Gadgetory

hey what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and we're gonna do a video that I said even on Tech Talk that I wasn't gonna do already making me a liar and a hypocrite but whatever I can do that I guess it's my choice Coolermaster skate smart world series is where you will find the most custom computers on the planet and Ahmad coolermaster car for more details breather alright so you have probably undoubtedly heard that we are dealing with a GTX 970 memory RAM gate as people are hashtagging it or hashtag I want 4 gigabytes or whatever I mean this has turned into such a circus I guess I don't even know why I'm doing this video but I've been begged by so many people to do it I figured I'll go ahead and do it so the GTX 970 this thing came out on September 18th 2014 all of us reviewers talked about it we all got various samples I've got the g1 gaming I've got the SSC from EVGA and it was touted as like the most bang for the buck card out there it was like the 90s great but the 970 really is the value and it was hanging with the 290 and 290x and lots of tests and the specs were really outstanding I mean over 1600 CUDA cores 4 gigabytes of gddr5 64 ROP well it turns out that there at least was a miscommunication between Nvidia's engineering team and the advertising team where the specs for the memory side are cut down a little bit more than we really anticipated or even we reviewers even noticed we'll talk about that a little bit now there's two sources I'm going to point you to when it comes to the technical facts of this because I'm not going to turn this into a 45-minute video talking about the specs and exactly how they were cut down and how it matters now that's tech report Scott Watson and PC per over there Ryan trout they had done an amazing job at covering this and going into technical detail and what's actually happening here with the 970 on a high-level kind of a just a quick explanation is you have a cut-down crossbar on the 970 versus the 980 which has given you one less l2 cache module that has to feed two memory controllers one of those feeding the 500 megabyte segmented portion of that V RAM that's on there so that's how you have a 3.5 and a 500 megabyte now that 500 megabyte is be considered a low level or a low priority Ram and so that's why a lot of games when you're gaming on them will only show a cap of 3.5 gigabytes of vram and not go beyond that into the 4 gigabytes now before we talk about my thoughts on this I figured I'm going to look at this from the perspective of J three years ago let's say J or Eva I'm sure this is going to apply to many of you you've scrimped and you've saved and you load lawns and you wash cars you worked overtime and you did we had to do to go out and buy your first high-end graphics card and you picked up a GTX 970 on launch day and you're excited about it you were playing on the card and you thought this is fantastic or maybe you're considering buying one right now you're in the situation that I just described and you were considering buying one of these and then you hopped on Twitter you hopped on your favorite tech forum and now you're seeing all this 1970 RAM gates stuff and you guys don't know what to do so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to turn around I've got my Elgato Game Capture hooked up to the testbed right now we're going to actually capture some gameplay we're going to go through a couple of different scenarios we're going to see how well the card performs in these different scenarios we're going to try and stress it we're going to put it to the cap of that 3.5 gigabytes we're going to see exactly what happens so we're going to find out together even though I've already done all these benchmarks we're going to find out together right now in real-time how the card is really performing whether or not it's a card that's still worth buying with your hard-earned dollars so with that said let's go ahead and transition into the test bench let's start playing some games transition okay so here we go guys we are going to use MSI Afterburner here to do our test of VRAM usage now one thing I want to point out here I'm using 1080p for two reasons one my Elgato Game Capture that I'm using to capture this can only supply 1080p to the monitor when it's using HDMI pass-through and then second 1080p is actually used by 98% of gamers when it when Steam poll was actually done on hardware so 98% are using 1080p or less so remember the perspective of this video is the average consumer went and bought a graphics card like the 970 and now they want to know whether or not it's something that they should worry about or return so the first thing we're going to do here is the battlefield for 64-bit I shared headed open 64-bit tests on a 64 man server we're going to just max the slider out as far as we possibly can I also have fraps running here so that we can see a real-time on-screen FPS meter I don't like to use the built-in msi afterburner overlay or on the screen display OSD so yeah anyway we're doing 1080p for this test okay so we are in the menus video you can see we are in the ultra preset four times MSAA which is the most inefficient use of VRAM so we're trying to do the best we can to use as much of that as possible let's go ahead and bump this up to say let's go 150 on the resolution scale to add more resolution to this see we get here alright there we go let's go ahead and see how this is going to prepare you can see our FPS even at a hundred and fifty percent resolution scales sitting pretty good terrible I'm only going to play for a couple minutes here I'll probably end up editing this so we're going to take a look at what the vram is doing according to msi afterburner alright let's go ahead and see what was happening here on MSI Afterburner so