The 970 is still a capable card? Heresy

Idk I feel VR list it's steam again. Alyx helped push it big time but there hasn't been anything worthwhile since. Not too mention all the bs with oculus and FB.

The Facebook BS is just that. BS. Since the Quest 2 has been released VR game sales have increased dramatically. Games like Pistol whip and Beat Saber are seeing a 10x increase in sales since the Quest 2 launched.
 
Guilty as charged, still running my old GTX970. Built a new system a year or so ago, but kept this card as the new cards from nVidia and AMD were all on the horizon, lots of talk in the industry. Figured I'd wait.

But, make no mistake, I'm going to buy something very new after the AMD dust settles a bit. We'll see who can put what in the channel at a non-scalped price.....and I'll buy one.
 
I have to agree. Not until recently did I see anything wrong with the 1080 (non ti) that I was using. If I didn't get the bug for needing to upgrade my rig, all the games that I played and still play are fine running on my oldie 27" 1080p monitor. It went downhill the moment I started reading about all the cool new releases and buying a 34" UW...

Technically still don't need any of the hardware I am rocking compared to what I had before as higher FPS doesn't make me any better of a player. I still suck at most PvP oriented games, haha. At least now I can die in higher rez.
 
Same here. I mainly play VR games.



VR is definitely going mainstream. The Valve Index, Quest 2 and Reverb G2 are leading the way. The Reverb G2 has no SDE.


And meanwhile, HL Alyx has sold only 500k copies over the last 6 months.

The world's reason for the Index to exist has failed horribly (even though it will run fine on any other PC headset, nobody bought the game) . HL2 sold 1.7 million copies in it;'s first two months.

VR is nowhere near going mainstream.
 
VR is definitely going mainstream.
Feel like with how little mention VR got from the latest consoles launch that it is not going toward that direction in the moment, who would have predicted 4 year's ago than a 2020 new console launch will never mention VR (or new video card in 2020 either, even that reviewer will rarely look at them)
 
Feel like with how little mention VR got from the latest consoles launch that it is not going toward that direction in the moment, who would have predicted 4 year's ago than a 2020 new console launch will never mention VR (or new video card in 2020 either, even that reviewer will rarely look at them)
PS5 can use PSVR still, but you need a special adapter apparently - free, but has to be requested from Sony directly.
 
It's a lovely card but time catches up to all of us. I'm still running mine since there's no upgrade in stock for me to move up to. Since I do have 1440P and a 165Hz screen I want to go with something a little nicer. The only frustrating thing is that sometimes dropping the settings in a modern game doesn't feel like it always give you a tangible frame improvement for the settings drop. Biggest reason I want to trade up is to have the extra ram to turn more eye candy on, but also I don't think this card has serviceable frame rates for red dead redemption 2 at 1440p on a 970 unless you turn setting way down, and I think cyberpunk is going to spank these old cards.
 
Feel like with how little mention VR got from the latest consoles launch that it is not going toward that direction in the moment, who would have predicted 4 year's ago than a 2020 new console launch will never mention VR (or new video card in 2020 either, even that reviewer will rarely look at them)
I believe Sony is gearing up a new headset for the ps5.
 
So... Per this, a lot of older vr headsets really suffered from low ppi. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ro...why-its-important-for-vr-and-ar-headsets/amp/

Those of you who are VR fans - which modern VR sets have equal to or greater than 60 pixels per degree?

That article is pretty old in terms of VR development. It was written in a time when every Headset used Pentile displays. So there was only 2 subpixels for every pixel. Compare that to the newer headsets that are using RGB stripe display, they have 3 subpixels for every pixel. This gives a huge boost in clarity. And the newest headsets like the Quest 2 and Reverb G2 have next to no SDE, so you can't see the space between Pixels anymore.

Also, back to the statement you made on lag, that would be the fault of the 970, it's just not good enough for VR, and the Lag/tearing you was the headset dropping the framerate to half the refresh rate.
None of them are even close, I think they are approaching 15-20 PPD or so but nowhere near human clarity (which is where I assume you pulled the 60 number from).

Thankfully, tech has moved on too and the PPD isn't the only factor in how good the picture is in VR.
 
Yeah that basically cancelled my plans to get into VR.
Me too.

The 970 is still a great card for 1080p 60/75hz gaming. I have a 980 in my emulation machine. Way more than it needs but its been downclocked to 850mhz doing light duty now :)
 
I got a GTX 980 for basically 970 pricing in late 2015, so I'm in much the same boat five years later. The 980 is the same GPU, after all, just fully enabled and with the entire 4 GB of VRAM being usable at full speed.

The thing is, for flat 1080p gaming, it's perfectly fine, but for VR, it's painfully inadequate in stuff like DCS World and No Man's Sky (admittedly not the best-optimized VR titles by a long shot), framedrops out the wazoo. The fact that I upgraded from an Oculus Rift CV1 to a Valve Index is not helping in the slightest.

