Introduction

Earlier this month, AMD slashed pricing of its dual-GPU flagship Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card to $999, down from its launch price of $1499, even as NVIDIA's offering in the same league, the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z, continues to sell at $2999. NVIDIA instead extended its generosity to buyers of its two new high-end graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 980 and the GeForce GTX 970, respectively pricing them at US$549 and US$329. The latter's price is particularly exciting as it disrupts every current graphics card offering under $350 by so much so that NVIDIA discontinued the GTX 770 completely while reducing the GTX 760's pricing to a mere $220.

At its given price, which is close to half of some of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards available on the market, the GeForce GTX 970 is begging to be bought in pairs, especially considering its low 155W TDP. The GTX 970 ships with 4 GB of memory, so a pair of these for $660 could prove to be an interesting gateway to own your playable Ultra HD-gaming PC build. In this review, we wasted no time in putting the two GTX 970 cards we have at our disposal through our test suite which spans across 17 game tests at up to 5 resolutions, each, including Ultra HD and 3D Vision Surround with a trio of 1080p monitors.

The GeForce GTX 970 cards we have with us are both non-reference designs. One is an ASUS GeForce GTX 970 Strix OC, while the other is an EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX. Both cards have been set to run at NVIDIA reference clock speeds. Since the two are non-reference cards, noise-level and power-consumption tests are not applicable. It would be safe to assume that their power draw will be double that of a single card.

But before you proceed, make sure you didn't miss out on our single-card reviews, which include in-depth details about the new GM204 silicon and NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 980 graphics card, also launched today!

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
• EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX
• ASUS GeForce GTX 970 Strix OC

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results are obtained on this exact system with exactly the same configuration.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
• AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.

Each game is tested at the following settings and resolutions:

• 1600x900, 4x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens and laptops today (17" - 19").
• 1920x1080, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution for larger displays (22" - 26").
• 2560x1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30").
• 5760x1080, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical three-monitor high-end gaming multi-monitor resolution.
• 3840x2160, No Anti-aliasing. 4K Ultra HD resolution, available on the latest high-end monitors.

Assassin's Creed IV

The fourth title in the Assassin's Creed franchise, Black Flag follows the life and times of the most recent assassin, Edward Kenway, an 18th century Caribbean pirate. The game is a crossover of several of Ubisoft's best works, including Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 3, and still manages to feel unique. Yes, there are ship battles at high sea, too. Based on Ubisoft's AnvilNext engine, Black Flag takes advantage of DirectX 11 with Tessellation to conjure up richly detailed worlds. The game engine is limited to a maximum of 60 FPS, which affects our results for very high-end cards at lower resolutions.