according to afterburner we only used 1.5 gigabyte up scuse me derp we use 2.7 gigabytes of vram during that with the resolution scale at 150 so let's go and put it up to 200 and see what happens hope that soldier zoom intensity mode alright 200% so we're doubling the size of the resolution here which is going to put a lot of strain so we're going to notice some FPS dips for sure but what we're looking for here is terrible stuttering or just flat-out freezes because that's what people were complaining about and I mean yeah we're sitting it right about 300 hour 30 FPS between 30 and 40 FPS but really the resolution scale at this point is getting pretty damn near 4k overall on the textures so I don't know it looks pretty consistent to me granted the FPS is terrible consider 30fps to really be all that great of a gaming experience so far I'm not seeing any crashing not seeing any stuttering or any freezing textures look freakin amazing though so no I'm waiting for the freezing and stuff waiting for RAM Gate to appear still waiting for RAM Gate oh I got sniped nicely good job mr. sniper all right so what happened with the RAM on this one memory usage went up to three point well you can see right there we had a spike as we left it 3607 and it came down now as it's sitting there all right so here we are in the Skyrim settings you can see everything is completely maxed out object detail fade they were clicked that whatever that is everything's on ultra FXAA everything is on the highest you can go here so there we go let's go ahead and play some Skyrim now you're going to notice here that I'm level one I've got like no progress in the game that's because I lost all of my Elder Scrolls progress but that's okay I didn't play it to too much I just was using it for some benchmarks and things so pretty much we're sitting here right at the beginning of the game oh well no big deal so you kids see come alright FPS is running away to 145 fps you can see we're moving nicely nice and smooth there's no stuttering as I'm turning here there's no motion blur when I turn though I notice that I do see some what looks like texture flickering there in the water but that could be just because of the runaway FPS I don't know I know it doesn't actually do that when I have vertical sync going but hey well look at the RAM usage and we'll see what's happening maybe it's name is RAM related who knows alright so let's see how much beer and we're actually using rye memory usage it's even less than battlefield 1400 F or 1400 memory or megabytes can put total 1487 megabytes we're not going to go any farther on that one I mean I know that there are mods and things for this game there are no mods installed I don't believe that the average PC gamer is going to buy the graphics card and be like I'm going to start modding of course that's going to be a kind of a niche enthusiast group there as it is but as you can see FPS is doing just fine let's go ahead and clear that bad boy and now we're going to go ahead and do the other one everyone said that I should do on this test which is shadow of Mordor and I do have as you can see here the HD content pack is installed now I've already run this test and this is one that I will say does seem to hammer the graphics card more than any other test that I've done she had to his mood or middle-earth I said that backwards but I don't care middle of shadow Mordor earth alright options video alright so we're at 1080p 970 FPS no limits apply settings yes so Advanced Options I mean everything as you can see is just bloom as high as it will go alter alter alter alter alter depth of field order in transparency tessellation apply BAM alright so this thing is as high as it will go with the HD texture pack and once again this is one of those games that I have not really done a whole lot in just some benchmarking so obviously this isn't a playthrough or anything like that I wouldn't expect a playthrough that's what you're going for because you're not going to get it so it's not in this video maybe the future video I got to find a way to implement playing more games in my life I don't play enough games alright so as you can see when turning here we did get a little bit of stuttering right there when do a swan dive all right so so far we're doing okay fps doesn't look too shabby yeah just go for broke here oh this was a bad thing run away get away right away whoa hello mr. ring I bet yeah we're getting a little bit of stutters here I think I've bitten off more than I can chew here this is this is kind of how I go about life it just jump in and take on more than I can chew so I kind of feel like this guy in a way there's no way I can defeat all these guys I guess we're gonna try now aren't we this is a good way that really tests the card I guess die yeah oh my legs I finish you off when you awake rad taking on two captains here well we had a couple really bad stutters there oh yeah oh yeah I know you uh alright let's see what was happening here with MSI as far as you can see here we was sat right around 3.5 dip down came up dip down came up core clock it's really good but as you can see here the GPU usage had some stutters in there but the stutters don't really line up with anything happening with the RAM so I'm going to say that this might just end up being part of the HD content and everything being maxed out and this being a 970 so I guess that leaves us into conclusion time okay here we go guys conclusion time and my two cents on this whole 970 matter now as I mentioned I try to put myself in the perspective of somebody who's going out and buying a 970 they only want to buy one card they wanted the last several years and they've freaked out after hearing all of this 970 rumor stuff which is I guess not really rumor it's confirmed now at this point but