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The big 970 SLI dilemma

Soldato
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6 Jan 2013
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Rollergirl
Please keep this discussion for 970 SLI owners and what they plan to do. Any discussion on Nvidia or the 970 memory issue has a thread of it's own.

First of all, a massive thanks to OCUK for their unbelievable customer service in accepting returns on all 970's sold by them until the end of February. I have no plans to boycott Nvidia or Gigabyte for their stance. I simply want the best system I can afford. Rather than boycott, I'm going to focus on rewarding OCUK for their legendary CS with all future purchases, regardless of price (within reason, obviously :cool:) I'll be starting that with an order for a ROG Swift next week. :D

I'm thinking of returning my 970's in exchange for a single 980 and a credit note for the outstanding balance. I like the Windforce cooler, so it's looking like a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £467.99
Total : £477.59 (includes shipping : £8.00).



The big dilemma for me, is should I do it!

I mean, the performance of the 970's in SLI is stunning. However, the 980 will certainly outstrip a single 970 when the SLI isn't playing ball. Also, the 980 should have much better resale value, and I really want to move to a card with more vRam whenever that becomes available.

Will the 980 perform adequately at 1440p with AAA titles?

I'm planning on buying a ROG Swift, so do I keep the 970's or get the 980?
What are you planning to do?
 
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If it were down to me I would get a refund on the pair, then buy a 295x2.

It's the 4k champion... It's also at a price that wouldn't bother me too badly if the 380x came along within a few months.

I know you may not want AMD but you did ask !

I also wouldn't bother with the Swift. If you're going to get two 980s then the Acer 4k2k is what it's all about. 4k and G-Sync, a true step into the future.

I'm only getting one 980, and don't intend to go for 4k any time soon. 1440p is where I'm at right now. I just don't know if a 980 will push it enough.

If I go AMD, I lose the G-Sync functionality. Plus the heat... oh, the heat...
 
In my opinion if you are worried about vram then buying another 4gb card now makes no sense to me. 512mb more VRAM usable in how you would normally expect it is that really worth buying a new card then in six months time you find out 4gb is not enough.

Ideally there is no 8gb card that is a massively available at the moment so would turning texture quality down from Ultra to High really cause people such distress ?

Bide your time with what you have and see what comes out the rest of the year. I can just imagine people who got rid of 970 SLI/single 970's saying in six months time their 980 4gb doesnt have enough VRAM.

AMD or even Nvidia looking at whats been happening this week if they had any sense the new GPU race would be to get the first mainstream 8gb card as it would easily sell as well as a 970 if not even better.

Sorry if I am treading towards the vram thread. I just dont see the sense in getting rid of a "3.5gb" card and replacing it with a 4gb card because of a VRAM agruement. In that context it makes people look really stupid.

Now 970 SLI 4gb to 1xxx SLI 8gb would make sense.

Yea, I agree. I am like others, in that I haven't really experienced any issues that couldn't be remedied by dropping a setting here or there.

It's really the resale value that's niggling at me. The 980 is a premium card, so I'm not sure the resale value will be there either... especially when 8gb cards come out.

I'm edging towards keeping my 970's.
 
I had the very same discussion with myself and I was actually able to do something about it.
Having one PC with 970 SLi and another 970 3 way SLi, I was thinking of going 1x GTX 980 in one PC and 2x GTX 980 in the other PC. I knew very well that selling 5 GTX 970 would not cover the costs of 3 new GTX 980's...but I was kinda accepting it albeit unwillingly.

Luckily my buddy came to the rescue ! We talked about it and he said, "hey why don't I come by with my 2x GTX 980 and my 4K screen and we can check if it really is an issue".
So last evening we ended up swapping testing 1x GTX 980 vs 2x GTX 970 and 2x GTX 980's vs 3x GTX 970 and 2x GTX 980 vs 2x GTX 970 all in 4K.
Aaaaand halleluja I was happy with did that.... it saved me hundreds of quids.

