I can't make my mind up!!

[krumme]

I'm just wondering if the jury is still out on the 970.

I jumped on it because I'd read some four or five reviews! The reviewers never discovered the problem.

If you have some initial problems with anything, the skinny on the street has a chicken-little effect. All my little initial problems had other causes -- not the cards and not the drivers.

So it becomes a question of (a) how much I want to keep up with the gaming bleeding edge, (b) what was the real, internal nature of NVidia's mistake with promoting the 970, (c) when I'm really going to see a monitor upgrade to 4K as a life or death matter, (d) how much NVidia can "improve" card and game performance with driver/software upgrades, (e) how I spend my money on other forum-title priorities, and (f) how I spend my money on all other s*** in the journey of life.

NVidia designed the 970 to work the way it does. Did they actually plan on "snowing" the hardware-consuming public about it? Are we really sure of the hardware's limitations with any precision? In the latter question, some folks think they found the limits. Maybe they could've tweaked some settings -- I couldn't say.

Another's guess is as good as mine. I'm just satisfied with the card(s)'s performance at the moment. I like the lower power requirement and some other features.

Look at it another way. If the big "discovery" of January had yet to be discovered, I'm not sure we'd be having these discussions exactly the way they're unfolding.

This has always been the enthusiast dilemma. "Which one?" "When?" "1st tier or second tier model?"

You are wrong here. You have to remember the problem of segmented ram was not discovered as a technicallity. But because some 970 users had stuttering in games.
As Jhh have said this segmented ram is "feature" given to customers. They just didnt tell about it before

 

[Creig]

OP if are going with R9 290 than u have to know that Most and Majority of upcoming and latest games are Gameworks title which is Nvidia Stuff

Pure BS. Yes, some future games will be gameworks, but not "most and majority".

and in most cases AMD will perform bad example is like a GTX 770 will perform same as R9 290 in most gameworks games.List of games such as Dying Light,MGS V and upcoming like Project Cars,Witcher 3,GTA V ,Batman Arkham and MGS Phantom of Pain.

How do you come up with this nonsense? An AMD 290 performs just slightly under a GTX970 in most games and a 290X pretty much ties a 970 at 1080P and pulls ahead at higher resolutions.

Here is a example
http://pclab.pl/art62088-4.html

Your "example" of a 770 performing the same as a 290 is to cherry pick some unknown game called "Project CARS" BETA?!?

LOL!!!!

OP, if you want to see how the 970 really performs against the 290 or 290X, just read a real review from a major website such as Anandtech or HardOCP.

And keep in mind that a 970 is basically a 3.5GB card vs the 290/290X which have 4.0GB of full speed memory. And a 290/290X is less expensive than a 970 to boot. Many people have recently returned their 970's in favor of a 290 or 290X.

 

[Udgnim]

OP if are going with R9 290 than u have to know that Most and Majority of upcoming and latest games are Gameworks title which is Nvidia Stuff and in most cases AMD will perform bad example is like a GTX 770 will perform same as R9 290 in most gameworks games.List of games such as Dying Light,MGS V and upcoming like Project Cars,Witcher 3,GTA V ,Batman Arkham and MGS Phantom of Pain.

Here is a example
http://pclab.pl/art62088-4.html

can always cherry pick benchmarks for specific games

here's Evolve benchmarks at 2560 where the R9 290X beats the GTX 980 by 2 FPS and the R9 290 beats the GTX 970 by 9 FPS

http://www.techspot.com/review/962-evolve-benchmarks/page4.html

I prefer looking at TechPowerUp's charts since it shows a performance summary of multiple game benchmarks

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_980_Matrix/28.html

I am curious about Witcher 3 and GTA 5 performance since they are open world and I assume will make heavy use of VRAM