MSI GeForce GTX 970 GAMING 4G Video Card Review

The MSI GeForce GTX 970 GAMING 4G video card is making the GeForce GTX 780 and AMD Radeon R9 290 obsolete. This $349 video card puts up a fight and punches in a win at this price. The overclock alone is somewhat staggering. If you are about to spend money on a GPU, don't miss this one.

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Battlefield 4

Because FRAPS does not support Mantle we have to use BF4's built in frametime capture tool to capture the frame times. From this, we can calculate the average FPS instead of frame rate over time. This process of recording the data can be found here. Because we cannot use FRAPS we have to represent the data to you in bar graph format using average FPS only.


Highest Playable Settings

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In our NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 evaluation we discovered that the new GeForce GTX 980 does exceptionally well in Battlefield 4. It took back the crown in performance over the AMD competing GPUs running Mantle. The same holds true for the new GeForce GTX 970 in this game as well. We discovered a very strong performance advantage with the GeForce GTX 970 compared to the competition.

The MSI GeForce GTX 970 GAMING was able to play this game at 1440p with 4X MSAA enabled and the highest in-game settings, including HBAO. We did not have to lower any settings, nor AA. At 4X MSAA we are using the game's highest MSAA mode. The average performance was right around 60 FPS where we like it, and the minimum framerates hit the mid 40's to lower 50's. This beat the other two video card quite thoroughly.

The GeForce GTX 780 was the slowest out of the bunch. We had to disable ambient occlusion completely, with means no HBAO and no SSAO. With 2X MSAA the average framerate was still a couple of frames below 60 FPS. The only way to make it faster here would be to disable AA completely, which makes the game look like a mess. There is a lot of aliasing in this game without some form of AA, and it is actually harder to see things with all the aliasing.

The AMD Radeon R9 290 was faster than the GeForce GTX 780 and allowed us to leave HBAO enabled, and play at 2X MSAA. As you can see, before the GTX 970 the AMD R9 290 did have the performance advantage in this game compared to NVIDIA's offering. However, with the new GTX 970 the tables have turned on AMD, the GTX 970 is now faster and offers the best gameplay experience.


Apples-to-Apples

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At 4X MSAA you can see the MSI GTX 970 GAMING wipes the floor with the other two video cards. It is 26% faster than the GTX 780 and 21% faster than the R9 290.

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At 2X MSAA the same pattern holds true, while the R9 290 steps out over the GTX 780, the new GTX 970 steps out over both of them and offers 70 FPS average performance at 1440p 2X MSAA with HBAO!