Should I get GTX 970?

[StinkyPinky]

Are people still peddling this AMD has crap drivers myth? Come on. I've had zero problems with my AMD cards over many years.

Not to say I prefer AMD, I'd quite happily buy a nvidia card if the price was right at the time .

 

[kasakka]

Are people still peddling this AMD has crap drivers myth? Come on. I've had zero problems with my AMD cards over many years.

Not to say I prefer AMD, I'd quite happily buy a nvidia card if the price was right at the time .

To me the issue is more about AMD being slow with driver updates. It took them a long time (several months) to get for example a Crossfire profile for Far Cry 4 (and several other games released around the same time) while NV had it only slightly after release. AMD did do better for GTA V though. Overall their driver releases are far less frequent than Nvidia's and that can mean that players have to deal with performance/visual artefact issues for quite a while.

 

[3DVagabond]

To me the issue is more about AMD being slow with driver updates. It took them a long time (several months) to get for example a Crossfire profile for Far Cry 4 (and several other games released around the same time) while NV had it only slightly after release. AMD did do better for GTA V though. Overall their driver releases are far less frequent than Nvidia's and that can mean that players have to deal with performance/visual artefact issues for quite a while.

I don't know how many times this is going to be brought up. FC4 required a patch from the Dev to support Crossfire. That's what took months to occur. With GTA5 OTOH the Dev worked with both companies prior to release and they both had release day drivers. Which is how it should be for gamers. No reason any of us should suffer when we are the ones paying everybody's salaries.

I don't see the issue, ethically or intellectually, for a consumer to decide not to buy something because the vendor has purposely neglected him/her. Would seem rather self defeating to do otherwise.

 

[kasakka]

I don't know how many times this is going to be brought up. FC4 required a patch from the Dev to support Crossfire. That's what took months to occur. With GTA5 OTOH the Dev worked with both companies prior to release and they both had release day drivers. Which is how it should be for gamers. No reason any of us should suffer when we are the ones paying everybody's salaries.

I was not aware of that. Is it the same thing for all those other profiles (AC:Unity etc I think) that came in the same driver release?

Far Cry developers have been pretty notorious about not giving a crap about multi-GPU users. I haven't launched FC4 in a while so I don't know if they've still fixed the flickering environment on SLI or the broken SMAA.

 

[guskline]

I agree with the posters who say you need a cpu/mb upgrade before you upgrade the video card. The Denab is a noble card that has served you well but it's time to upgrade the cpu/mb and Intel seems to be the only real choice.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

On the GTX 970 "3.6GB" RAM frenzy, I see more than one poster calls it a "RAM flaw."

The technical people were quite clear about it: it was designed that way.

The flaw was that of the marketing department.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

On the GTX 970 "3.6GB" RAM frenzy, I see more than one poster calls it a "RAM flaw."

The technical people were quite clear about it: it was designed that way.

The flaw was that of the marketing department.

The marketing should have been, "We don't know or care WTF is inside it - this ~$300 card will crank out ~200,000 PPD at Folding@Home. Have a nice day."

 

[DaveSimmons]

On the GTX 970 "3.6GB" RAM frenzy, I see more than one poster calls it a "RAM flaw."

The technical people were quite clear about it: it was designed that way.

The flaw was that of the marketing department.

A bad design is a bad design, even if it was designed that way intentionally.

For example the leaf blower FX5800, or my first-generation and very loud 4870, where I had to manually create and set different fan profiles for different games.

 

[RussianSensation]

On the GTX 970 "3.6GB" RAM frenzy, I see more than one poster calls it a "RAM flaw."

The technical people were quite clear about it: it was designed that way.

The flaw was that of the marketing department.

I wouldn't call it a 'flaw' of the marketing department. If anything the marketing department made a brilliant 'correction' of the specs. Had the card been released on day 1 as a 3.5GB+512MB card, that would have been a flaw that would have cost 970 a ton of sales/reputation damages. Since millions of people already bought the 970 card and if they wanted to stick to NV, their only option was to get the much more expensive 980, they had no option but to keep their 970. That's not a marketing flaw, but a brilliant strategy to hide the flaw. I think if 970 launched as a 3.5GB card from day 1, the market's perception of it would have been less favourable. :biggrin:

Most people buying 970 today have no idea it's a 3.5GB card. The average PC gamer doesn't do research like we do and since NV never corrected the specs on their boxes, it's still sold as a 4GB GDDR5 card.

I was not aware of that. Is it the same thing for all those other profiles (AC:Unity etc I think) that came in the same driver release?

Ya, that's why many people think HardOCP lost its mind when it blamed AMD for not having a CF profile working in FC4 when it was public knowledge that AMD couldn't get CF to work without the developer releasing a patch that made it work. It took months but somehow the minute the developer released a patch, CF magically started working with AMD doing nothing on its end. HardOCP though, well they keep blaming AMD for not having CF working in GW's game titles on day 1. LOL!

 

[kasakka]

I wouldn't call it a 'flaw' of the marketing department. If anything the marketing department made a brilliant 'correction' of the specs. Had the card been released on day 1 as a 3.5GB+512MB card, that would have been a flaw that would have cost 970 a ton of sales/reputation damages. Since millions of people already bought the 970 card and if they wanted to stick to NV, their only option was to get the much more expensive 980, they had no option but to keep their 970. That's not a marketing flaw, but a brilliant strategy to hide the flaw. I think if 970 launched as a 3.5GB card from day 1, the market's perception of it would have been less favourable. :biggrin:

Most people buying 970 today have no idea it's a 3.5GB card. The average PC gamer doesn't do research like we do and since NV never corrected the specs on their boxes, it's still sold as a 4GB GDDR5 card.

I completely agree. I would've considered twice. The move was rather dishonest and I hope they have to pay for it in case of a lawsuit at least. That said, the 3.5 GB controversy was completely overblown and mostly because of one game: Shadow of Mordor. Even the developer says that the game at ultra textures needs 6 GB VRAM (and it almost eats that much on the Titan X) but since it ran quite ok on the 980 4 GB people were quick to say the 970 was completely awful.

In reality Nvidia has actually improved the performance in that game on 970 with driver updates and with my 970 SLI I can run GTA V, Far Cry 4 etc just fine at very high settings. So far only SoM has had issues with the amount of VRAM. With still no reasonable competition to the 970 I think it's still a pretty good buy even though prices have gone up. I believe Nvidia will keep putting out cards with the split memory architecture but when we start having 6-8 GB RAM it will probably become far less relevant until 4K displays become the norm.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I believe Nvidia will keep putting out cards with the split memory architecture

Probably. Nobody was complaining about the 660Ti being a "1.5GB" card or threatening lawsuits.