Value and Conclusion

A pair of GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards in SLI is a cracker of a combination! At $660, or roughly the price of a single, but now discontinued GeForce GTX 780 Ti, the GTX 970 SLI offers impressive multi-GPU performance upscaling with drivers that are not only new to this card, but also the architecture. In several modern AAA games that can make high-end single-GPU cards sweat at higher resolutions, the GTX 970 SLI offers upscaling in excess of 70 percent, in some scenarios even scraping 100 percent!

Take Crysis 3 at 5760 x 1080, for example. A single card offers frame-rates of around 15 FPS, while SLI nearly doubles that to a playable 30 FPS. Battlefield 4 at Ultra HD, which averages around 24 FPS on the single-card, sees its frame-rates dart past the 46 FPS mark, which is more than playable. Add adaptive V-Sync and G-Sync to the mix, and it's buttery smooth. With TN-film Ultra HD monitors approaching the $400 mark, a GTX970 SLI setup is your cheapest gateway to Ultra HD gaming.

Across the competitive landscape, the GTX 970 SLI demolishes every NVIDIA single-GPU graphics card we have with us, be it the GTX 780 Ti or the GTX TITAN. The dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, which held onto its lead over an impressive streak, is as much as 29 percent behind in performance. AMD's current flagship, the Radeon R9 295X2, however, is 6 percent faster. It's about $330 costlier, and even if we were to assume that the GTX 970 SLI configuration has double the power draw of a single-card, the duo would still end up with less power draw than AMD's offering. If you're feeling adventurous, you could spend the $330 saved on a third GTX 970. With most $150-ish Intel Z87 and Z97 chipset motherboards shipping with a third PCI-Express gen 3.0 slot that works at x4 when three slots are populated (bandwidth comparable to PCI-Express 1.1 x16), a third GTX 970 could be an audacious alternative to spending $999 on a single R9 295X2. The GTX TITAN-Z isn't budging from its $2,999 price-point, and so it's no less than one parsec away from our thoughts.

As with every multi-GPU setup ever made, the GTX 970 SLI has its shortcomings because of driver support. Games need to be optimized to take advantage of multi-GPU environments. A poorly optimized game, or one that's too new to be optimized, will sometimes not benefit from the second GPU at all, and you're left with the performance of a single card until NVIDIA rushes out driver updates with those optimizations, which come out fast enough after big AAA game launches. An example of such is Wolfenstein: The New Order, which can't get itself to work with SLI. Some AAA games get optimizations even ahead of their launch. Not being able to properly play a game you pre-ordered for months, pre-loaded ahead of launch, and were keen on playing full throttle the instant it officially released would definitely suck.

The other more obvious requirement is the second PCI-Express slot, and power cabling, which shouldn't be a problem for mid-range ATX or even high-end micro-ATX motherboards. Bear in mind that not every motherboard with two or more long slots supports NVIDIA SLI, as motherboard manufacturers still have to license SLI support for specific models from NVIDIA.

Overall, the GeForce GTX 970 SLI, coupled with $500-ish 28-inch Ultra HD monitors, heralds Ultra HD gaming for PC builds with budgets of under $2000. In February this year, market analyst NPD DisplaySearch published this report in which it predicts that the industry will have shipped its 2 millionth Ultra HD PC monitor by the end of the year. We laughed that report off at the time. Oh, how little we knew.