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Can Nvidia's now-discontinued GeForce GTX 970 successfully power a 4K ultra HD display on a range of challenging PC games? On the face of it, the notion sounds ludicrous - on a specs level we're severely constrained by memory capacity, bandwidth and of course, basic compute power. But consider this: the prices of 4K monitors and TVs are dropping like a stone, but relatively speaking, graphics hardware is holding its price. On a general level, we need more from our graphics hardware, and the GTX 970 is an excellent subject for our tests to see just how far mainstream GPUs can be pushed.The choice of this particular video card is not coincidental. The GTX 970 is a sales phenomenon to the point where even though it was removed from sale some time ago, it's still the second most popular GPU in the Steam hardware survey, just ahead of its effective Pascal replacement, the GTX 1060. Overclock the GTX 970 and as long you're not bogged down by sub-optimal drivers, or held back by its lower memory allocation, its ballpark performance is on par with the 1060. Automatically, our test results here will apply to around 10.5 per cent of the current PC gaming market.
On top of that, it's also a benchmark for extrapolating out the baseline for potential 4K performance on other cards too - GTX 980, R9 390, RX 480 and RX 580, for example. Recently, we ran a feature on the ways that this tier of GPU hardware could produce PS4 Pro-beating performance, if developers embraced the smart rendering techniques Sony and others have pioneered. But these tests are different - ideally, we're looking for console-equivalent performance (or better) at native resolution: true 4K, as Microsoft would put it.
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