GTX 970 Should I upgrade to GTX 980?

I'm not starting it. I'm just asking him to back up his claim. But we all know that will never happen.

 

Its not easy to replicate the issue, that's how the whole issue became notorious and controversial.
Nvidia disguised it well, and I don't necessarily mean this pejoratively.

If the game wants 4GB, surely it can be fit in 3.5GB without falling on its face. at least today. And if it needs 4GB, having slow 0.5GB is better than having 0 GB.
The card is nobrainer at 1080p, less so at 1440p. I thought we were past this...

 

I'm not saying you are. But he doesn't have to back up his claims. He can claim he's seen a UFO and nobody can disprove it. If he's seen "an increase in smoothness", then great. If you disagree, that's also great. But all you guys need to say is "I disagree with that, look at X source", or if you're lazy "In my personal experience, the VRAM issue is overblown and you don't need to worry about it".

It's not even worth the effort to do anything other than post your own opinion. There's more of you guys, use your numbers in a constructive fashion for once :cheers:

 

I would personally stick with gtx 970, TWINS, then check the review on both the titan-x and the upcoming ati/amd offering, Personally I am gearing towards the Titan-x, mainly because of the vram, 12gb is overkill as even with 3 of theses suckers would put the card to its knees, that is alot of vram usage then you got win10 around the corner, add more vram, sounds good but once alot of the vram is filled the card in the end probably wont even budge. Card needs tremendous amounts of horsepower under the hood to push 12gb worth of texture buffer.

We shall see once the card arrives. I would love to see 3 of theses bad boy's and put it on 8k rez monitor, and then see the vram usage and how it will perform, holy ****.

I hope Mr. Hilbert does a tri-sli review on a 8k resolution monitor(if and when it will be released or through dsr if you can get it that high) with three of the titan-x's, wow. I want to see review extremely BAAAAAAD!

 

Ok. I disagree with Carfax' post. And I can prove back up my claims, upon request. Piece.

 

I always back up my statements

Memory usage isn't important to any real degree eh? LOL OK if you say so..

But in any case, it's not just a matter of memory usage. It's also a matter of bandwidth. Whilst the GTX 970 technically has the full 256 bit memory bus just like the 980, it can't access the memory at the same speed due to the segmentation of the last 512MB of VRAM, which has it's own crossbar..

So essentially, you're getting a 224 bit memory bus giving 196 GB/s of bandwidth to the 3.5GB of VRAM, and the last 512GB is being accessed at 28GB/s on a 32 bit memory controller.

In actual game performance, this results in a the GTX 970 paying a much larger price than the 980 in bandwidth limited scenarios. Take this for example. The new game Evolve at Techspot. Here are the 1080p results:

Spoiler

As you can see, the GTX 970 isn't that far behind the 980. It's about 11% slower.

Now here are the 1600p results:

Spoiler

Both the GTX 980 and the 970 have a very large performance decrease due to the resolution bump, but comparatively, the 970 has a significantly higher performance impact.

From 1080p to 1600p, the 980 has a 67% performance decrease. From 1080 to 1600p, the 970 has whopping 88% performance decrease!

This mirrors my experiences in a thread that I made a while back. I went from G1 GTX 970 SLI to EVGA GTX 980 FTWs, and I documented my reasoning and experiences in this thread if you want to have a look..

I tested two games that will regularly exceed 3.5GB at 1440p. Watch Dogs and AC Unity and I found differences in both compared to the GTX 980s..

I also found that AC Unity with 4x MSAA was totally unplayable on GTX 970 SLI at 1440p, whereas on the GTX 980 SLI it was playable.

This is backed up by Computerbase.de's testing for AC Unity, which shows the GTX 980 having much larger gains over the 970 than typical for AC Unity at 1600p:

Source

So while in regular gameplay that isn't bandwidth or VRAM limited, the GTX 980 will only be about 15% faster on average than the 970. But in bandwidth and VRAM limited scenarios, that figure can easily double..

I also tested Dragon Age Inquisition, which doesn't regularly exceed 3.5GB of VRAM, and found that the GTX 980s were still smoother than the 970s, which I attribute to the bandwidth gap..

 

AC Unity:



Dying Light:

 

Why do you think that will never happen? Weird. I always try to back up my claims, so I don't know where you're getting that from..

See my reply to Darkest, and I also replied to one of your posts..

 

We can't keep repeating this a million times more, VRAM usage is not equivalent to VRAM requirement. If a game uses more than 3.5GB does not mean that it requires more than 3.5GB to run properly.

 

This is true. Most of the VRAM is being used as a cache, and not for direct rendering. But this doesn't mean that VRAM usage does not affect gameplay or performance, because it does.

More VRAM being used as a cache means that the overhead involved in the transfer of textures between system memory and VRAM is drastically diminished, which means potentially less stuttering and hitching.

VRAM usage, as it relates to performance really depends on the game engine. Some engines are more efficient with memory management than others. In those games, VRAM usage may not affect performance at all.

But in other engines that are inefficient with memory management, having more VRAM may have a massive impact on fluidity..

 

your the only one who makes any sense, I ignor the trolls I know your correct and would take your views well before there's.

 

^^By the way its ignore.

 

Thanks. I researched this issue thoroughly before I made the decision to return my G1 GTX 970s for the two EVGA GTX 980 FTWs, so I didn't make it haphazardly.

I suppose my argument was pretty good though, as the naysayers have remained silent :bigsmile:

 

I think its more that people do not give a schiit as this topic has been beaten to death.

 

Yup.

Yup.

 

says the people who don't own the gtx970 lol ..

 

You don't need to own a 970 in order to prove that allocation is different from required memory, an engine will often allocate more than it actually needs. That's the issue with a lot of the people whining about the memory on the 970 -- the cited games are often allocating more than is needed. For people running 1080-1440P there are very few scenarios where the full 4gb of memory is actually even needed. In some cases we're even looking at a lack of GPU power, although this is usually more common at higher resolutions. Anyhow, I'm done beating a dead horse so that's the last I'll say on it.

Regardless, weren't you quitting gaming? Seems funny that you'd do that then spend all your day trolling a forum that caters mainly to pc gaming hardware. Seems to me that you just like the attention tbh.

 

I actually started to come back in this section soley based on this thread.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=397513
Its my fault for clicking on a 1 star thread. My bad.

 

And backs up why I have certain people on ignore, occasionally I have to go back over a few threads to remember, but in cases like this I am reminded daily

 

I would say save your money for a 1070 gtx and then a 1170 etc. that is future proofing since the 1070 will most likely be faster than your 980. A gtx 970 and 1070 will most likely cost the same as one 980 also.

1st cd burner I bought was for corporate back up and cost $1000.00's, worth it to get rid of tape drives. Burning media was not cheap either. It came with a cd caddy, however it was not future proof. What can you get a cd, dvd, bluray burner for now a days? Who cares because it is flash drives and usb 3 back up drives that are the current technology.

I will be happy running 60 fps on a gtx 970 now and will upgrade more often and when it is affordable. Like back up Graphic cards always evolve and dumping a huge amount of money on one series is not for me anymore, even if I can afford it my logic says no.

Regards