I was hoping that there would be graphics cards actually worth upgrading to specifically for VR performance, and while an RTX 2080 would already double my DCS performance (I borrowed one for troubleshooting and benchmarking purposes for an evening), I didn't find it to be worth paying over twice as much at the time.

Now we've got new cards that are worth the dosh - on paper, anyway, because even the new RX 6800 (XT) release today makes the RTX 3080 launch seem widely available. Probably won't even be able to buy any of these new Ampere or RDNA 2 cards until next year.

Guess Maxwell will just have to live on a little longer in my desktop, even as I'm benching Turing against it with my new laptop packing an RTX 2070 Max-Q (which is underclocked to the point of performing more like a desktop 2060). Yes, said laptop technically runs the Index about as well as my desktop in practice, but it's not the dramatic improvement that dropping a 2080 in said desktop was.
 
Flipping through GPU articles - I stumbled across this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/review/1822-geforce-gtx-970-vs-radeon-r9-290/

A 2019 article comparing 970 performance 5 years later.

Considered within the limitations of playing on a 24 inch 1080p screen at 60hz (the most common screen out there (as far as I know) ) - it's still getting solidly playable frames. As in - a player with a good CPU and RAM and a 970 can probably get the visuals and be competitive on all but the most demanding 2020 games at 1080p.

AAnyway... While most of us here are enthusiasts who like the bleeding edge of tech in our rigs... I'm kinda surprised by the 'long legs' of this very legacy card. Anyone still rocking one certainly got their money's worth.


I had the best and nastiest 970 and that thing was a 1080p killer. There isn't much that that card can't do.

Stupid power surge destroyed the whole rig it was in though because my UPS with AVR died a while before that. Lame.
 
i'm still running my 970 i bought 5 years ago. so far i don't really have any reason to upgrade. my monitors are both 1080p and it handles that just fine for the most part.

doom eternal you're not going to run high settings. more like low and a couple medium. not my cup of tea, so doesn't matter to me. i tried it, got bored of it. control i very much enjoyed and it initially ran like butt-grade crap. then i overclocked my card as much as i could and it runs well enough for me.

i find it hard to believe that 5 years later i still don't need a new video card. i admit, it's partially due to the fact that i have kids now and less time for gaming, but still i find it surprising. either way, i'll take it.
 
I'm still rocking a 4690K/GTX 970 build at the moment and it's been damn good to me, although I do want a new build soon. I've been on 1080p for pretty much forever, but I recently purchased a 1440p monitor. Haven't tried the 970 on it yet but I figure it may start to show its age at that resolution.
 
If they hard disproportionately american (maybe not) it could skew things a little bit being what seem by far the best market to get an AMD card.

I do not know how much numbers there is, but for example:
https://www.proshop.de/RTX-30series-overview
https://www.proshop.de/AMD-Radeon-RX-6000-Series-overview

Total amount of card received by that reseller

6800xt: 25
6800: 100
Total received : 125

3060ti: 195 (Maybe they sold more 3060TI the first day than AMD card since launch)
3070: 1709
3080: 1197
3090: 498
Total received : 3,599

That would be if their numbers are up to date, 28.8 NVidia card sold for each AMD ones.

Incoming:
6800: 13
6800xt: 9
Total Incoming: 22

3060ti: 357
3070: 291
3080: 410
3090: 80
Total Incoming: 1,138

50 Nvidia incoming card for each AMD ones


Outstanding Customer orders:
6800: 67
6800xt: 506
Total Outstanding: 573

3070: 679
3080: 3,442
3090: 186
Total Outstanding : 4,307

% filled of the Total customer (outstanding + card received), removing 3060ti
AMD: 18% of the 698
NVIDIA: 44% of the 7,711
 
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Still have 3 evga b stock 970s at my house running in my wife and both my kids PCs... probably will have to upgrade them eventually because they kids are into texture packs and mods for minecraft, farm sim, etc etc that press them on vram.
 
i have a 1060 6gb in a secondary box which iirc has Similar performance to a 970. It’s paired to a 1080p@144hz display, and yeah it does just fine. There are a few games where the 6gb helps to crank up texture quality where the 970 would likely struggle with its 3.5+.5GB arrangement.
 
You're running an archaic i5. We aren't interested in your experiments in frugality ya?
I dunno, it's a bottleneck for sure...

Considering some people play games that don't tax the cpu much I'd have to see the use case and OC (?) to really understand his reasoning.

Also, it could very well be a forced situation, not everyone has the $400 to upgrade their cpu/mobo/ram.

For fun here is a 4k run in a benchmark vs an 8600k:

I have a feeling that at 2k this cpu may do pretty decent in most older games
 
20201224_221207.jpg
my archaic system suits me just fine for 1080p
 
Still rocking my EVGA 970 SSC 970 with an AIO modded on to it at 1500/4000.

