In this episode of ‘What graphics card did my local CEX have in its shop window which I purchased and slapped in a mid-range gaming rig to test out its gaming capabilities’ I’ve got myself a GTX970. More accurately MSI’s GTX970 which I must say looks quite cool though a little out of place unless you were going for a red and black PC build, 9 years ago. Well, even now to be honest, it still looks great with its dual-fan design I think. The GTX970 launched on September 19th, 2024 and was built on the 28nm process. The MSI version has a small factory overclock with core frequencies up to 1114MHz, 1,753MHz memory and 1253MHz boosted. Around the back, you can find a DisplayPort 1.2 an HDMI 2.0 port, a dual-link DVI-D port and a dual-link DVI-I port. It can produce resolutions of up to 4,096 x 2,160 but for testing purposes and gaming you’re not going to get above 1,1920 x 1,080 so don’t try it.
It’s virtual reality ready though we didn’t test any of those games here today because well, I don’t have access to a headset or even the room to use one. It uses 145 watts of power and features SLI capability, Nvidia PhysX, it’s DirectX 12 compatibility, it features Nvidia’s PureVideo HD technology, and finally, PCI Express 3.0 architecture. It features 1664 shading units, 104 texture mapping units, and 56 ROPs. NVIDIA has “enabled” 4GB GDDR5 memory with the GeForce GTX 970, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. However, there was a bit of controversy over their alleged 4GB GDDR5 memory,. where the card sat closer to 3.5GB of GDDR5 memory, and Nvidia had to pay every person who ever bought one $30 back for their mistake. Wait… does that mean I can get some money back? Despite this though the card was extremely popular back in the day, and topped Steam charts for some time, and is kind of why it caught my eye in the shop window in the first place.
You can still get Game Ready drivers for this card through the Geforce Experience software which threw back version 566.03 just in time for a bit of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, not that I’m going to be playing that game here probably because it’s not even out yet, but still, always good to keep the drivers up to date. And for the sake of transparency, I am running this 970 with a Ryzen 5 5600X with 16GB RAM memory, and my games are all stored on a basic 2.5mm SSD if that’s to make any kind of difference, but maybe, probably not at this point. So let’s put this card to the test and run some modern games from 2024, starting with some Black Ops 6, and that’s only because no one really plays Apex anymore do they?
Black Ops 6
Black Ops 6 did give me some gyp. The game ran, don’t get me wrong and when it wanted to work, it ran well. I had to run everything at a low graphical preset except strangely Static Reflections on High which the game chose for me automatically. Must not be many mirrors in Black Ops 6 then, and the resolution at 1080p. Now it may have been the game, but I experienced a lot of crashes, especially when trying to join a multiplayer game. The gameplay I did manage to capture was from Zombies, of which I got up to round six, fought some spiders and then it began to stutter and again resulted in a crash. It could have been the game, it might have been me. Either way, it thew back an average FPS of 61 which is decent for such a new game, with a 1% Low of 40.
Counterstrike 2
Counterstrike 2 worked like a dream and I ran two separate tests, not that they were too different from each other. The first test I ran a resolution of 1920×1080 and a medium graphics preset, and got an average FPS of around 147, and the second test I bumped up the graphics preset to high, and got an average FPS of 134 though this did dip when more things were happening on the screen. It was a good experience overall, though I would definitely stick to medium preset to get that higher FPS rate as this is a highly competitive game.
F1 2024
F1 2024 unfortunately did not work with the MSI Afterburner overlay because it’s an EA game and they’ve never seemed to like me, but Steam reported me an FPS rate of around 70-80 while blasting around Silverstone at 1080p medium graphics preset. Also please ignore my horrendous driving, it was the first time launching this game on this PC and all of my assists were switched on so the car was awful to drive. Looked smooth though!
FC25
Because why not right? Also, terrible game by the way but it’s modern so I thought I’d give it a try. As you can see it ran at a lovely locked 60fps all of the way through. Shame I didn’t score, but anyway, it was running at 1080p on a medium graphics preset. And I must say it did look quite good
Fortnite
Fortnite as usual stuttered in the lobby and stuttered while flying down from the bus to the ground. Once on the ground though it gave me an average FPS in the 90s and was smooth to play. I didn’t get any kills though. Shame that. But if you’re wanting to play a bit of Fortnite, you’re not going to be breaking the bank to do it.
Forza Motorsport
Forza Motorsport initially locked the framerate at 30fps which I ran a lap at Hockenheim. And it was raining too, and for the most part it felt okay. Apologies for my bad driving I’m too used to F1 sensitivities. I did manage to unlock the frame rate in the graphics settings menu, which unfortunately did give me an error message about VRAM limitations. I ran the game at 1080p and everything set to auto which I think to be honest meant low, and I was hitting the late 40s with an average FPS of 40. So all in all not bad but the game certainly didn’t look very shiny at all, but at least it was playable.
God Of War: Ragnarok
This game I wanted to try because I’m currently running through it at the moment and am enjoying it, so wanted to see if it would run on 10 year old hardware. And it did! Just about. It came up with a warning that its VRAM wasn’t big enough and there could be performance issues, and inside of the game I literally had to tank the settings down to a 1080p Low preset to get something smooth enough to play. But when I did my average FPS hit around the mid-30s whereas at a medium preset, it was in the 20s and very noticeably glitchy.
Helldivers 2
This game got me nervous. It’s never worked on one of my graphics card videos before, so I wasn’t holding out much hope. Strangely enough, though it did, and running everything on a Low 1080p resolution preset, which by the way was lower than the recommended Steam Deck settings, it ran smoothly and I was even getting a decent 50 fps out of it, though the average on screen showed 40s as my average, the pod drop skewed that because that was proper laggy.
Overwatch 2
What can I say. Fan favourite Overwatch 2 which I ran twice because the first time as you can see on screen now I stupidly locked my FPS to 60. It still played beautifully in the first game, but it did skew my average FPS for the second game of which I was getting closer to the 120s in terms of of framerate. By game three I reset the benchmark and was capturing average framerates of around 140fps which was stellar for a game running at 1080p on a medium graphic preset.
Warhammer Space Marine 2
Space Marine 2 shocked me that it actually worked. I was really expecting an error on launch. It ran which was interesting to say the least. I ran the game at 1080p in both Low and Medium quality presets. On Low, the PC achieved an average framerate in the late 50s and it felt really smooth. Unfortunately, it didn’t look great though so there’s that trade-off. It loses all of its shine compared to a high-end gaming PC. But it’s absolutely playable if you want to make your way through the story mode. On medium though it wasn’t even worth the added texture. Not only did it give me an error message for not having enough graphics memory to run a medium preset, it became a bit slow in terms of input, and timing my blocks was getting hard. I’d run it in low too.
So is it worth it in 2024? Well, for what we saw I would say yes, it managed to pretty much play every single modern game we threw at it bar Black Ops 6, but looking at reports online, that game seems to be buggy for everyone anyway so I’m unsure if it was just me that it was affecting. The VRAM issue though is still an issue, and there are other options out there for a similar price to what we paid for to get that full 4GB advantage. But I’m unsure right now on how much of a difference it would be. Maybe a follow up video could be interesting for you? Anyway, this has been the MSI GTX970, an extremely popular card for the time, and yes if you want a cheap rig to play some games in 2024, it could potentially get you by.
