Nvidia GTX 960

[Bizman]

A friend has a 4890 which got some extended life by extra case fans blowing cool air directly to its cooler. As Chalenge said, their cooling solutions age.

My humble suggestion looking at your specs would be either the GTX 980 or the Radeon R9 290x. Also, if your PSU is more than a couple of years old, replacing it with something known good like this would be advisable: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151087

[Denniss]

The 970 is definitely the way to go atm. Sweet spot of performance vs price.

You may have missed the fake specs nvidia had on their website for the 970, the upper 512 MiB gfx memory are extremely slow and responsible for lags/stuttering in very high resolutions.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

You may have missed the fake specs nvidia had on their website for the 970, the upper 512 MiB gfx memory are extremely slow and responsible for lags/stuttering in very high resolutions.

You may have missed the real world benchmarks which show that that last .5Gb of the 4Gb is not a performance bottleneck in a real world scenario. It hits only a certain benchmark which saturates 100% of VRAM on every run and that's not what games do.

The 970 is the price/performance leader despite the confusion with the specs.

[Denniss]

If I pay that much for a gfx card I wouldn't want to run into such a scenario, regardless how slim the chances are. Nobody knows how long nvidia will apply fixes to their driver to ensure the 970 stays at the lower 3.5 GiB. BTW it's sufficient to run into 3+GiB VRAM use to vastly increase chance of stuttering.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

If I pay that much for a gfx card I wouldn't want to run into such a scenario, regardless how slim the chances are. Nobody knows how long nvidia will apply fixes to their driver to ensure the 970 stays at the lower 3.5 GiB. BTW it's sufficient to run into 3+GiB VRAM use to vastly increase chance of stuttering.

Then go ahead and buy the 980 or Titan what stops you? For most users who do not run 4K or triple monitor systems a 970 gives much better bang for buck.

[Skuzzy]

You may have missed the real world benchmarks which show that that last .5Gb of the 4Gb is not a performance bottleneck in a real world scenario. It hits only a certain benchmark which saturates 100% of VRAM on every run and that's not what games do.

The 970 is the price/performance leader despite the confusion with the specs.

Actually, it does hit in the real world, if you are running resolutions higher than 1920x1080 with any anti-aliasing and large (4Kx4K) textures (most games released in the last couple of years have those).  When it hits in a game, you know about it as performance tanks.

It makes sense as to how NVidia got the price so low to start with.  Cheaper low speed ram, fewer than advertised ROP's, less level 2 cache than advertised as well.  At least they were honest about the memory path size (256).

NVidia did not do themselves any favors by being deceitful about the specifications.  When a company does that, it says they are not confident in the product.

One thing for certain, it gave AMD/ATI a windfall in sales.  Dumb move.  I was looking at getting a 970 myself, until this broke.  I run higher resolutions, with anti-aliasing a lot.  I am not going to gamble I will hit that performance wall.  I'll just wait a bit because the AMD offering runs way too hot (i.e. consumes too much power) for my tastes.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Actually, it does hit in the real world, if you are running resolutions higher than 1920x1080 with any anti-aliasing and large (4Kx4K) textures (most games released in the last couple of years have those).  When it hits in a game, you know about it as performance tanks.

It makes sense as to how NVidia got the price so low to start with.  Cheaper low speed ram, fewer than advertised ROP's, less level 2 cache than advertised as well.  At least they were honest about the memory path size (256).

That would be weird since the 970 has excelled in game based benchmarks even at 1400p resolutions.



As you can see the much more expensive Titan plays the second fiddle.

[Skuzzy]

One only needs to peruse various game boards and you will find a lot of complaints.  Early on, players thought it was their game that was the problem.

Benchmarks really do not mean much as AMD and NVidia do insure their products will run benchmarks well.

[Skuzzy]

One last thing.  NVidia only released the truth after gamers were complaining about performance issues, which caused others to take notice and explore why there were complaints.

NVidia claims they are working on a driver which will work to move off functions into that 512MB space and make the effort to not use that space for real time operations.  How successful that will be is yet to be seen.

NVidia's failure to disclose truthful specifications aside, the card is a good card for a number of things.  It is a shame NVidia felt they had to lie about the specifications.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

One only needs to peruse various game boards and you will find a lot of complaints.  Early on, players thought it was their game that was the problem.

Benchmarks really do not mean much as AMD and NVidia do insure their products will run benchmarks well.

So what you're saying is that Nvidia is cheating in all the 10 game titles typically used for benchmarks. The benchmarks are nothing but scripted runs of the game - they must be pretty clever to cheat in each one of them while managing to collapse in performance while playing a game using that same engine.

Just out of curiosity, what would be Nvidias motive in placing the cheap 970 ahead of the super expensive Titan?

[Skuzzy]

So what you're saying is that Nvidia is cheating in all the 10 game titles typically used for benchmarks. The benchmarks are nothing but scripted runs of the game - they must be pretty clever to cheat in each one of them while managing to collapse in performance while playing a game using that same engine.

Just out of curiosity, what would be Nvidias motive in placing the cheap 970 ahead of the super expensive Titan?

I am not saying it.  It has been well known for many years that NVidia and AMD optimize for benchmarks.

You would need to ask NVidia why they lied about the specifications.  You do realize NVidia has admitted they lied about it?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I am not saying it.  It has been well known for many years that NVidia and AMD optimize for benchmarks.

Static benchmarks are one thing, game engine based benchmarks are a harder thing to optimize for without accidentally improving the actual game performance lol.

[Skuzzy]

Static benchmarks are one thing, game engine based benchmarks are a harder thing to optimize for without accidentally improving the actual game performance lol.

Any static iteration of any 3D graphics exercise is easy to optimize for, and it may or may not improve game performance, all depending on the nature of the optimization and how it is triggered.

If you knew how these things actually worked, you would have understood that.  Maybe NVidia chose 3.5GB as the threshold as they knew that would be just enough for any given benchmark available today.  Speculation on my part, but it would not surprise me.

[Skyyr]

So what you're saying is that Nvidia is cheating in all the 10 game titles typically used for benchmarks. The benchmarks are nothing but scripted runs of the game - they must be pretty clever to cheat in each one of them while managing to collapse in performance while playing a game using that same engine.

I have a 970 myself, but Nvidia's been busted doing this before, as has ATi/AMD.

Read the comment thread for a brief walkthrough of various tech manufacturers that have done this.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/12/2341240/intel-caught-cheating-in-3dmark-benchmark

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Any static iteration of any 3D graphics exercise is easy to optimize for, and it may or may not improve game performance, all depending on the nature of the optimization and how it is triggered.

If you knew how these things actually worked, you would have understood that.  Maybe NVidia chose 3.5GB as the threshold as they knew that would be just enough for any given benchmark available today.  Speculation on my part, but it would not surprise me.

I find all this conspiracy mongering a bit laughable. There's no logic in Nvidia intentionally crippling its products and then cheating in benchmarks. If they want to segment their products by throttling a cheaper model it defies logic that they then would try to cheat in benchmarks in order to prove it's really not any slower than the more expensive model they intentionally throttled to sell it cheaper.

Here's the whole memory issue explained and also why it's not a big deal in real life: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Discloses-Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970

NVIDIA has come clean; all that remains is the response from consumers to take hold. For those of you that read this and remain affronted by NVIDIA calling the GeForce GTX 970 a 4GB card without equivocation: I get it. But I also respectfully disagree. Should NVIDIA have been more upfront about the changes this GPU brought compared to the GTX 980? Absolutely and emphatically. But does this change the stance or position of the GTX 970 in the world of discrete PC graphics? I don’t think it does.