My current system is an i5 4690 @3.5 stock, 8GB of RAM and an old GTX 550ti, FS9.1 and windows 7x64.

 

I would like to upgrade the card to a GTX 970.

 

At the moment I am getting very high FPS until I hit heavy cloud and then they drop to between 19 and 24fps.

 

Will the GTX970 be worth it ?

Will anything be bottlenekking my system ?

 

Please don't recommend the 980 as that is out of my budget!!!!

 

Thanks

Trevor

 

 

Will the GTX970 be worth it ?

 

Yes ... particularly if you play more modern games using DX11.

 

 

 

 

Will anything be bottlenekking my system ?

 

Yes ... your cpu.

 

 

 

 

until I hit heavy cloud

 

The 970 will not help much in this circumstance unless you run 3 monitors, remember FS9 is 12 years old.  Best you use lower/lowest quality or default cloud textures.

_{I had a GTX 980 and I returned it. I thought it was a waste of money and now I am back on GTX 580 ( both cards referenced designed). My GTX 580 is actually a 3gb memory and it runs cooler than the GTX 980. I thought the GTX980 was supposed to run cooler because according to the specification supposed to draw less power. GTX 970 not worth it.}

 

GTX 970 have a memory allocation bug:

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/does-the-geforce-gtx-970-have-a-memory-allocation-bug.html

Asus 4g GTX 970 STIX. It runs cool as a cucumber and quiet. I have it on my gamer rig and am very impressed.

Won't do much for FSX.

 

I went from a 570 to 970... Fps are the same.

 

Seems to smooth out P3D a little

 

Helps A TON in XP10

 

And of course other games it's great for!

 

That memory bug thing is no factor... Unless you run 4k monitor and play shooter games...

Thanks everyone.

So the card is obviously not worth the money/investment for fs9.

 

Trevor

Absolutely not for FS9, but you still have a very capable base system to run P3Dv2 if you add the 970.  I don't know why you'd stick to FS9.

Which is best for FSX/P3D: a GTX 970/980 or the old GTX 780?

As other have said, FSX doesn't get much of a boost from the new cards because of it being so limited by the CPU. One can get around that by using DX10 with Steve's DX10Fixer, but for the most part the action with new video cards is geared towards XP10 and P3d. For P3d (in order of increasing price):

 

GTX 970 (probably the baseline if you want to spend that kind of money and hope to see improvement) < GTX 780 < (GTX 780TI or GTX 980) < rumored GTX 980 Ti < Titan X

 

Even with P3d, an OCed high end CPU is going to bottleneck the higher end nVidia cards, unless one is running 4K resolutions.

I have a ATI R9 270X performing quite well in P£D and FSX with I7 4790k with 1 monitor 1650X1050

 

it costs only 160€... yes Titan X would be better but not ten times better.... ;-) Also don't think GTX 970 would perform twice better...

 

Don't know why you could need a GTX 970 for FS9... i would however upgrade also the sim... FSX SE or P3D V2 i think are much better.