Should I return my GTX 970?

When I was buying it I was looking at charts such as this and GTX 970 looked very good for the price. Now I'm reading all this stuff about how its gonna have a short life and soon it wont be able to run games as good as R9 290X I'm thinking should I give it back and get a R9 290X?

Do you ever plan to game on resolution beyond 1080p? with that same GTX970?

I have 2 970s in SLI (still contemplating sending them back) and game at 1440p and I can tell you that almost every game runs fine at max settings.

The only games I've encountered issues was Shadow of Mordor and Skyrim with tons of mods.

Shadow of Mordor only stutters a little (with Ultra textures) after hours of play and usually when moving from one side of a map to another then turning the camera. The stuttering is brief so it didn't bother me.

Skyrim will stutter like mad if you load it up with 4k texture mods but you can push Skyrim to stutter even on the 4GB 290x with those same mods.

I can't foretell the future with 100% accuracy but for the next year or two I can almost guarantee you will be fine with the 970 in the vRAM department.

Samsung has barely started mass producing 8GB GDDR5 memory and the only card to have it is the 290x which very little people have purchased.

AMD's newest video cards to be released this year will be limited to 4GB because of tech limitations.

Having more than 4GB of vRAM won't be a normal thing to see until mid next year.

1080p and 1440p gaming should be fine on the 970 even with games that use a lot of vRAM as long as you tone down the use of MSAA.

If you have a multi monitor setup or 4k monitor then a 970 and even a 290x will hit their vRAM limits much quicker.

The games doesn't suddenly run worse than they did before, however it was a misinformation from nVidia regarding the specs for that card yes.

If you are happy with the performance, then keep it I say.

@CrazyBahal:

I bought the 970. its a great card for 1080p and below. I retuned mine shortly after finding out about the ram fiasco and bough a 290x (sapphire 8gb edition...got it at a discount too because of the 970 uproar..cost about the same as what i paid for the 970). Ive had the 290 for a month now. Its an amazing card and i havent looked back at all. Im actually waiting for a second one i just ordered to crossfire in a new sustem im currently building.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

I have a GTX 970 have seen no issue with using all 4gb when using ultra settings with high resolutions. Many are just overestimating the performance of the 970 and are using over excessive settings and are seeing the performance issues. People with SLI 970's can see the issues more prominently since the segmented memory pool hinders commutation speed. however some of those people still have to look at game vram usage as well being part of the problem.

There are games out now that can use more then 4gb and you will still see the same issues with any other card with 4gb. The new Dragon Age game and even shadows of mordor using ultra settings can use more then 5gb of vram and when that happens 900 and 200 series perform in the same way.

With DX12 around the corner its not a smart idea to get any current AMD gpu. And with AMD abandoning mantle all their 200 and older series will not see the gains that DX12 cards like the 900 or 300 series will see. You can see 970 or 980 perform massively better then the 290 series with DX12 games.

by the time you find many games that hit beyond the 3.5gb mark, you'll be upgrading your gpu again anyways so i wouldnt stress out about returning it.

it took a while for anyone to find this problem, even benchmarks i read up on the card before i bought it mentioned nothing about this because so few games used 4gb of memory.

If you game @ 1080P than keep the card. If you game @ 1440P and above than return it.

Thank you for the replies guys, Yeah I think I will keep the GTX 970. Thank you again