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The GeForce GTX 970 is that rarest of things in the graphics card market - a genuine game-changer. In fact, it's actually more like a cooked hand grenade strategically lobbed into the high-end GPU market, designed to cause maximum damage to the competition - but in the process impacting just as many Nvidia cards too. It costs £260, which is a lot of money, but its performance per pound ratio is so strong that some might say there's little point considering any other high-end GPU currnetly available - and that includes Nvidia's own flagship GTX 980.The headlines are this: AMD's R9 290 and top-line R9 290X - £300 and £400 GPUs respectively - are effectively obsolete: hot, power-hungry, inefficient products that are effortlessly bested by Nvidia's £260 upstart. Nvidia is caught in the blast radius itself too - the GTX 780 is history, while the 780 Ti - a card that sold for over £500 just a few months - is also bordering on the irrelevant. Overclocked, the GTX 970 also beats the stock performance of the £430 GTX 980 in most applications too - a phenomenal showing bearing in mind that the latter is 65 per cent more expensive.
The fallout doesn't end there though, as there are the ramifications for the dual-GPU market too. AMD's beautifully insane, water-cooled 11.5 teraflop Radeon R9 295X2 - the product that humbled Nvidia's $3000 Titan-Z folly - was pretty much the only contender for high quality, high frame-rate 4K gaming until the arrival of Maxwell. With the way things stand now, two 970s in SLI will be cheaper, cooler, quieter and far more power-efficient. It's something we'll look into testing, but based on the results on this page, an SLI 970 set-up should almost certainly prove more capable too in most titles.
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