The chip also measures nearly 400mm square, and by way of comparison, the latest Ampere GA104 chip used in the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti is only a touch smaller (393mm square compared to 398mm square) but has over triple the number of transistors. Microsoft DirectX 12- NVIDIA® 3D Vision® Ready- NVIDIA SLI® Ready Technology- NVIDIA CUDA® technology- PCI Express 3.

As anti-aliasing goes, you're never going to beat the brute-force approach of rendering at a much higher resolution and downscaling - as the DSR examples we previously ran, repeated below, should demonstrate.However, the GTX 970 and the other graphics cards featured in this piece were tested at the Digital Foundry office. It doesn't quite hit the enthusiast gamer pricing sweet spot, but it offers so much raw performance that the additional premium makes it seem like a no-brainer.

Two 100mm downdraft Torx fans provide airflow, with MSI boasting their new fan design offers 19 percent better airflow and five percent less noise (at 100 percent fan speed). A) noise reduction, and also offers users the ability to control the two fans independently using its Gaming App. At Nvidia's recent tech conference, the firm was confident that there would be no hit to performance - despite the downscaling algorithm using a 13-tap Gaussian filter to improve results compared to basic super-sampling. The GTX 970 was understood to have three fewer streaming processors than the GTX 980, meaning fewer texture units and a slower core clock speed, but otherwise retain the same 4GB of GDDR5 memory and 2MB of L2 cache for accessing it.This means that 16 SMMs are enabled (2048 CUDA cores), as are all 64 ROPs and the full 256-bit memory bus. The fan blades alternate between traditional blades that direct airflow to the heatsink, and dispersion blades with a small ridge in them that draw in more air and push it into the path of the normal blades blades, essentially accelerating the airflow. FXAA DSR with FXAA 4x MSAA DSR with 4x MSAA Watch Dogs next, with FXAA and 4x MSAA variants once again stacked up against the DSR equivalents. We've attempted to eliminate 'false' and 'fake' listings, so these are only the sold listings (which can still be incorrect in some cases), but the trends are easy enough to see.

The GPU is cooled by a massive nickel-plated copper baseplate, to which the four heat pipes (two 8mm, two 6mm, also nickel-plated) are soldered to. The results demonstrate that you're still looking for a dual GPU solution for anything approaching 60fps gaming - some might consider the combination of combination of circa 30fps frame-rates with pared back settings too much of a compromise. We re-run our 1080p tests at the higher resolution and find that the GTX 970 still manages to deliver the goods. Results between the new card and the GTX 780 Ti and R9 290X are much closer, but it seems that the new Nvidia card handles those frame-rate dips a little better than its much more expensive competition. Join the experts who read Tom's Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news — and have for over 25 years.MSI's custom cooler has always impressed - the R9 290 we used for CrossFire testing in our R9 295X2 piece was also a peach. We upped the maximum fan-speed to 70 per cent to accommodate the increase in heat output, but the card was still very, very quiet overall - a feather in the cap for MSI's new TwinFrozr design. The GTX 980 dominates for the most part here, but the sheer effort required by the GPUs in producing a single frame sees the delta between the cards close considerably. AIB profits will be hardest hit when the bubble pops, and they'll be the ones dealing with RMAs for years to come. The temperature cut-off points are similar to the ASUS card – between 60 and 65°C, the fans will spin up; once the GPU drops to about 50°C, they're no longer needed.

And those cards are likely much newer — but possibly used for 24/7 mining, so don't count on getting a pristine GPU either way. The GTX 980 is the worlds fastest GPU and the GTX 970 offers the most advanced performance in its class. In our GTX 980 testing we found that the card was a little weak on Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider - and that appears to carry across to the 970 too. The GTX 970 more than fits the bill: it brings the ultra high-end GPU experience that much closer to the mainstream to the point where the value offered here is almost ridiculous. The low-performance segment is significantly slower to access than the high-performance segment, hampering performance.It runs GTA V very well, and runs most games at a pretty flawless 60fps or higher on great settings. GTX 980 and GTX 970 are faster than their 700 series predecessors but not immensely so, and as a result NVIDIA does not expect 700 series owners to want to upgrade so soon.