Fact was that we played every new AAA title in 4K at max details and minimum 8xAA in all titles. We were excited to see if the Vram "issue" on the 970 would cripple it.
We did all the first testing with 1-2-3 GTX 970. With 1x 970 card FPS were low and at these quality settings games weren't really playable.

2x GTX 970 improved things a lot - we loaded the games with 8xAA and we experienced stutter every now and then and the VRam usage was 3.5GB+ and texture popping was random. We backed down to 4xAA and things lightened up. Still not stutter free and occasional hickups but we didn't see texture popping. Then we backed down to 2xAA (still looking sweet in 4K) and now things rang smooth as silk and we didn't experience stuttering at all.

Now to 3x GTX 970 - fired up the same games and Dying Light the "problem child" for the 970 Vram problem we tried first. Set it to 8xAA and we still had massive stutter all over and texture popping like with 2x 970. We downed AA to 4x and now things got weird. Absolutely smooth gameplay eventhough the Vram was hitting 3.8GB !!!. Maybe that extra GPU really made a difference now backing up the Vram ! We didn't see that coming.
The same story we repeated in the other games BF4, BioShock Infinite, COD Ghost/Advanced Warfare etc. Gaming in 4K with 3x 970 was a breeze with max 4xAA.
All in all we were sure we had seen the "3.5GB+ 0.5GB" problem in the games.

Now we moved to the GTX 980. 4K same setting Vram usage 3.9~4.1GB with 8xAA. But heavy stutter stutter and low FPS. One card just can handle it. Backed down all the way to 2xAA before with got FPS though would touch the likes of 30FPS and Vram usage between 3.4~3.5GBVram

Moving to 2x GTX 980 we expected the 980's to show their REAL 4GB Vram available. Fired up Dying Light set to max and 8xAA. First minute was smooth and we were so confident that this was how real 4GB vram would run the game... but them BAAAAM... suddenly the memory usage showing 3.8 went to 4.1GB and we were back to texture popping and choppy gameplay just like the 2/3x GTX 970's.
We could not believe it so we restarted the PC and game - with that that 3 times in a row, but every time the choppiness and texturepopping returned. Even 4Gigs wasn't going to cut it to run 4K at 8xAA. We backed down to 4xAA and here we started get get smooth gameplay again, only once in a while when a lot on the screen happened the FPS would back down in the low 30FPS - not surprisingly the 3x 970 delivered much better gameplay experience and FPS smoothness at these same settings.
After that we continued to tests in all the other games. We were surprised to see that all the games behaved in the same manner 8xAA at 4K was too much for even two 2x GTX 980's to handle. Vram usage was oversaturated causing stuttering etc. Backing down to 4xAA things got a lot better and games played smoothly albeit with a lower average FPS than 3x 970's.

So all in all. We played through all the games and I must admit that the 3.5GB+ 0.5GB vram issue was only "evident" when the 980 REAL 4GB card had the same problems !.
I'm really not that sure that the 970 is a crippled card at all, because when the 970 had problems so had the 980's.

Right now I am actually very happy I didn't sell my 5x 970's but decided to keep them. I'm thankfull for the fact that I for myself could test things out before throwing hundres of £ out of the window for nothing - so a hughe thank you to my buddy Jess :D I've seen it with my own eyes that "upgrading" from 970 "3.5GB+0.5GB" to 980 4GB is useless.
When 8GB versions of 970's get here I'll purchase those also eventhoug they may be "7GB+ 1GB" or so.



I hope you can use my answer to something. :)

Awesome post, thanks for that.

I've said all along that I am happy with the SLI performance, it's the resale value that's my main concern now.
 
After mulling it over the weekend, I've also decided to RMA my 970's. I'm just about to pull the trigger on a single 980 to tide me over until an 8GB card to match or surpass the 970/980 is launched.

These 970's were always a stop gap for me, which is why I never put them under water. The risk to resale value is just too great with this situation regarding vRam.

Once again, top marks to OCUK for their policy on this. My 980 will ordered via OCUK.
 
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