NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 970 is an amazing card. It is fast, power-efficient and extremely affordable.
NVIDIA did not provide a GTX 970 reference board, so we did our best to simulate its performance properly for a baseline comparison. Averaged over all our tests, the reference board is 8% slower than the GTX 980 (at 1920x1080). This makes the card faster than the R9 290X and GTX Titan, but slightly slower than the GTX 780 Ti. The ASUS GTX 970 Strix comes overclocked out of the box for a slim 2% performance advantage. Other custom GTX 970s provide a few percent more. ASUS probably should have overclocked their memory chips to make up some ground. In my opinion, the GTX 970 is the right card for 1440p gaming. It is also a good investment if future-proofing 1080p or G-Sync gaming beyond 60 Hz is your intent.
Just like with the GTX 980, power consumption has massively improved, which gives NVIDIA the ability to unlock these performance levels without having to use bulky and expensive cooling solutions. However, our ASUS STRIX sample roughly consumes as much power as the NVIDIA GTX 980 reference design, the latter obviously being faster. Such may be due to ASUS's changed PCB layout, which includes changes to the VRM circuitry, or the GM204 simply scales better with shaders than with frequency. Another factor is the way Boost works as a higher boost (which the ASUS board utilizes) also increases the voltage and, incidentally, power consumption. Still, the card is incredibly efficient, more so than any other card outside of the Maxwell family. I also really like the fact that ASUS used a single 8-pin power connector instead of two 6-pins, which makes installation easier and reduces the cable clutter in your case.
It looks as though ASUS has a winner on their hands with their STRIX cooler. It stops the fans while the GPU is cooler than 67°C, which nullifies any noise in idle, during Blu-ray (Media PC!) playback, and light gaming. The fans will spin up at above 67°C, but do so with very little noise. Other noise sources in your system will mask the VGA's fans during even a heavy gaming session which pushes ASUS's card to the limit. This is definitely the card to get if you want a low-noise experience.
Reaching the second-highest clock in our GTX 970 test group, close behind EVGA's SC ACX, overclocking of our sample worked well. Memory topped out just 10 MHz shy of 2 GHz because of the card's well-overclocking Samsung chips. The heatsink does not cool the memory chips with the baseplate, but uses the fans' airflow instead, an approach that works quite well.
NVIDIA is also introducing several new software features with their latest generation of GPUs. The first is DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), which is the equivalent to SuperSampling (running the game at a higher resolution), with a high-quality gaussian filter that improves the quality of the downscaled image sent to your monitor. This feature can be useful with older or less demanding titles as it squeezes some extra image quality out of the game, but the performance hit is just too big for some of the more recent AAA titles; remember, the game is actually running at 4K. The next innovation is MFAA, which is an evolution of NVIDIA's TXAA anti-aliasing algorithm that promises near 4x MSAA quality at only a 2xAA performance hit. Together with G-Sync, these show that NVIDIA not only delivers good hardware as its software department also has a better track-record in backing up its products with stable software, and useable new features. NVIDIA also says the GTX 980 and GTX 970 to be DirectX 12 cards even though the DirectX 12 specification hasn't been finalized yet. Time will have to show whether NVIDIA's support will cover all DirectX 12 features or only a subset.
The real kicker with the GTX 970 is definitely its pricing. Reference boards can be found at an incredible $329, with ASUS's overclocked STRIX GTX 970 OC retailing at $339, a very reasonable price increase. This makes the card cheaper than AMD's R9 290X and R9 290, and both are slower, draw more power and produce more noise. Personally, I would have expected the GTX 970 to retail for well above $400, matching GTX 780's current pricing. But it looks as though NVIDIA meant to torpedo AMD's whole product stack, and I say they did so successfully.