[PCPER] GTX 970 SLI (3.5GB effect)

[Erenhardt]

I used high textures, I noted that because Ultra textures did stutter.



That's true. I'd think large stutters would still be recognizable. G-sync certainly shows the cards in their best light though, so that is good to point out.

Thank you for that answer.

I don't understand all this talk about "that is insane resolution not meant for this gpu"

The frame buffer is not the most VRAM occupying thing there is. Game assets, textures. That is why there were comments earlier that some games seem to not increase the VRAM usage despite the change in resolution.

Ultra textures, 4K textures, next gen textures... whatever you call it, it will come. Sooner or later games will use 100% of available hardware in consoles.

Textures now seem to have the biggest impact on visuals. Resolution, quality, diversification, all have great impact on how the game looks and it is easy the most left behind area of in-game graphics.

 

[ocre]

That graph is misleading though.. The frametime spikes were due to them enabling 2x supersampling, which is basically 5K resolution. At normal 1440p, both cards are very playable.

Any GPU can have it's memory system overwhelmed if you choose the right settings, so this doesn't really prove anything other than the GTX 970 not being as fast and as capable as the significantly more expensive GTX 980..

Going to extremes to prove that the GTX 970's memory subsystem is crippled is just nonsensical..

I totally retract my prior post a out those charts.

I was tricked. Looking at the post on my phone, the color choice in the graph being so poor, I completely overlooked the 980 and how bad it was doing.

That was my fault, my bad.

But I also was mislead though by the post though.
Those results were posted with the claim that this isn't an ultra high resolution problem, saying this was bf4 SLI at simply 1440p. The reality is it was 1440p with DSR 2x. That even higher than 4k. 5k you say, wow

I am shocked.

There is no doubt that I found the misleading specs bothering. But now a huge effort is being pushed. Lets be real about this and quit the misleading.

The 980 has over 120% the cuda cores of a 970. It runs at a higher speed. What the heck is going on here? Anything that causes a 980 to struggle and stutter will naturally be that much worse on a 970. Any settings that are stuttering on a 980, will play even worse on a 970. There is no way around it.

I can't believe some of this stuff.

Because the 980 is at least 120% more powerful, there maybe a special case where the 980 manages to run something okay and the 970 just can't manage it. But actually, the 980 specs are more than 120% a gtx970.

I have had both the 970 and now the 980. Both could max out all the games I tried so far. I actually notice very little difference at all, almost none unless I use a frame rate overlay or run a benchmark.

Also, the only time I was able to make the 970 struggle as was trying to push high resolutions through DSR. It killed performance and I was sure that the issue was this setmented ram everyone kept saying was such a big deal. I had to return the 970 to bestbuy, they would only exchange it in store. My options in store was another 970 or the 980. I went to 3 bestbuys, 2 large stores in memhis tn. The only options for AMD gpus, the highest they had in stock was a 270x. I was upset and wanted the full 4gb. My only option, a gtx 980 and I had to pay the difference to get it.

Long story, sorry. But that's how I ended up with a 980 and that's why I got one. Anyway, put it in and fire up these games that struggled on my 970 with 4x DSR and guess what......

Not very playable. The same high settings that were unplayable/unpleasant on the 970 were not very good at all on the 980 either. I come to realize I was pushing these cards past their capabilities. Almost every case of unplayable on the 970 is still not good on the 980. I was duped.

I really don't care what people buy or what they get. But as an owner now of both the misrepresented 970 and a full flat 980, I think my experience should hold at least some value. I want to tell anyone out there unhappy about their 970 specs, return your card if you want to. Buy a 290x if you want to......get what makes you happy, even if its on principle alone.

But know that there really isn't this massive difference, this huge disadvantage that is trying to be force fed. If its gonna cost you money to take it back, know that even a 980 isn't gonna get you that much more performance. That these new games are resource hogs and super high resolutions will bring your GPU down to a crawl. I traded my card in and payed the difference for a 980 and found out that there is a lot of misinformation. Things like DSR are very hard on your GPU.

Honestly, if your really upset about it because of the principle and its gonna cost you money to send your card back, you might be better just voting with you wallet next round.... In your next GPU purchase. Because the reality is that the 970 is very powerful and there just isn't that much better right now.
No one has to take my advice, they can learn the hard way. Go through all that trouble and spend extra money to get really no noticeable improvement. I can speak from the perspective of a 980, its not much better than a 970 at all. Even in high resolution DSR. I have seen 290x frame times at these ultra resolutions as well, its not gonna be just so much better. Of course all this is on a game by game basis. There are games that AMD shine in, that's not the point.

My point is, if this bothers you so bad....
Just know that there isn't much better performance to be had right now. So think hard about it before throwing money at an exchange. I think anyone upset would be better off remembering this and voting with their wallet next round of gpus. When there will be a real noticeable difference.

