GeForce GTX 970 4 GB & Dual 4K monitor, match made in (heaven/hell)?
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Dell's selling a quality 4k monitor now for a price I can afford, and I'm looking to buy at least one of them.
But then I was thinking: wouldn't it be awesome to have two of them?
But then I was thinking: can my GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB of memory even drive dual 4k monitors? What about if one is playing Skyrim or World of Tanks?
Does anybody have any insight? Or especially first-hand experience-- I don't want to drop $$$ on dual monitors if it turns out one of them is practically useless.
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well i don't play skyrim but i do have a triple 1080p setup with a 4GB 970.
i can play GTA V across all three on ultra with about 200MB of graphics memory free, so you should, in theory, be able to do dual 4k monitors in Skyrim. might not be able to use ultra settings on everything though.
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All five or all three? I'm confused.
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three sorry.
not sure how that typo slipped through.
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Ok so that's a game on 6220800 pixels.
A single 4k is 8294400 pixels...
Of course I could also just run them at lower resolutions if needed. So my options are still open.
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it's going to depend heavily on how Skyrim loads things into video memory. I believe Skyrim is less memory hungry in that department than GTA, so you may be fine keeping settings on ultra high with dual 4k. If not you could reduce textures or drop down to 1080p to play the game, and upgrade to dual SLI in a couple of months when the price of the 970 drops again.
I'm certainly planning to go to SLI around the winter holidays
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Skyrim is placeholder for "a generally demanding video game".
World of Tanks is actually a better example, since it's rendering engine is much newer than Skyrim's, but it's a less-played game so I figured there'd be fewer people available to give first-hand advice.
So far I haven't bought any true "next gen" games for Windows; they've all been on the Xbox One. So I dunno what my video card does with, say, Evolve.
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Skyrim is placeholder for "a generally demanding video game".
no argument from me on that score.
Skyrim is visually hard on graphics cards, but if it's computationally hard and relatively light on the memory consumption then you shouldn't have issues with that card on dual 4k screens.
I know that the total number of models that Skyrim loads is lower than GTA V which would usually make it less memory intensive, even as it is just as computationally intensive. The question, and one i don't have an answer to, is whether that's enough to make the difference.
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A quick bit of googling suggests that card might struggle with 1 4K monitor, let alone 2, with a 970. (Also, did you hear about the "the 970 effectively has only 3.5GB of ram" thing?)
One forum post on PC Part Picker said you'd be get about 40fps in Battlefield 4 (http://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/57496-gtx-970-for-4k).
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After about a week of full on G-SYNC, I'd say G-SYNC is way better than total resolution: at least for gaming purposes.
If you are looking at the Dell(s) recently mentioned by a major tech pub, and you can use to real-estate for non-gaming stuff I'd say go for it.
Otherwise I'd spend the money on the two monitors for 1x 4K monitor with G-SYNC.
I have but a lowly 760, but I definitely don't get tearing/stuttering with GTA V, much less my less intensive games like RE5/6.
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Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.
@blakeyrat, I don't personally have any higher end graphics cards, but everything I've seen suggests that you'd be hard pressed to get reasonable framerates on more recent demanding titles at 3840x2160 even with dual GTX 970s at higher settings. A single 970 isn't going to handle gaming at 2x4k very well. You might be able to compromise with lower settings, but that's beyond what I know.
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Yeah that's about the conclusion I came to also.
Otherwise I'd spend the money on the two monitors for 1x 4K monitor with G-SYNC.
My desk is big enough for 2 24" monitors.
Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.
Yeah I think the memory speed thing is: 1) ridiculous, 2) will be fixed quickly by firmware/driver updates anyway.
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A single 970 isn't going to handle gaming at 2x4k
very well.at all.I've just gone and done some research because someone told me they found a 970 for sub200$ and i went "ooh shiny"
the maximum resolution of the 970 is 4k. there's no way the card can drive two 4k displays at the same time.
even the titan cards can't handle two 4k displays.
Looks like the only way to get dual 4k is to SLI or go with an ATI card.
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Plan B is to run a single 4k monitor and keep my 1080 on the side. The secondary 1080p is basically a Xbox monitor for my Xbox One and 360 and (in that role) wouldn't benefit from 4k anyway.
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Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.
The only reason I brought it up was because a couple of forum posts specifically called out that on multimonitor setups the "missing" half-gig of RAM might be problematic. (I put "missing" in quotes on purpose, because I know it's there, I just don't feel like going into it. It should be easy to find articles on it on Tom's Hardware etc.)
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I bought a single 4k monitor. THREAD CLOSED! or keep talking I guess whatever.
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Yeah I think the memory speed thing is: 1) ridiculous, 2) will be fixed quickly by firmware/driver updates anyway.
It doesn't sound like it, since there's actually missing ("The GM204-200 GPU has three SMM units disabled, for a total of 13/16 SMMs. This in turn disables some components of the memory sub-system. This leaves the chip with less resources to manage the same amount of memory as the GTX 980.") address hardware ("crossbar resources to the address system").
This article http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-memory-issue-fully-explained/ sez that a 970 will only get ~30FPS at 4K on a single monitor with < 3.5GB in use.
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Looks like the only way to get dual 4k is to SLI or go with an ATI card.
