Tech Guru wrote@StannisTheMannis
If you are aiming to play on 1080p , 970 is great I have been using it for approximately 1 year now , all the "fiasco" about the 3.5+0.5 GB Ram issue vs actual real life performance is very exaggerated. Shuttering may exist on 1440p (very settings) or 2160p which is initially the 970 is not meant to be used on 4ks. From my honest user experience I have been using the MSI 970 Gaming OC (single & SLI):
- The Maxwell is very efficient Nvidia architecture heat / temperatures on a good air ventilated case you can OC the 970 at levels reaching the 980 performance (personal testing).
- GTA 5 / Wicher 3 which are VRAM intensive AAA Titles , you can push 1440p by playing on high settings and sure disabling Nvidia HairWork on Witcher 3 - MSAA 2x for GTA 5
-I am not defending the GTX 970 because I am a user for this graphic card but truth to be said since You are some how speculative about its real life performance.However, after actually using the card, using less than 3.5gb of VRAM and more than 3.5gb of VRAM by altering settings in games does not appear to affect performance.
-For R9s / Fury & Direct X 12 - I would wait for a couple more DX12 games to draw results.AMD has been working with Mantle for some time, and had it ready for DX12. NVIDIA must have something in the oven, but must not still be stable for users.
One should not forget that DX12 uses all stream processors/CUDA cores in order to increase performance, and that GCN as whole has way more stream processors than any Nvidia architecture has CUDA cores. A good example of this is how the 290X that's framerates at 1080p are less than the 980 Ti's 2160p using DX11 in Ashes, while using DX12 it's only a 2FPS difference between the two at 1080p and 1440p and just one FPS at 2160p. If DX12 makes the 290X within striking distance of the
980 Ti, imagine how much it'll increase the difference between the 970 and the 390 which is already well ahead at all resolutions.
If he was upgrading when Pascal and Arctic Islands come out, the $50 difference wouldn't be justified, but he wants it to last for 4 years, which quite frankly turns the fight well in favor of the 390.