As we already know, the GeForce GTX 970 is a cut down Maxwell core featuring the GM204 core with 1664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs and 64 ROPs. While the core configuration had to be skimmed down to make an affordable Maxwell offering, the memory side was kept the same with the card shipping with a 4 GB VRAM that operates at 7 GHz, along a 256-bit memory interface. Now NVIDIA introduced the new compression feature known as Delta Color compression which conserves bandwidth but has little affect to minimize overall VRAM usage.

The games in which users seem to have been facing these issues include Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 with the total VRAM usage limited to 3.5 GB. Some users tried to test their cards using the memory burner test that is available on MSI’s Kombuster however several cards failed to load it past 3.0 GB. Since this was a issue being faced by many, I put my own GeForce GTX 970 through the tests in Far Cry 4, Shadow of Mordor and even the MSI Memory burner test. The results are quite surprising since the GALAX GeForce GTX 970 EXOC BLACK that I have equipped on my rig managed to load all of the 4 GB VRAM buffer in the memory burner test and ran with out any issues. Same goes for the games, Shadow of Mordor delivered around 60-65 FPS on average at maxed out settings with 3.6 GB memory usage. The game ran flawless without any stuttering or frame drops. Far Cry 4 was a similar scenario taking up around 3.8 GB of VRAM on 2560×1440 resolution with 2x TXAA and delivered a smooth frame rate.