Just waiting on that 3080 ti.
 
VR is definitely going mainstream. The Valve Index, Quest 2 and Reverb G2 are leading the way. The Reverb G2 has no SDE.

Pfft!

Outside the US the tech is stupidly overpriced and availability is in some cases non existent. In my locale the Index isn't available direct from Valve, suppliers stopped holding stock of VR hardware as nothing was selling due to stupidly inflated prices and need for stupidly expensive hardware for a half decent experience.

It seems every 20 years or so VR is the next best thing, and every 20 years or so after all the hype has settled, it fizzes out and vanishes until it's next apparent uprising.

In relation to the 970, I had one for quite some time as a backup card and it was a very capable unit for the money paid. I recently sold it to a client as I mostly use my 980Ti these days, which is also a very, very capable card. Long live Maxwell!
 
Mainstream? Hardly. I build gaming machines every week... want to know how often I'm asked about VR? Maybe, MAYBE one out of 15 builds. I'm not against VR, but we still aren't there yet.

But of those who do, it is common for them to have 900 series cards like the 970 or 1060... and want something better now. Which is understandable. The resolution and refresh rates aren't good without at least a 7000 or 8000 series cpu and a video card starting at the 2060 performance level. Under those specs I hear complains of frame drops and stuttering that shouldn't be happening but are.

As for the adoption rate of VR...

I THOUGHT full immersion VR would finally succeed this time by being dragged along by the rapid advances in AR headsets... a "side effect" of AR becoming a daily use item. But it seems like AR headsets completely died. Which is insane. It's the connection with the real world that will ALSO drive full immersion. Not the other way around. I don't know about everyone else, but as far as headset gaming goes, I was most impressed by something like Minecraft being played on the living room coffee table by multiple people at once. Something an entire family might actually sit down and do, or just randomly join in on. This could easily translate into endless other types of games with real interaction without shutting out from the real world. If the headsets can do this, it's only a small change to shut out the real world and go full virtual for other games. This was going to provide the stepping stone that VR has always failed at in the past.

Microsoft abandoning their AR headset development is one of if not THE most tragic, idiotic lack of vision in the PC space I've ever seen in the history of computer market screw-ups and I've seen them all.

We've missed the boat. By now, we should be just entering a golden era of AR where companies like Logitech should be making quality AR accessories that are used globally daily. But no.... MS just couldn't be bothered to finish what they almost had done. The last 10% just kicked their ass and they quit. Tragic. It shouldn't have mattered if they needed to spend another few billion and start over from scratch. Winning the AR/VR space and developing the standards in interaction for those environments is worth almost any price. Far better than Facebook developing the standards.
 
Speaking a a Quest 2 owner.

VR may not be mainstream, especially the kind of VR experience hardcore PC gamers crave. But the Quest and Quest 2 have sold ALOT. Look at any of the facebook groups (shudder) and reddit to see how active its gotin in the last few months. Since the Quest 1 went on sale and the release of the Quest 2.

Alot of the general public have picked it up, but nothing like an Index or vive, just the standalone headsets. And it is a pretty decent experience, for what they are.

And you an still play lower end VR games with a 970, alot of the earlier Oculus rift titles play pretty well. I wouldnt try some of the latest titles, I need to pick up Alyx and give it a go...


Facebook screwed it up bad by tieing the oculus accounts to facebook accounts, people who would have bought the Quest 2 out of mere curiosity now wont because well Facebook. I really wish this hadnt happened or there was a way to opt out.
 
I used to be a VR Sim Racer. Started VR racing 2016, but once I got the ultrawide, the Oculus has just been collecting dust.
It's a good experience with Super Sampling, but with the hassle of plugging in, calibrating etc just turns me off sometimes when I have other peripherals like wheels pedals etc.

Most people say VR is better than monitors for immersion which is true, but through my experience I prefer Ultrawide with crisper image quality. I would gladly take VR over 16:9 though.
Imo, VR just needs to upgrade on the resolution on VR lens. It's almost been 5 years since I bought the Oculus and there hasn't been much improvements.

Just my 2cents with Racing games and VR.
 
My son is currently using a 970 on his 1080p 144hz display, and he gets like 300+ fps in counterstrike, and hovers near the fps cap in fortnight and some modded out minecraft servers. I'd say that's just fine for an old gpu. I probably spent $450 on at launch.

It all depends on your use scenario.
 
My son is currently using a 970 on his 1080p 144hz display, and he gets like 300+ fps in counterstrike, and hovers near the fps cap in fortnight and some modded out minecraft servers. I'd say that's just fine for an old gpu. I probably spent $450 on at launch.

It all depends on your use scenario.
Just noting msrp on the gtx 970 was $330 ;).
 
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