There are a few main hypervisors out there that can utilise connected hardware in a virtual machine state; I've only used vSphere ESXi and Xen (and its 'commercial' but free cousin Xenserver). With these two, you can pass through various bits of connected hardware to a virtual machine with degrees of success.
To start, you need a motherboard that supports IOMMU (AMD) or VT-d (Intel) to allow for the passthrough of peripherals and then a CPU with AMD-V (AMD) or VT-x (Intel); the combination of these allows not only virtualisation but also complete component pass through.
Personally I have found that Xen/Xenserver has the most robust passthrough in terms of performance and 'working' but you often had to drop to the command line on the host machine to get the component to passthrough... Apart from GPUs which can be done via a XAPI based GUI. Once passed through, the device generally worked well and was good.
For ease of use however, nothing beats ESXi; installs on USB, simple to use GUI and can pass through all devices using it - much simpler and easier than xen... But sometimes it doesn't play ball such as with my PCIe TV cards... Cannot get them to keep playback going using them!
Both systems could easily utilise the 970 via passthrough and both can do it via a GUI; I'd recommend taking both for a spin and seeing which you like best... make sure you install xenserver on a spare hdd as it will want to install unlike ESXi which will utilise a USB but will need a HDD or NAS/SAN for storage.
I think ESXi 6 now has complete USB device passthrough too allowing you to access USB peripherals attached to the host without needing to pass the controller in to the VM.
