So after a week with limited flying time ( I have a 3 year old at home) here are a few observations about the 970 gtx:

 

1. You can adjust higher AA in NV inspector with no apparent loss in FPS.

2. Coil whine is nonexistent in my MSI 970 gtx 4g gaming.

3. I get higher FPS in 2048 Rex clouds and ASN weather.

4. Detailed scenery and storms will still reduce FPS - sometimes in the teens.

5. The sim seems smoother even at lower FPS ranges.

6. Internal temps inside case have gone down. On average about 1-2 deg Fahrenheit.

7. Moving from the 480 to 970, I can see a reduction in jaggies, shimmering.

8. Higher settings have put me in OOM territory twice.

Conclusion:

For me it's still the same sim with some minor improvements. The GPU did not give me better FPS in all instances, but the sim appears to be crisper than it was with the 480 gtx.

The 9XX will be over Keller ,for your CPU ..keep it with the 580 ... and FSX is CPU oriented anyway  

My 780's have a Texture fill rate of 233.5 Gtexel's and a memory bandwidth of 317.2 GB/s what now 970/80s.  Massive overclocking and water cooling. Daily drivers.  Don't try this at home. 

Any of you using a 970 with 3 monitors? Looking to get a feel for an upgrade and move to a 3 monitor setup. 

Well, I just upgraded from a GTX 670 to a GTX 970.

 

The biggest difference for me is that P3D v2 is smoother with shadows turned up. Or rather, turning up the shadows slider and enabling the various options doesn't impact performance nearly as much. With the 670, higher shadow settings would introduce micro-stutters and some weird kind of input lag. I still get that at the Ultra setting, but at High with some reasonable distance settings, I can finally enjoy a smooth, lag-free sim. In other situations, such as complex OrbX airports, where I was CPU bound before, there's no difference at all.

 

In FSX, there's no difference at all. This is expected, because when I upgraded from a GTX 460 to a GTX 670, there was no difference either. FSX is a museum piece, and doesn't take advantage of new technology invented after 2006.

 

With X-Plane, there's a small difference, but only a couple of FPS. Sometimes, it's enough to prevent the sim from going into "slow motion" mode (physics running at less than realtime). So if you're right at the edge (under 19 FPS), then adding a faster GPU might just push you over that magic boundary. Of course you could just turn down a setting slightly and achieve the same thing.

I've been using a MSI Nvidia GTX970 with P3D and love it. It comes with a great MSI Overclock program that I use everytime I fly P3D. Can max out most all scenery settings, using Active Sky, as long as I'm not around LA, NYC, etc. Seems to me that in P3D AI traffic puts a real hurting on frame rates, so I keep that turned way down.

 

                                                                                             Paul