GTX 970 to GTX 1070 - Will This Improve Performance?

Thinking of upgrading my GTX 970 to a GTX 1070 and I am wondering if it will improve performance in DCS. I will be running it at 1080 with AA on. My understanding is that the NTTR map runs notably slower than the default map. I plan on getting some of the new DLC terrian eventually, so if anyone has done a similar upgrade path and has NTTR and can comment on performance increases (if any) I would appreciate it.

CPU is a 4670K @ 4GHZ with 8GB of RAM, installed on an SSD running Win 10.

970 is still a pretty good graphic card! DCS is very memory hungry so if you can do only 1 upgrade, if I was you, I would add another 8gb of RAM instead!!! If you have money for both (RAM and 1070), then why not... 1070 is performing like a 980ti, so you should see a few fps more!!! ;-)

The 1070 also draws less power, IIRC, and has more VRAM than the 970.

Upgrading from one generation is ridiculous. You should "upgrade" your overclock. :smilewink:

I have a 980 and couldn't play in NTTR with 8gb, a lot of stutters, had to lower the graphics to medium and preload radius to 30000 and still had a lot of framedrops.

Now I have 16gb and can play it normally.

Upgrading from one generation is ridiculous.

Generally yes, but 1070 is a completely new technology, new architecture... The improvement from 970 to 1070 is quite significant!!! in the order of 50-70% more fps, depending of the game! Look at the benchmark, quite impressive the performance difference in only 1 generation... So thats not that "ridiculous"! ;-)

The improvement from 970 to 1070 is quite significant!!!

But will it show in DCS in 1080p? I would wait for 2.5 being released and then compare performance between the two.

Hi there. Your 970 is fine. I use an older Radeon R9 290 which gives similar performance and can get 100fps+. The biggest improvement came when I upgraded my CPU to a core i5 6600K and overclocked it to 4.2GHz. My suggestion is to first try staying with your current CPU, buy a decent air cooler and see if you can get an overclock to about 4Ghz. I'd also recommend a total of 16GB RAM because as Mammatus said, DCS is quite a resource hog. If that doesn't give you an improvement then look at a CPU upgrade.

Hope it helps.

Hi Flogger23M, I would get an extra 8GB of RAM to bring it up to 16GB. Playing at only 1080p resolution I think you will be fine with your 970 for now. If this is only for DCS then I would hold off upgrading GPU till after the 2.5 merge comes out later this year.

I have seen some gains moving from a 970 to a 1070 in DCS and have been able to turn up eye candy but it is with other games that I have seen the huge 30-60% FPS increases. What I have gained in DCS I guess is higher mins slightly.

Keep the 970 but go 16GB RAM and overclock your CPU ;)

Im still holding my wallet to purchase the GTX 1070 G1, recently I picked one Vengeance Pro 16GB kit and things run lot better on DCS World and with other sims. I also have the GTX 970 G1 edition only with the facotry OC + i7 4970 and one 250gb SSD just for my sims and most of the time I have 60fps on 1.5 and NTTR 60/50 above Vegas, for me is more than enough. As some of the other guys said, you should try 16gb, really makes the difference, for sure.:thumbup:

If i remember correctly Haswell is not very good overclock-er (big heat problem) and what ever DCS guys like to say but this mammoth of the game still use one core for most of the game (second core for sound :lol: ). So what you need to do is to try to get little bit more of that CPU 4.2 maybe 4.4 and for sure 8gigs of ram. New graphic, i do not see much good coming of that upgrade in DCS. Also 1070 G1 is not even close as good as it was 970 G1.

I don't think here is much point upgrading to the 1070 from a 970 for a single 1080p or 1440p screen.

But for 4k, or multiple screens, absolutely do it :)

I don't think here is much point upgrading to the 1070 from a 970 for a single 1080p or 1440p screen.

 

But for 4k, or multiple screens, absolutely do it :)

If your going balls out with 4k screen...your gonna need a wee bit more juice then one 1070 :D for anything beyond 30fps.

