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Are the GTX 970's & 980's already the best GPU's ever made?

I think what Nvidia have accomplished with the 970 is that they have successfully trained people into thinking that £250-£300 is a very cheap price for a low end card. Even I found it hard to restrain myself from buying 1 as an upgrade for my 570!

Yes that's true but AMD did the same before when they followed up the 4870/4890 with the much higher priced 5850/70 as the upgrade option.
 
I think what Nvidia have accomplished with the 970 is that they have successfully trained people into thinking that £250-£300 is a very cheap price for a low end card. Even I found it hard to restrain myself from buying 1 as an upgrade for my 570!

Low end card. I think not. Revise before you post.
 
I think what Nvidia have accomplished with the 970 is that they have successfully trained people into thinking that £250-£300 is a very cheap price for a low end card. Even I found it hard to restrain myself from buying 1 as an upgrade for my 570!

Since when has the GTX *70 version of the Nvidia card range been low end? It's always been the one underneath the top.... GTX 270, 470, 570 and 670 have all been fairly close to their GTX *80 variant bigger brothers which is normally always the flagship model on release.
 
is it the best card ever?................ no it's too boring, but it's deffo the safest bet.

the AMD MSI Lightning is the best, it's got attitude and wow factor
 
The 970 and 980 are great cards for the price but this whole launch strikes me as very reminiscent of the 680 launch. It's a restrained card that does enough to better the opposition, but only just, at a decent price.

If I was looking to buy a new card now for someone playing at 1080, I'd be buying a 970 almost without question. But are these cards the best ever, or even just legendary? Definitely not as I think in a generation or two these will be remembered as fondly as the 680 is now, but only as fondly as the 680 is now.
 
I think what Nvidia have accomplished with the 970 is that they have successfully trained people into thinking that £250-£300 is a very cheap price for a low end card. Even I found it hard to restrain myself from buying 1 as an upgrade for my 570!

Very true. I agree although the 970 is more mid range than low end. If Nvidia had brought out their real high end now it would be a good sizeable chunk of performance faster than the 290.
 
Since when has the GTX *70 version of the Nvidia card range been low end? It's always been the one underneath the top.... GTX 270, 470, 570 and 670 have all been fairly close to their GTX *80 variant bigger brothers which is normally always the flagship model on release.

Low end card. I think not. Revise before you post.

My mistake sorry, I presumed (wrongly it seems) people here on OCUK knew that the 970/980 uses the cut-down Maxwell GM204 chip which when compared to the GM200 chip is considered the lower end and usually reserverd for the *60/*50 cards. Personally I'm waiting for the full-fat Maxwell GM200 cards as an upgrade to my 570.
 
I actually think they are pretty boring too hence why i still have not bought one. I will remain gpu-less because when i looked at the reviews it was about 45-50w lower than a 780ti when overclocked and about equal at 2160p. The software functions and hdmi 2.0 is all i can really say im happy about. The rest is pretty damm dissapointing if you are gaming at 4K 28nm still has not delivered for you.


Pretty dodgy to buy as well with Mordor hitching to load ultra hd textures at 1080p? Not to mention price is about equal to a 780ti when you factor in the free game. I dont think its a good deal hence why my money is going elsewhere until December.
 
Or the x800xt pe for those who could find one. Just one of a number of cards in the history of gaming that have been genuinely twice as fast as the best of the preceding generation.

Oh my I had one of those. They were rarer than hen's teeth. I've never so many scams on eBay involving those. 95% of the listings were scams from hijacked accounts. I finally found one from a guy in chinatown in L.A. who sent it over, must have been the only genuine seller of those on eBay at the time. Almost a miracle it arrived and the customs managed to miss the duty on it too.
 
People rate the 8800 GT too much. 512 of Vram 50% less than the GTX
Yes there were a few 1Gb cards, but there was a premium to pay for them.

6 month after it's release you could by a 8800 GTX Extreme for £185.93.

The GTX 970 not only more or less matches the old cards for less money, they increase the Vram by 33%.

So even if the same level of discounting happens with the GTX 780Ti and it's sold off for £275-£300 it's stuck with lower Vram, so the GTX970 will still look very good in comparison.
 
LOL,people have short memories.

The Geforce 256 and the 9700 PRO were revolutionary when they came out.

The Geforce 256 was not only the first DX7 GPU but also had transform and lighting hardware,unlike previous GPUs which required the CPU to do such operations.

When the 9700 PRO came out,it was considered a perfect card in every way and the first DX9 card:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/970

It was incredibly complex for the time and IIRC had the biggest GPU(in terms of transistors),but still delivered in performance and power consumption too.

Compared to what Nvidia released in the 5800 Ultra and Matrox had with Parhelia they were beaten in almost all metrics.

Both companies could barely compete with the 9700 PRO/9800 PRO.

Nvidia even jumping to a process node ahead,could barely compete with the 9800XT and it had far more memory bandwidth too:

http://techreport.com/review/5797/nvidia-geforce-fx-5950-ultra-gpu


Then there was the mighty 8800GTX - that card was a massive performance bump over the previous generation and was relevant for years.

The GTX970 and GTX980 are not revolutionary - they are refined 28NM cards with improved power containment and control mechanisms.

You might as well say the 8800GTS 512MB was revolutionary compared to the 8800GTX,as it had most of the performance but consumed far less power and was half the price. I had the latter myself too. The HD5850 1GB could have been considered revolutionary too,since it was released six months before the GTX480,overclocked well and consumed much less power than previous high end cards too. It was also cheaper than the GTX285 while also being the second DX11 card made.

HD4870 and HD4850 against the Nvidia cards. The AMD "small die" strategy which meant the prices on the GTX200 series collapsed,meaning people had awesome value cards. Nvidia was using 470MM2 to 576MM2 chips against 256MM2 to 282MM2 chips,so for the size the R700 was remarkable for its performance(plus it pioneered the use of GDDR5 too in graphics cards).

The revolutionary cards tend to have long lifespans.

The Geforce 256,9700 PRO and 8800GTX were considered fine for gaming for years and great examples of high end cards. You could argue they set the bar in terms of allowing devs to push shinier games.

Going down the range,for budget gamers,the 9500 PRO,6600GT,8800GT and HD4870 brought high end performance but for much lower prices.


Likewise the 6800 GT you could unlock to a 6800 Ultra.

It was the AGP 6800LE which was the best for unlocking - I had two. One unlocked from 8 pipelines to 12 and the other from 8 to 16. I had in-between 6800GT and 6800 Ultra performance for a much lower price.
 
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The last card that really wowed me was the 4870. It felt like such a leap forward and at£180 too.

It's the £150-£180 market that I care about and it's been 2 years since anything interesting has happened there.

To me it should be expected that each new generation brings a leap forward in performance and without a price increase either.
 
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