I assume he's not going to want to replace his close-to-brand-new card. I did see one forum post claim a pair of Radeon 290s would be far more performant than one 970, but, is anyone surprised by that?
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I assume he's not going to want to replace his close-to-brand-new card.
i would also assume so.
it's an option, but that would require you to use that abomination that is ATI and their "oh you upgraded your graphics drivers and now nothing works? oopsies! we'll like totally fix that for you in the next driver update. giggle it should only be about three months."
.... oh how i hate ATI for all they've put me through on support calls.
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that abomination that is ATI
We can all do a bunch of ATI-bashing, but my PC, with a Geforce card has some serious coloring artifacts in HL2--the dark corridors in the beginning after you get the crowbar have a horrible rainbow on them that's simply not present on my son's PC with an ATI card.
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At least Nvidia doesn't break and leave broken for months or years features of their cards just because the card id one model generation back from current and they couldn't be assed to test with the card before pushing the update.
Maybe they've changed in the seven years since i was last willing to deal with ATI, but i doubt it.
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break and leave broken for months or years features of their cards
You mean like the ability to draw colors correctly?
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well, yes.
also i suspect you just have a graphics profile issue and there's a game specific one that you can have nvidia apply for you that fixes it. there's a lot of games that need those and nvidia usually just applies them automatically if you have the full driver set installed, which includes the geforce experience application.
if you don't have it already getting that app will probably fix the issue for you.
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Nvidia
Fuck those guys for screwing over Shield Portable. You have a perfect portable gaming console with great specs and fairly low price and you proceed to not market it, not secure almost any games, and then withdraw it silently from the store to release a #2934988109248th tablet.
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I think you were the only one on Earth interested in buying a shield.
It was just Yet Another Android-Based Game Console. The market of which consists of maybe 47 users, all of whom already own Ouyas. It didn't help that it wasn't even an early YAABGC, it was announced in a huge crowd of similar devices, all competing for the same 47 users. At some point there were more YAABGCs than potential users of them.
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also i suspect you just have a graphics profile issue
Yes, I'm sure an obscure game like Half-Life 2 isn't likely to have correct profile settings out of the box.
(I've been using GeForce experience since I got this card. I actually stood in line at midnight on release day, btw, to buy HL2.)
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Fuck those guys for screwing over Shield Portable.
Fuck those guys for putting the shield streaming service on every PC whether or not it has a shield!
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From my Blakeyrat experience, GeForce Experience does a terrible job.
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I actually stood in line at midnight on release day, btw, to buy HL2
I thought HL2 was a Steam only thing, as an incentive to get people to use a service that was about as popular as Origin at the time?
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It was, but it was sold in boxes.
As shown by this informative image I got from Google when I searched "Half-Life 2 retail box":
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So it just needed activating on Steam? I suppose that makes sense considering broadband speeds back then
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Yep. I got a boxed copy pretty close to release and activated it on Steam.
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Yeah there were a lot of games back then that would "install into Steam" from disk. Another one I remember is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
I got my copy of Half-Life 2 from a pack-in deal on an ATI video card. Then fucking Valve delayed their game by a full year and by the time it came out it barely ran on the card it came with. Fucking Valve.
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Valve delayed their game by a full year
Delaying by only a year would be considered massive overachievement for them nowadays
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I thought HL2 was a Steam only thing
In 2004, buying your game in a store was a thing. You took it home, installed it (and Steam), and then activated it online.
There was actually a van from a local radio station down there at the Best Buy. Go figure.
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Delaying by only a year would be considered massive overachievement for them nowadays
The only reason they delayed it instead of releasing a broken mess is that some hacker stole the source code and forced their hand after demonstrating how buggy and broken the game was.
I'm 100% convinced they would have released the buggy and broken version had the hack not occurred.
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There was actually a van from a local radio station down there at the Best Buy.
What, getting its tires rotated at the Goodyear next door?
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What, getting its tires rotated at the Goodyear next door?
No, they were doing a broadcast for some reason. Probably "look at those kooks out at midnight." Because nobody's ever done that for a game console or new TV or movie release.
Best Buy was doing the midnight sale.
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4GB of memory
3.5GB usable.
My assumption is that you'd have to drop down the quality, but I'm not really sure.
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will be fixed quickly by firmware/driver updates anyway.
Impossible. It's part of the hardware design.
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No, they were doing a broadcast for some reason.
Yes, thank you. That is the best way to respond to a joke, Dr. Mathscience.
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Ouyas
Non-portable.
The sole fact of this being a portable Android-based console (so you get, at the very least, multiple emulators right off the bat) without having to screw with a touchscreen sold it for me. That you could stream a game and play PC games allegedly comfortably was a pretty good idea too.
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The only reason they delayed it instead of releasing a broken mess is that some hacker stole the source code and forced their hand after demonstrating how buggy and broken the game was.
If only Discourse had delayed their v1.0 and made it not suck because of some people showing how buggy and broken it was ...
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Another one I remember is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
That game was one of the best when it comes to getting good combat physics. Every time I see what other games do, it really jars because I've seen how good it can be. (Knocking orcs off a cliff with the bits and pieces of their brethren from when you've got a good hit in does not really get old.)