And if it helps the OP, with my spec in my sig I "borrowed" a 1070 founders edition, swapped my 970 and got to play with it for a couple days. For DCS....literally ZERO difference. I didn't have time to do like a super in depth benchmark but a few DX12 game where able to grab an extra 5fps..ish..I think...maybe :huh: DOOM on Vulcan ran better as well. The biggest difference in DCS was when I OC'd my cpu from 3.5Ghz/3,9Ghz boost? to 4.4Ghz, the I5 4690k has continually surprised me, I thought going from an I7-2600 (no K) was a down grade...it blows that (and a few other) I7's away at almost everything...especially with single core performance. I7 has a leg up with hyperthreading tho. The only down side is...its called devils canyon for a reason, WATCH YOUR TEMPS CAREFULLY! I cannot stress that enough. I am still running stock clock speeds complete with worse then useless intel stock fan because I am saving for a certain AIO water cooler. I did grab 16g of RAM a while back, it was dirt cheep at the time, but I seriously never noticed much difference with DCS, session rarely went beyond 5-6Gigs. Now for the naughty hundred Firefox/google chrome tabs I have open at anyone time it was well worth it and its a bit of "future proofing" (I swear there is no such thing, its all a scam :lol:). Just my 2 cents...and bad writing & grammar post. Hope it helps

From all I read on the forum I do not believe that this will provide significant improvement. Personally I upgraded from a NVIDIA GTX 560 to a NVIDIA 970 in December and I did not see a quantum jump in game performance. My hardware platform is an 8-core i7-4790 CPU @ 3.6 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. My main monitor is an ACER XB270HU with 2560 x 1440 pixels set to 144 Hz refresh rate and using NVIDIA's G-Sync for vertical sync.

I use a second smaller monitor to display auxiliary information like input bindings (in Excel), maps or flight manual pages

Most of the time I see frame rates between 70 and 100 and the display is fluid.

The test seems to be flying just above the tree tops at Las Vegas in NTTR, at near 400 km/h and that is still fluid with frame rate about 70.

The refresh rate setting on the main monitor makes a difference and I got best results at 144 Hz.

I just upgraded from a 390x to the 1070 and I'm not regretting anything. The performance in DCS and SQUAD which are the two games I play the most have increased so much from going with the green team. As the others are saying though, I dont think I would recommend going from a 970 to a 1070. And yes I play in 1080p

16 gigs of ram and don't overlook switching from hdd to an ssd also. It might not improve fps but it will definitely make you're gaming experience much smoother, especially online. I was shocked at the performance after these two upgrades. Also on a 780 gtx I am getting 100 fps.

From all I read on the forum I do not believe that this will provide significant improvement. Personally I upgraded from a NVIDIA GTX 560 to a NVIDIA 970 in December and I did not see a quantum jump in game performance. My hardware platform is an 8-core i7-4790 CPU @ 3.6 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. My main monitor is an ACER XB270HU with 2560 x 1440 pixels set to 144 Hz refresh rate and using NVIDIA's G-Sync for vertical sync.

I use a second smaller monitor to display auxiliary information like input bindings (in Excel), maps or flight manual pages

Most of the time I see frame rates between 70 and 100 and the display is fluid.

The test seems to be flying just above the tree tops at Las Vegas in NTTR, at near 400 km/h and that is still fluid with frame rate about 70.

The refresh rate setting on the main monitor makes a difference and I got best results at 144 Hz.

This may not apply to any other machine but yours with your settings.

At 3.6GHz you will not render enough frames to see the noticeable difference, you could mount a Nvidia 1280GTX-SLI and wouldnt see a significant difference unless you spool that CPU to higher clocks so you have got additional raw frames to do something with.

Also, when mentioning FPS you always have to tell your ingame LOD settings. There can be a huge difference in fps by just flicking 1 switch in DCS.

I doubt your setup delivers 70fps over Vegas in LLF with Visibility set to extreme and most others to highest possible.

Unless you upgrade your CPU as well I wouldnt go for a 1070 as it wont match your singe core CPU power.

..weakest link of the chain....:smartass:

* it's not an 8-core either. It got 4-Cores which are capable of Hyperthreading.

i just upgrade my asus strix gtx 970 to strix 1070 and the boost that i saw in games is great at least 30 fps gain in almost all games and DCS now running at 60 fps almost all times everything high at resolution 2560x1080p

if you can i say yes go for it

don't use / switch off / mirrors?

don't use / switch off / mirrors?

no mirrors selected as i dont use them...

i just upgrade my asus strix gtx 970 to strix 1070 and the boost that i saw in games is great at least 30 fps gain in almost all games and DCS now running at 60 fps almost all times everything high at resolution 2560x1080p

if you can i say yes go for it

Same for me. I have seen significant improvement of 20-40 fps in many games. While DCS my min frame rate has improved. The 970 could do 2560 x 1440 res ok but moving to a 1070 I get 60FPS in pretty much everything as per my old monitor 60hz refresh rate.

Only my old i7-950 which has been overclocked from 3.07 to 4.25 Ghz is holding back my GTX1070 from further frames.

Only my old i7-950 which has been overclocked from 3.07 to 4.25 Ghz is holding back my GTX1070 from further frames.

Which CPU isn't @1440p? Maybe with 2.5 the CPU bottleneck will not be that pronounced anymore.