Hello all, I've been planning to upgrade my 760 to a 970 next month, but now with the news about Shadows Of Morder (not that I'm terribly interested in playing it) needing 6 GB of VRAM for Ultra textures I've started pondering whether it would be a good idea to get wait a bit and get the 8 gig version.
I'd like the card to last me about 2 years or a bit more, with possibly getting another one for SLI later down the road.
Opinions?
Is an 8GB 970 planned?
Apparently yes.
I just don't see it worth paying an extra price premium to get 8GB of VRAM just to play Shadow of Mordor on ultra. Which, to be honest, I bet is most likely a typo or they're just exaggeratin to make PC games think they care about us.
Or it's just going to be an unoptimized pile of shit.
they are but i wouldn't grab the 8GB models. THAT makes no sense. I know back then when we argued that Cards that make were 2GB cards that also had 4GB variants made no sense. but In some cases they did. with Crossfire or SLI you didn't have to worry about using up all your memory whereas 2GB's you cranked up the Resolution and then you had something to worry about. now with 4GB models there are currently NO games using that amount of Memory AT ALL. and 8GB Cards SLI's is un-neccesary. you're just paying extra for no reason when 2 4GB cards in SLI or Crossfire is Perfect.
But to answer your question though I wouldn't grab the 8GB Models they make no sense. you'll be perfectly fine with a 4GB card or two 4GB Cards in SLI or Crossfire.
Just two words: GPU RENDERING
specially 3d path-tracing... there are a ton of people buying titans for blender just for the 6gb of ram, (and now that there is the 6gb variant of the 780 there will be a ton buing it)
there are also other uses, like gpgpu compute (3d reconstruction, feature detection in photogrammetry models, fluid simulation...) the software normally creates clusters to avoid the run out of memory problems but the more memory you have the less clusters, the faster you get work done...
So I'll wait for the 8gb version because I do 2 some of these things, if you don't , there's no point in buying it, if at some point games need 8gb i'm prety sure that actual graphics cards could not have the necessary horse-power for running them, so you might be safe with just the 4gb version for a while
they could pull a call o duty where it only needs like 1 but won't run without 6