Does it make sense for me to upgrade my 970 to a 1080, or wait for Nvidia to release the next gen cards?
It is a major upgrade, 1080 almost doubles 970 performance (stock to stock or oc'ed to oc'ed). But at this stage, I'd wait and see what nvidia is planning to release.
I recently upgraded from a 970 to a 1070ti and that was a huge upgrade. I only did so because I found one brand new below msrp even after taxes and I couldn't let the chance slip by. If you find an unbeatable deal, worth it, other wise just wait it out. I have never seen dramatic price reductions on previous gen GPU's when new ones come out so don't expect to pick up a last gen model on the cheap, plus you know once the new line releases you better be ready to pull the trigger or you'll be playing the waiting game even longer to get your hands on one because availability will go fast as always
I would upgrade. Pascal is two and half years old, making it Nvidia's longest living generation. It's a good solid GPU that will last you for a while. Besides Next generation will not come out any time soon, it wasn't announced in recent events. The most likely release will be Q1 / Q2 2019. I will be very surprised if we see anything earlier then that.
Some guy over on the EVGA forum was arguing with me claiming that Nvidia already had THOUSANDS of wafers all ready tested all the way from the "1180 ti to the 1160" ...if that is what they will even be called. What a loon.
I guess we both agree that is purely a speculation. Not more and not less. Only development team / key decision makers/partners know the actual situation. All of this is under NDA as of right now. Consumers can only guess. If I was Nvidia I wouldn't sell anything new as long as prices are so high for current cards/demand is still there. In next several months, miner demand for GPU's will further drop, which will be most likely compensated by all those people that were waiting for Pascal purchase @ MSRP. Win/win for Nvidia. Last I checked they had ~70%ish market share, why bother with new stuff. Besides Pascal rapes 1080p 1440p current-gen titles. Hell, writing this makes me think late 2019 for next gen will be the most likely area.
I did just that at xmas because my 970 was base min for VR and the Oculus rift, and the 1080 has allowed me to really ramp up the settings in VR games with it, very powerful card, BUT, i am getting major buyers remores as apart from the Rift i am not really gaming on PC at the moment, so i really could have waited somewhat. lol I am on the verge of sticking it up on ebay but i am waiting for one of those pay only £1 selling fee offers they have now and again.
And another thing that came to my mind is AMD, Nvidia will not release anything up until AMD announces release dates for next-gen Vega's.
Well if someone can wait for another year, be my guest. If I wanted to upgrade from 970 to 1080 I would do it now.
Do not do it. Wait for 1180 GTX card. However it's going to be a long wait, nothing this year, sometimes in 2019.
SLI is a mixed bag these days, less and less studios are actively supporting it. And the performance payoff is not as high as most people assume it would be. Plus, that still does nothing for the memory issues of the 970's design. I'm looking at upgrading to a 1070 within the next few weeks. While my 970 still runs almost everything very well, more and more titles are pushing the card past it's memory. In games that run great on 4gb cards, I encounter stuttering with my 970 once the memory usage gets higher then 3.5gb. It's a poor design that really pulls down an otherwise great card. But, I'll get a 1070, and just switch this 970 into my secondary PC that my wife uses.
I went from an Evga 1070ftw to an Evga 1080ftw and gained on average 22-25 fps so going from a 970 to 1080 will add heaps of fps.
I said it's not as high as people assume. And, I stand by that. As a lot of people think SLI is a magical fix for a game and will give a massive FPS boost. Which is not true. In some games, yes, the benefits are great. But, there are also plenty of games that give minimal increases... and others that don't support SLI, where the setup can actually hurt the games performance.