NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 970 is an amazing card. It is fast, power-efficient, and extremely affordable.
NVIDIA did not provide a GTX 970 reference board, so we did our best to simulate its performance properly for a baseline comparison. Averaged over all our tests, the reference board is 8% slower than the GTX 980 (at 1920x1080). This makes the card faster than the R9 290X and GTX Titan, but slightly slower than the GTX 780 Ti. The Palit GTX 970 comes with a large overclock out of the box, which results in a 6% performance advantage. This makes the card the fastest GTX 970 we tested so far, faster than the EVGA SC, which, despite its higher baseclock, doesn't boost as high on average. Palit should have overclocked their memory chips for some additional performance. In my opinion, the GTX 970 is the right card for 1440p gaming. It is also a good investment if future-proofing 1080p or G-Sync gaming beyond 60 Hz is your intention.

Just like with the GTX 980, power consumption has massively improved, which gives NVIDIA the ability to unlock these performance levels without having to use bulky and expensive cooling solutions. However, the Palit GTX 970 Jetstream ends up consuming more power than the NVIDIA GTX 980 reference board. Such may be due to Palit's changed PCB layout, which includes changes to the VRM circuitry, or the GM204 simply scales better with shaders than with frequency. Another factor is the way Boost works, since a higher boost (of which Palit has plenty) also increases the voltage and, incidentally, power consumption. Still, the card is incredibly efficient, more so than any other card outside of the Maxwell family.

Palit's cooler uses the triple-slot form factor, which usually results in a cool and extremely quiet card. In idle and low-load gaming, the fans turn off, delivering a noiseless experience, which is awesome! During heavy gaming, temperatures are perfectly safe, but they are higher than on competing dual-slot cards. Gaming noise is pretty quiet, but other dual-slot cards are quieter. Overall, I have to admit I expected more from Palit's triple-slot cooler, and I'm a big fan of triple-slot cooling if it provides the right benefits. During testing, I also noticed some coil noise from our card, which is more or less noticeable, depending on the game, scene, and framerate.
Palit's GTX 970 JetStream has three mini-DisplayPort outputs, so you can build a G-Sync surround setup using a single card, which is not possible with many other custom design GTX 970s because they still use the old 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DP output configuration.

NVIDIA is also introducing several new software features with their latest generation of GPUs. The first is DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), which is the equivalent to SuperSampling (running the game at a higher resolution), with a high-quality gaussian filter that improves the quality of the downscaled image sent to your monitor. This feature can be useful with older or less demanding titles as it squeezes some extra image quality out of the game, but the performance hit is just too big for some of the more recent AAA titles; remember, the game is actually running at 4K. The next innovation is MFAA, which is an evolution of NVIDIA's TXAA anti-aliasing algorithm that promises near 4x MSAA quality at only a 2xAA performance hit. Together with G-Sync, these show that NVIDIA not only delivers good hardware as its software department also has a better track-record in backing up its products with stable software, and useable new features. NVIDIA also says the GTX 980 and GTX 970 to be DirectX 12 cards even though the DirectX 12 specification hasn't been finalized yet. Time will have to show whether NVIDIA's support will cover all DirectX 12 features or only a subset.

The real kicker with the GTX 970 is definitely its pricing. Reference boards can be found at an incredible $329, with Palit's overclocked GTX 970 JetStream being the most affordable, retailing around $345, a very reasonable price increase. This makes the card cheaper than AMD's R9 290X and R9 290, and both are slower, draw more power, and produce more noise. Personally, I would have expected the GTX 970 to retail for well above $400, matching GTX 780's current pricing. But it looks as though NVIDIA meant to torpedo AMD's whole product stack, and I say they did so successfully.