Nvidia GeForce GTX 970: what 8 Hacker News owners think

Likes it

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.

Neutral

Maybe so, but that becomes irrelevant when you consider that the new, better quality instantly becomes the expected baseline. So the price of the "baseline" quality is going up regardless. Let's look at GPU prices as an example. Around 12 years ago, I bought a GTX 970 for around $350. That was considered a very good GPU at the time. Today, the "equivalent" GPU model (RTX 5070) now costs almost double. Of course, the newer GPU is much more powerful (more than double, in fact), but all the things you'd use a GPU for have also advanced and now expect an entirely new level of performance as a baseline, such that the older GPU is fairly worthless today. So most people agree that GPUs in general have become more expensive. Regarding DeepSeek's price: it's obviously subsidized, and unlikely to match the actual inference cost right now.

Likes it

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

Doesn’t like it

Which card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs. Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.

Likes it

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.

Likes it

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.

Doesn’t like it

More like " I refuse to be held hostage by your delusional business model" more like. I bought two GTX 970's, and a GTX 1030. Then I did the research on how they actually worked and the nefarious things the company got up to in order to spoliate open source drivers. The minute they switched to secritful Falcon units, is when any pretense of good faith was thrown out the door. They cheated me out of 3 graphics cards worth of functionality. I can accept "not yet implemented". I will not accept "predatory board forces you to do business with me forever". No mad conception of IP justifies that.

Likes it

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.

Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it

2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.

Likes itHasn’t owned it

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.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

What owners wrote