they're concerned now about whether or not they should keep the card or concerned about whether or not they should buy the card if they were thing about buying one and here is the what it comes down to as far as I'm concerned the GTX 970 is still an amazing graphics card now the general public especially those in these--piece enthusiasts and gamers are mad and I think that that's a little bit rightfully so considering it does say right here massively 4 gigabytes gddr5 now that can be a little bit misleading because you would think that you have 4 gigabytes available to the game engine or the gaming engine the way the card works to available to the games to give you the best performance but as you can see with shadow of more or 3.5 is technically where it caps out it doesn't even try and use as other five or 500 megabytes of VRAM now the only way that benchmarks were able to do it in fact some of those ms-dos based benchmarks or command put benchmarks where they were forcing access to that ram which was causing the card to actually work outside of the way it was designed so therefore you saw massive slowdowns now Nvidia does say that that 500 megabytes is similar to accessing system ram which is what happens when you use more than your available vram on a graphics card but that it's four times faster but as you saw shadow of mordor was not using more than 3.5 because the game really only saw 3.5 now that is something that people do in my opinion have a legitimate fact or a legitimate right to be angry over thinking they were buying a four gigabyte video card when in fact they were getting a 3.5 gigabyte video card now the only people who would really probably be affected by this are going to be people who are playing shadow of Mordor at 1080p on high res or HD resolution trying to max it all the way to the right and then people who are doing things like heavily modified Skyrim heavily modified minecraft or other very heavy texture based games now in my opinion the general buyer out there is probably not doing all of that now if you're the kind of person it's like I just want to buy a graphics card I just want to throw it into my computer and I want to have a good gaming experience by just playing some my Steam games or playing battlefield or counter-strike or Call of Duty or things like Tomb Raider far cry 4 whatever then you're going to find that the card is going to serve you very well and well into the future in fact a lot of people right now are playing on graphics cards that don't have more than two or three gigabytes of vram and you don't really hear them complaining because vram is not usually the limiting factor on the gaming experience so if you take anything away from this video the GTX 970 is still a fantastic card and it's going to serve you well for years to come on most titles unless you start getting heavily into things that are texture based or modified or high-definition texture packs now there's a couple of good things that actually came out of this this was an opportunity for mt2 jump and they did AMD definitely jumped by slashing the price of the 290 and a 290x even further which now means that you can get graphics cards like the 290x for as little as and sometimes cheaper than a gtx 970 so really this is a good thing for the consumers but I do think Nvidia is going to have to work really hard at getting back some of the trust of the public I think there might be a little bit of a trust issue now when it comes to that but I don't feel that this is something that's going to happen again on a videos part I think they've learned from this or hopefully they've learned from this assuming that wasn't an outright deception I don't believe it's an outright deception they would know that this would eventually come to light they wouldn't try to completely deceive the public at least I would hope that that's the case so I think that they've learned their lesson from this and they're going to have a little bit different checks and balances now when it comes to their advertising and Department and their engineering department so we can hope for that at least but there you go guys if you're looking at getting a gtx 970 the card is still delivering everything it promised and everything that we said it was delivering at the time of launch and today five months later so I don't feel that it's a terrible card I think it's unfortunate the way things went down with the way the vram is working in fact Nvidia says that this is by design this 3.5 and 500 it's the first time they've ever done it in fact it wasn't even possible before on the way that the way that the bar on the l2 cache works but now it's possible so what could have been a great technological advancement to say hey we have done something here that could be very good in the future unfortunately now kind of gives them a black eye but I do feel that it was a little bit of an unfortunate thing where you're not really getting four gigabytes of gddr5 for your games to access so there you go guys my two cents on the GTX 970 still a fantastic card if I was in the shoes where I bought the card and based on the performance that I'm getting right now and this was the only card I owned I personally wouldn't be returning it because I don't fall into the group that's being affected by this whole vram thing and then lastly if you're the kind of person that's like nope this is a deal breaker for me well you even cheaper AMD cards now to consider like the 290 and to 90 X so all around it kind of stimulated the market a little bit when it comes to price drops because AMD was like heck yeah we're going ahead and lower prices even more and be like four gigabytes bitches they go guys GTX 970 take it for what it is these are the tests I performed that was my two cents on it see you guys in the next one