People have told me that mayber I don't see a difference much now with my 980 but in the future I sure will. I have my doubts now, for sure. Especially now that I have had a lot of time with the 980. I do get higher frame rate and benchmarks but the truth is these cards perform really really close no matter what anyone else tries to tell you. This is a first hand account based on experiences having had both cards

 

[kasakka]

I had a go with Shadow of Mordor this morning both with a single GTX 970 and SLI. It ran surprisingly nicely at Ultra even with a single card but SLI was definitely smoother except both had this stuttering in certain areas when you rotate the viewport. It was obvious that the FPS was high but even though the game is on a SSD there was stuttering but only when rotating the viewport. It's almost like the game can't churn out textures fast enough. High textures are smooth.

I also noticed that Shadow of Mordor has really high memory use in general. According to MSI Afterburner it used up about 3.7-3.8 GB VRAM, 7 GB RAM (dropped to slightly over 1 GB after closing the game) and pagefile was also at 11 GB (currently 3 GB with just a browser and AB open).

I'm not sure if it's in any way a good test of the cards capabilities with that much resource hogging in a game that frankly doesn't look all THAT fantastic or have a particularly complex AI or anything.

 

[wand3r3r]

I totally retract my prior post a out those charts.

I was tricked. Looking at the post on my phone, the color choice in the graph being so poor, I completely overlooked the 980 and how bad it was doing.

That was my fault, my bad.

But I also was mislead though by the post though.
Those results were posted with the claim that this isn't an ultra high resolution problem, saying this was bf4 SLI at simply 1440p. The reality is it was 1440p with DSR 2x. That even higher than 4k. 5k you say, wow

I am shocked.

There is no doubt that I found the misleading specs bothering. But now a huge effort is being pushed. Lets be real about this and quit the misleading.

The 980 has over 120% the cuda cores of a 970. It runs at a higher speed. What the heck is going on here? Anything that causes a 980 to struggle and stutter will naturally be that much worse on a 970. Any settings that are stuttering on a 980, will play even worse on a 970. There is no way around it.

I can't believe some of this stuff.

Because the 980 is at least 120% more powerful, there maybe a special case where the 980 manages to run something okay and the 970 just can't manage it. But actually, the 980 specs are more than 120% a gtx970.

I have had both the 970 and now the 980. Both could max out all the games I tried so far. I actually notice very little difference at all, almost none unless I use a frame rate overlay or run a benchmark.

Also, the only time I was able to make the 970 struggle as was trying to push high resolutions through DSR. It killed performance and I was sure that the issue was this setmented ram everyone kept saying was such a big deal. I had to return the 970 to bestbuy, they would only exchange it in store. My options in store was another 970 or the 980. I went to 3 bestbuys, 2 large stores in memhis tn. The only options for AMD gpus, the highest they had in stock was a 270x. I was upset and wanted the full 4gb. My only option, a gtx 980 and I had to pay the difference to get it.

Long story, sorry. But that's how I ended up with a 980 and that's why I got one. Anyway, put it in and fire up these games that struggled on my 970 with 4x DSR and guess what......

Not very playable. The same high settings that were unplayable/unpleasant on the 970 were not very good at all on the 980 either. I come to realize I was pushing these cards past their capabilities. Almost every case of unplayable on the 970 is still not good on the 980. I was duped.

I really don't care what people buy or what they get. But as an owner now of both the misrepresented 970 and a full flat 980, I think my experience should hold at least some value. I want to tell anyone out there unhappy about their 970 specs, return your card if you want to. Buy a 290x if you want to......get what makes you happy, even if its on principle alone.

But know that there really isn't this massive difference, this huge disadvantage that is trying to be force fed. If its gonna cost you money to take it back, know that even a 980 isn't gonna get you that much more performance. That these new games are resource hogs and super high resolutions will bring your GPU down to a crawl. I traded my card in and payed the difference for a 980 and found out that there is a lot of misinformation. Things like DSR are very hard on your GPU.

Honestly, if your really upset about it because of the principle and its gonna cost you money to send your card back, you might be better just voting with you wallet next round.... In your next GPU purchase. Because the reality is that the 970 is very powerful and there just isn't that much better right now.
No one has to take my advice, they can learn the hard way. Go through all that trouble and spend extra money to get really no noticeable improvement. I can speak from the perspective of a 980, its not much better than a 970 at all. Even in high resolution DSR. I have seen 290x frame times at these ultra resolutions as well, its not gonna be just so much better. Of course all this is on a game by game basis. There are games that AMD shine in, that's not the point.

