I finally decided it was time for a graphics card upgrade. My existing card was still performing very nicely for most games, but the most recent were starting to push it a little too far.
Any game in 1080P was still perfectly good on high settings, but my monitor is 1440p (2560x1440) and some of this year's games were not able to handle that resolution at high settings. And for GTAV I even had to run at 1080p just to get 30FPS.
I decided to do some benchmark tests before and after to compare and thought I would share the results here.
PC hardware setup:
Intel i7 2600K at 4GHz
32GB Ram
Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3 motherboard
Dell U2711 27" (2560x1440) monitor + 2x Iiyama 17" monitors
Logitech G15 keyboard
Logitech G500 gaming mouse
Samsung 850 EVO SSD
4x SATA HDDs
Optiarc BD-RW
Old graphics card:
XFX Radeon HD 6950 2GB XXX DD Black Edition
New Graphics card:
MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming G4 Twin Frozr V
Benchmark test results:
First I ran both cards using 3DMark.
Cloud Gate: AMD: 17788 NVIDIA: 25073
Sky Diver: AMD: 10252 NVIDIA: 24972
Fire Strike: AMD: 3056 NVIDIA: 9832
So as you can see every benchmark was over double the score, with the toughest Fire Strike test being 3 times the score. The combined test in Fire Strike also showed a huge difference. The AMD card struggled to get out of single framerates, mostly as low as 3FPS. The NVIDIA card was over 30FPS for the whole test.
Next some games.
DIRT 3
First I tested Dirt 3. Both cards running the game in 1440P with all settings on Ultra.
AMD: Minimum 39.4 FPS / Average 46.1 FPS
NVIDIA: Minimum 90.95 / Average 108.9
I did discover a bug in Dirt 3 which others have also found with nVidia cards (900 series). The game offers 8xQ CSAA in the graphics settings as the highest setting, but if you set it you lose the whole game graphics and are just left with a green screen background and can hear the game but not see it. Official answer direct from nVidia is that their graphics cards no longer support 8xQ CSAA. Switching back to 8xMSAA solved the problem, but you have to force quit the game and delete the hardware config settings from the Windows user directory to get the game to load properly again.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
This was one of the first games I played which couldn't handle a decent framerate at 1440p on the older card. I had to run it at 1080p.
AMD: 1080P (medium settings) Average 50.87 FPS / 1440P Average 33.9 FPS
NVIDIA: 1440P (Auto recommended high settings) 54.7 FPS (43 min / 95.6 Max) / 1440P Ultra settings 52.8 FPS (40.7 Min / 69.6 Max)
So the game now runs slightly higher framerate with everything set to ultra than it did on 1080P on medium settings before. So the card is still only just handling this game on maximum settings but I know I can reduce a couple of filter and shadow settings to high to dramatically increase the framerate. I just wanted to see what it could do.
Grand Theft Auto V
Finally GTAV. This was the worst performing game on my old card.
AMD: 1080P Average 30 FPS
NVIDIA 1440P Average 60FPS.
On the old card the settings were all on high and I had to still reduce the resolution to 1080P to get a steady 30FPS.
On the new card with nearly every graphics setting maxxed out it was sticking at 60 FPS for the whole benchmark. So I'm very happy with that.
Conclusion
For me this was a great graphics card upgrade.The GTX 970 is currently the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market. Sitting at around the £250 price and delivering high end performance at half the price of the next card, the 980. If anyone is considering buying a new GPU then seriously consider this one. I purchased the MSI 970 because of it's fan and physical card design, plus the ports I needed. you can however get alternative make 970's for as low as £230 so a real bargain.
And it's popularity is confirmed on the 3dMark website where current stats show the 970 is the most popular card with those posting scores at the moment.
Until now I've been using AMD/ATI cards for a long time. Before the 6950 I had a 4870. Until now AMD were offering the best performance to price ratio cards on the market, but this has finally changed because with the current range of cards AMD didn't release any new cards, instead just renaming and tweaking existing ones. The 290x being near identical to the 390x for example.
I could however have purchased an AMD 390 for close to the same price as the nVidia 970 and they are very close on performance. The reason i didn't is because in all reviews and customer comments I've read the AMD card has a very high power consumption compared to the nVidia card and it runs very hot, whereas the 970 is one of the coolest running cards for a very long time, not even needing its fans to be spinning when not gaming.
