Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

I literally just replaced my GTX 970 a week ago. Fantastic GPU, lasted me a good ten years. Baldur's Gate 3 finally got me to update it, which it could run it but I dunno a new game got me excited. It ran Elden Ring just fine last year though.

Yup. This is my take. I build a new machine about once every 4 years for gaming/development, and I just don't really see all that much difference between the capabilities of the machine I built two generations ago (now ~9 years old) and the one I specced out last year. I can still load up modern AAA titles on the 9 year old machine and they run just fine at 1080p 60fps with some minor tweaks to the graphics. Turns out the GTX 970 from 2014 is still more than capable. Basically - these top end cards are a complete waste of cash for the average consumer. Hard to even claim you're future-proofing the machine with it - you're just plain wasting money.

I owned the 970 for 7+ years and I remember all about that bruahaha. I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day. It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks. And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?

I was luckier, this method also resurrected my GTX 970 and it worked for two more years. It was still working when I sold it.

> It sucks that you basically have to buy a super power hungry, super expensive GPU from a company that refuses to do anything open source if you want to be able to do anything but play games on your GPU. I have a lot of fun in Blender for two years now, using Nvidia GTX 970 - it's quite old by now, and definitely cheaper than $400. As someone who has seen a lot of bug reports, Blender has problems with AMD, Mac, and newest Nvidia (RTX) cards.

Laya is pretty easy to set up on its own without ollaya. I just did that and replaced my current jev API usage to laya running on a GTX 970 with 4GB of vram. Very small context window, but for some existing small llm work I was doing, it was a drop-in replacement and it makes me happy I can get use out of old hardware I have running.

I run a GTX 970 on Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland) without issues. Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.

It's an old desktop built in 2014 or 2015 that I never used on my lap. This was a reply to "never having had a computer that felt fast for so long". For some tasks, this CPU with the GTX 970 still feels faster than MacBook M2 or recent Ryzen laptop APU.

I'm glad I'm skilled enough for this to not annoy me. I'm using a cheapo CPU from 2010 and a $7 TPM 2.0 module plugged into my motherboard. Elden Ring runs fine on a GTX 970 from ebay for $30. Windows 11 has been happy for years. I might have also run some hack or trick or bypass, but I've long since forgotten since it was easy and widely published how to do it. The environmental impact of enterprise licence businesses throwing out good hardware in a year sucks though. But honestly any business paying for enterprise license was replacing hardware that frequently anyway. E-waste levels from corporate america IT departments has always been shocking. Hopefully the recyclers can refurb those.

Are we once again allowed to buy high-end graphics cards at retail price, or are the crypto-boys still ruining it for everyone else? Last couple times I went to look at cards the prices were jacked up and eventually I stopped looking. Though I suppose it's for the best since my GTX 970 still gets the job done all these years later.

I was running a heavily overclocked 970 until about 7 months ago when I upgraded to an ultrawide monitor. Before that, it was more than happy playing the games I played at 2560p at only a few fps slower than my partner’s 980. For the price it cost me, it was an excellent card, and i paid more than triple adjusted for inflation for the 3070 that replaced it.

I was confused when the game came out because I was running a GTX 970 and never had any stuttering issues with medium settings. Not sure why, but everyone I knew with a newer nicer card had the stuttering issues.

The part about them being buggy is definitely true. Up until somewhere around 2016-2017 the ATI/AMD drivers were really bad. I had an "HD 7850" GPU on Linux around that time and it was barely usable. The performance was less than half of what you got on Windows, and the drivers would crash very often, sometimes several times a day if I was trying to play games like Team Fortress 2. It was so bad that I decided to replace the HD 7850 with a new GTX 970 and decided to not buy anymore AMD GPUs for the indefinite future. The GTX 970 was stable and performed very well with the closed source drivers, and other than them being closed source I never had an issue with them. I always installed the closed drivers through the system package manager which handled all of the tricky stuff for me (Arch Linux maintains the nvidia driver as a system package and makes sure it runs on the current kernel before releasing it). In modern times the situation has flipped though. I still haven't bought an AMD GPU since then but I am pretty sure my next one will be.

I built new media box last year and thought I would try AMD Ryzen 2400G APU. Turns out it was a bad choice. Those graphics drivers are extremely unstable, it keeps crashing frequently, kernel bug reports have many reports from multiple people with info on how to reproduce them but those cases are still in status "NEW" almost 1 year later. And while their Windows benchmarks are decent, anything 3D related on Linux is a glitching disaster with poor performance. My friend bought latest Intel NUC with AMD Vega graphics and he could not even get Linux to boot with that. Meanwhile I have Nvidia GTX970 on my desktop PC and everything works fine, even G-Sync works. I have used Nvidia cards with Linux for 10 years now and I have not had any issues like I have with AMD now. To me it seems like AMD dumping their drivers as open source is a call for help on maintaining them rather than being all friendly to community.

You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops. They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away. Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.

I checked to see if you claims were true (3060 = 1070ti)… and you’re absolutely right! https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3060-vs-Nvi... Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to upgrade if you aren’t aiming for the highest specs (which is most people). Even ignoring the crypto craze, there wasn’t really that much tangible advance in GPU specs (and even when it did it traded off in terms of size, power consumption, and heat.) Before you were able to buy a GTX 970 for $400 to play all the latest games at the best options and that was enough… and even to this day it’s still a solid entry-level GPU.