New Graphics Card! New Experiences with the GTX970!
So about 2 weeks ago my AMD HD7870 packed up on me meaning I didn’t have the ability to play graphic demanding games on my PC rig. Fortunately I had some unexpected money come my way so I thought it was worth treating myself to a graphics card upgrade. I decided I would go for the EVGA GTX970 card and I can honestly say I’m so glad that I did.
As we’re entering a dawn of 60FPS 4K gaming this card has more than enough hardware to handle more or less every game you throw at it on MAX settings – as long you have it at 1080p. For me this is fine as I can’t justify a 4K monitor until the prices come down. So I installed my graphics card into my PC, fortunately I already had all the required connectors from my previous GFX card so it was literally just a straight swap. With the graphics card fully-installed I thought I would test it out. First things first was to try some games I knew my last card struggled to handle at 60FPS such as the Witcher 2 at max settings and Crysis 2. The card made light work of these games and didn’t even break a sweat, I felt like a school-kid uncontrollably impressed.
Below is a screenshot from the Witcher 2, for me personally I think this game looks better than the Witcher 3 on the PS4. This is with all the eye-candy set to maximum and the game was still easily able to run at 60 FPS!
Geforce Experience Extras: One of the best features with the standard GFX card settings for me was the Geforce Experience app. This particular app would scan your game library and if it detected any games it could optimize then it would give you the opportunity to do so at the click of the button. One of the most intriguing options that I saw was DSR, this was something I was familiar with using upscaling options on Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii Emulator) in which you could increase the internal resolution before being down-sampling back to your monitors resolution. The result is a super crisp looking image and also you’re fitting the area which you would see on a 4K game onto your 1080P. The game is essentially running at that higher resolution so naturally you got to make sure you can run the game at that resolution. I’ve made to get Bully Scholarship Edition & Skyrim working at 4K resolutions at 60 frames per second!
Borderlands 2 through DSR: The Geforce experience app let you also improve Borderlands 2 to an increased resolution of 2715×1500 whilst still giving you 60FPS. Check out the video below this is me testing the Geforce Shadowplay option at the same time:
