GeForce GTX 970
Along with the flagship gaming video adapter based on the Maxwell architecture, a junior model with the same graphics processor, the GM204, was also released, with lower frequencies and partially blocked computing units.
The GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 differ primarily in the number of active computing units in the GM204 chip. In the crystals allocated to the GTX 970 model, 3 out of 16 MMX are disabled. Consequently, out of 2048 CUDA cores and 128 texture units, only 1664 and 104, respectively, remain in operation. Differences in the front-end configuration GPU are quite significant. In addition, the GTX 970 has reduced clock speeds: from 1126/1216 to 1050/1178 (base frequency and Boost Clock, respectively).
But the back-end of the processor was not affected. 64 ROPs and four 64-bit memory controllers are still active. The effective RAM frequency according to reference specifications is 7 GHz, the volume is 4 GB.
The launch of the GeForce GTX 970 is not accompanied by the release of a reference device - NVIDIA farmed out the design directly to video card manufacturers.
Characteristics of GeForce GTX 970
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Chip
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Frequencies
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Memory
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Interface and TDP
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GeForce GTX 970 essentially has only 3,5 GB of main video memory. The reason lies in the different ways of implementing SMM (Maxwell Streaming Multiprocessors). GeForce GTX 980 or GPU GM204 uses four GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters) x 4 SMMs x 4 SMMs x 32 ALUs, which gives 2.048 stream processors. With the GeForce GTX 970 we get 13 SMMs x SMMs x 32 ALUs = 1.664 stream processors. The missing SMMs lead to corresponding "gaps" in the memory subsystem. GPU.
As a result, only 3,5 GB of 4 GB memory is addressed at full speed. In particular, NVIDIA uses two memory sections: 512 MB and 3.584 MB. If a game requires 3,5 GB of memory or less, then it can only use the first partition. If more than 3,5 GB is required, then the GeForce GTX 970 uses both partitions, but not at full speed, so we get a difference in memory performance between the GTX 970 and GTX 980, which is not related to the difference in the number of texture units and stream processors.