My point is, if this bothers you so bad....
Just know that there isn't much better performance to be had right now. So think hard about it before throwing money at an exchange. I think anyone upset would be better off remembering this and voting with their wallet next round of gpus. When there will be a real noticeable difference.

People have told me that mayber I don't see a difference much now with my 980 but in the future I sure will. I have my doubts now, for sure. Especially now that I have had a lot of time with the 980. I do get higher frame rate and benchmarks but the truth is these cards perform really really close no matter what anyone else tries to tell you. This is a first hand account based on experiences having had both cards

While it's interesting to hear your experience, there was plenty of people claiming crossfire stuttering was imperceptible. If you thought a 970-> 980 upgrade was going to be a significant upgrade the only person you fooled was yourself. This type of a problem is only going to be proven with frametime/FCAT testing.

Even when trying to prove it, it seems like NV has tried to avoid the VRAM so strongly that it might be difficult to bench it accurately as it tries to avoid it until it's simply overwhelmed and VRAM usage skyrockets. Who knows, NV has tried to avoid using it and they even admit to that. Why would they make sure not to use it unless it's detrimental to performance.

The whole point to the 970 debacle was that it's a ticking time bomb with gimped memory, plus some of the specs were a lie. To add to that, reviewers which were jumping on the smoothness campaign have almost all completely flip flopped their positions and it seems like they are intentionally avoiding smoothness investigations. Why wouldn't they thoroughly investigate such of a huge fiasco? It's been a slow news year and yet the biggest scandal breaks out and we are met with silence and some obscure useless tests which don't prove that the problem doesn't exist.

NV themselves have flip flopped with their statements and tried to reverse the position of returns. Now they are basically silent. Their reps are silent. They seem to be buckling down and trying to ignore the whole controversy. What are you paying a premium for.

As for the testing, I don't know why PCPer chose these two games, BF4 is old and not even the most demanding game out there. 4k with 1.5x scaling is similar to around 2x MSAA iirc (maybe 4x). If you want 4k you basically have 4 GPU choices (290/x, 980/70) so certainly a number of users will use these with 4k/high res.

Reviewers haven't really confirmed or proved otherwise that the 0.5 GB doesn't matter once it's used which is the whole point, in addition to the other specs which were lied about. The whole issue was raised by users themselves and has clearly been proven to exist.

All that aside, I can see and agree with some of your points (and appreciate that you seem very rational). I just remain skeptical that the true effect waits to be seen and in ~2 years it will be clear. If the GTX 1070 is released and they ignore the 970, or when console ports start to become more sophisticated (it's coming).

Whether people choose to lay down and accept it because "performance" hasn't changed, or whatever other reason, is their choice. The only way to make sure they (either brand) don't try pull a fast one over consumers is by making that choice with your wallet. Money talks.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Thank you for that answer.

I don't understand all this talk about "that is insane resolution not meant for this gpu"

The frame buffer is not the most VRAM occupying thing there is. Game assets, textures. That is why there were comments earlier that some games seem to not increase the VRAM usage despite the change in resolution.

Ultra textures, 4K textures, next gen textures... whatever you call it, it will come. Sooner or later games will use 100% of available hardware in consoles.

Consoles don't have enough power to push games that would actually use 4k textures and such. That's why they don't offer it on PS4 and Xb1, but did so on PC.

Besides, what good is 4k textures on a game running medium shadows and 900p resolution?

 

[Silverforce11]

I had a go with Shadow of Mordor this morning both with a single GTX 970 and SLI. It ran surprisingly nicely at Ultra even with a single card but SLI was definitely smoother except both had this stuttering in certain areas when you rotate the viewport. It was obvious that the FPS was high but even though the game is on a SSD there was stuttering but only when rotating the viewport. It's almost like the game can't churn out textures fast enough. High textures are smooth.

That's exactly the problem and it occurs at 1080p too because Ultra textures actually load a ton of assets into the vram, regardless of the resolution, it saturates 4GB.

The same thing happens in Skyrim with texture mods (designed for 4GB vram in mind!) & Arma 3, but worse as you run around it stutters flushing the vram to load new textures.

Also recall, Watch Dogs had ultra textures (which did significantly improve IQ), 2gb cards couldn't even select it, 3gb cards run it but had slight stutters and 4gb cards ran it well.

For console ports (or rather, cross-platform games), definitely ultra textures is the first & easiest thing devs add to give the PC version an edge.

 

[RussianSensation]

That's exactly the problem and it occurs at 1080p too because Ultra textures actually load a ton of assets into the vram, regardless of the resolution, it saturates 4GB.

Yup, in SoM once the VRAM approaches 3500mb, the GPU utilization tanks and it's a stutter fest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6k55epUBCE

Also, notice the water texture flickering in Skyrim on the 970 - amazing considering the near "perfect NV drivers" myth and this game is > 3 years old.