Any game in 1080P was still perfectly good on high settings, but my monitor is 1440p (2560x1440) and some of this year's games were not able to handle that resolution at high settings. And for GTAV I even had to run at 1080p just to get 30FPS.
I decided to do some benchmark tests before and after to compare and thought I would share the results here.
PC hardware setup:
Intel i7 2600K at 4GHz
32GB Ram
Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3 motherboard
Dell U2711 27" (2560x1440) monitor + 2x Iiyama 17" monitors
Logitech G15 keyboard
Logitech G500 gaming mouse
Samsung 850 EVO SSD
4x SATA HDDs
Optiarc BD-RW
Old graphics card:
XFX Radeon HD 6950 2GB XXX DD Black Edition
New Graphics card:
MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming G4 Twin Frozr V
Benchmark test results:
First I ran both cards using 3DMark.
Cloud Gate: AMD: 17788 NVIDIA: 25073
Sky Diver: AMD: 10252 NVIDIA: 24972
Fire Strike: AMD: 3056 NVIDIA: 9832
So as you can see every benchmark was over double the score, with the toughest Fire Strike test being 3 times the score. The combined test in Fire Strike also showed a huge difference. The AMD card struggled to get out of single framerates, mostly as low as 3FPS. The NVIDIA card was over 30FPS for the whole test.
Next some games.
DIRT 3
First I tested Dirt 3. Both cards running the game in 1440P with all settings on Ultra.
AMD: Minimum 39.4 FPS / Average 46.1 FPS
NVIDIA: Minimum 90.95 / Average 108.9
I did discover a bug in Dirt 3 which others have also found with nVidia cards (900 series). The game offers 8xQ CSAA in the graphics settings as the highest setting, but if you set it you lose the whole game graphics and are just left with a green screen background and can hear the game but not see it. Official answer direct from nVidia is that their graphics cards no longer support 8xQ CSAA. Switching back to 8xMSAA solved the problem, but you have to force quit the game and delete the hardware config settings from the Windows user directory to get the game to load properly again.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
This was one of the first games I played which couldn't handle a decent framerate at 1440p on the older card. I had to run it at 1080p.
AMD: 1080P (medium settings) Average 50.87 FPS / 1440P Average 33.9 FPS
NVIDIA: 1440P (Auto recommended high settings) 54.7 FPS (43 min / 95.6 Max) / 1440P Ultra settings 52.8 FPS (40.7 Min / 69.6 Max)
So the game now runs slightly higher framerate with everything set to ultra than it did on 1080P on medium settings before. So the card is still only just handling this game on maximum settings but I know I can reduce a couple of filter and shadow settings to high to dramatically increase the framerate. I just wanted to see what it could do.
Grand Theft Auto V
Finally GTAV. This was the worst performing game on my old card.
AMD: 1080P Average 30 FPS
NVIDIA 1440P Average 60FPS.
On the old card the settings were all on high and I had to still reduce the resolution to 1080P to get a steady 30FPS.
On the new card with nearly every graphics setting maxxed out it was sticking at 60 FPS for the whole benchmark. So I'm very happy with that.
Conclusion
For me this was a great graphics card upgrade.The GTX 970 is currently the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market. Sitting at around the £250 price and delivering high end performance at half the price of the next card, the 980. If anyone is considering buying a new GPU then seriously consider this one. I purchased the MSI 970 because of it's fan and physical card design, plus the ports I needed. you can however get alternative make 970's for as low as £230 so a real bargain.
And it's popularity is confirmed on the 3dMark website where current stats show the 970 is the most popular card with those posting scores at the moment.
Until now I've been using AMD/ATI cards for a long time. Before the 6950 I had a 4870. Until now AMD were offering the best performance to price ratio cards on the market, but this has finally changed because with the current range of cards AMD didn't release any new cards, instead just renaming and tweaking existing ones. The 290x being near identical to the 390x for example.
I could however have purchased an AMD 390 for close to the same price as the nVidia 970 and they are very close on performance. The reason i didn't is because in all reviews and customer comments I've read the AMD card has a very high power consumption compared to the nVidia card and it runs very hot, whereas the 970 is one of the coolest running cards for a very long time, not even needing its fans to be spinning when not gaming.
