I think I posted it here when the whole 970 "gate" happened, but I actually had to go and find the specific game with the issue and screw around quite a while to get it to be affected by the whole 3.5/4 thing as some had complained. As Skuzzy said, 99.9999% of the games out there won't be affected, and do NOT be put off by the hay that was made by nVidia's enemies and gaming/tech journalists with time on their hands who labored to make the whole thing much worse than it actually was in practice. Was there technically a "dishonest" tech description from NVidia - difficult to really say IMO, they certainly made a great card and I don't think they set out to "screw" anyone. I was very happy with my 2 when I had them, in SLI they smoked a single 980 and ran right up there with a 980ti depending on the nVidia SLI profile/game.
I've been considering picking up a 960 2nd laptop (I have a 980 MSI right now) just to see how it'll run games including AH3/Beta- only because they can be found for sub 1000$ easily, while the 970s are usually 13 or 1400$, and 1800 at least in CDN money now. It just seems a little more accessible price wise than the 970 if somebody HAS to have a notebook for travel/work and can only afford a single solution in that 1000$ price range. Probably tomorrow I'll grab one from the local shop.
As stated the 970 is much more powerful than the 960, but based on 5 year old HTPCs running AH3, I think the 960 will be a great "budget" option with environment and maybe some other things turned down for the future.
Maybe the new Pascal "budget" GPU in that 960 price range will really be great as well, the rumor is a huge performance jump even in the mid-range cards from both nVidia and AMD are coming in the next quarter or 2.
