Gadgetory

silence redefined November 2014 we are only a few months away from the one-year anniversary of the year of 4k proclamation back at CES 2014 that was the year where display manufacturers were promising that we would have this world full of beautiful and compact pixels and so far they have delivered as a plethora of T and 4k goodness but it was on the backs of GPU manufacturers to keep up with the ever rising demand for pixels and I think it's safe to say that there is now a cost-effective answer Mount Vesuvius the volcano of heat aka the AMD r9 295x2 was the first mainstream affordable card quote-unquote that was capable of pushing 4k while in vidya 7 70s and 7 80s in sli could barely keep up with it so it was the king of GPUs for a while and only the real option if you wanted to game in all that beautiful 4k goodness priced at over $1000 at release however this affordable option wasn't really all that affordable to the mainstream prices have lowered closer to one thousand point after Nvidia launched in 1980 and the 970 GPUs that changed everything the 970 is able to push borderline playable frame rates minimum of 30 FPS at Ultra settings in most games at around $350 each of these GPUs performs extremely well and are insanely efficient you can see our review of these here however EVGA has really stepped up to push the adoption of 4k and 1440p gamers prices are significantly less than 295x2 the question is are two of these GPUs in sli capable of keeping pace with the current power leader well first looking at EVGA s new GPU the GTX 970 FTW or for the win Edition we see that they have completely redesigned their ACX cooler the heatsink follows that 970 s architectural lead by becoming even more efficient than their predecessors it's made offense 36% quieter 26% cooler with an insane 400% longer lifespan off the fans by using swept fan blades double ball bearings and an extremely low power motor these fans are capable delivering even more airflow with less power overall this means that EVGA can take the power savings and throw it back into the GPU or clocking the core to 12 16 megahertz base clock and 1367 boost clock with vrm at 7 gigahertz affected clock speeds paired with the added features the Nvidia supports like dynamic super resolution which is basically an enhancement by rendering in 4k but down sampling to the native resolution of your monitor these GPUs are pure monsters and throwing two of these in our test rig and we can finally see how they handle 4k resolutions in some of the newest games so eibar take it away all right so this is the fun part starting with Assassin's Creed Black Flag we are running at a resolution of 3840 by 2160 everything maxed out and where the results are playable but most importantly look at how it just stacks up against the 295x2 next is battlefield 4 on ultra settings again running at that 4k resolution hitting over 40 frames per second and again we see impressive results against the 295x2 Far Cry 3 is a lot of fun and handling highest settings no problem and hitting much better scores with the 970 in SLI than that peasley tune in ffx-2 showing some real potential for 4k gaming assassin's creed unity was the only real exception at the time of testing Ubisoft was in the process of correcting some major gameplay issues it's not every day when you see people disappear into a graded path and suddenly fall into the abyss of nothingness the frame rates were also grossly affected by issues however the Nvidia enabled features like the lighting and textures are breathtaking overall the sli pair ebj 970 a CX 2.0 cards are a force to be reckoned with at around $750 for a pair or 375 each these cards are beasts in our limited benchmarks a pair of 970 s managed to beat the 295x2 in two games but lower average in Far Cry 3 so what does this mean for the state of 4k outside of limited TN panels 4k gaming is becoming real and not a luxury coupled with dynamic super resolution for delivering 4k quality graphics to your sub 4k panel we are starting to see everything come into place it may almost be December but we might be finally seeing the year of 4k come to reality as always consider subscribing for more similar content give us a like if you found this review helpful thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one