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  • (17 October 2024, 13:29)
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Last week we took a look at NVIDIA’s newest consumer flagship video card, the GeForce GTX 980. Based on the company’s new GM204 GPU, GTX 980 further cemented NVIDIA’s ownership of the performance crown with a combination of performance improvements, new features, and power consumption reductions. Combined with a lower price than the now-dethroned GTX 780 Ti, GTX 980 is an impressive flagship with a mix of attributes that NVIDIA hopes to entice existing 600 and 500 series owners to upgrade to.

Of course even though GTX 980 was cheaper than the outgoing GTX 780 Ti, it is still a flagship card and at $549 is priced accordingly. But as in every GeForce product lineup there is a GeForce x70 right behind it, and for GTX 980 its lower-tier, lower priced counterpart is the GeForce GTX 970. Based on the same GM204 but configured with fewer active SMMs, a slightly lower clock speed, and a lower TDP, GTX 970 fills the gap by providing a lower performance but much lower priced alternative to the flagship GTX 980. In fact at $329 it’s some 40% cheaper than GTX 980, one of the largest discounts for a second-tier GeForce card in recent memory.

For this reason GTX 970 is an interesting card on its own, if not more interesting overall than its bigger sibling. The performance decrease from the reduced clock speeds and fewer SMMs is going to be tangible, but then so is a $220 savings to the pocketbook. With GTX 980 already topping our charts, if GTX 970 can stay relatively close then it would be a very tantalizing value proposition for enthusiast gamers who want to buy in to GM204 at a lower price.

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