The GeForce 9-series has been released

For 1440p I would definitely go for a GTX 970 or higher. If you're in a hurry, yes, GTX 980 is the only way right now until nVidia has issued an official statement on that possible VRAM allocation bug of the GTX 970. If you can wait for nVidia's findings and possibly BIOS updates from the cards manufacturers, then the GTX 970 has a much better price/performance ratio than the GTX 980 and I would rather get a 970 and maybe upgrade again later in the year (sell the old card on eBay) depending on whatever comes out.

But it doesn't look too promising for this year. nVidia (GM200) and AMD (Fiji) will release new high end chips that will probably settle in above (price/performance) the current GTX 980.
But other than that we're going to have to wait for the transition to 14nm for AMD (Global Foundries) and 16nm for nVidia (TSMC). The rumor mill says late 2015 or early 2016 for AMD's 14nm chips and just "2016" for TSMC/nV.
This year will most likely be completely uneventful in the sub €500 region and only be somewhat interesting for those with phat titanic (pun intended) wallets .

Update: nVidia has issued some detailed info on the VRAM allocation of the GTX 970 (which should no longer be considered a bug but a feature).

A feature that doesn't make customers happy = less sales.

I got a GTX 980, it works well so far. It is extremely quiet which I really like. I can't hear it at all. In comparison my old AMD card was almost like a hair dryer.

danutz_plusplus said:

Anyone seen this report?

http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/nvidias-gtx970-has-a-rather-serious-memory-allocation-bug/

I think this will make my decision between either a 980 or a 970 way easier.

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I read some comments this morning from it-related site about that article and some say the bandwith drop is related to the benchmark program which doesnt have proper drivers to access the last part of the memory.

The last part of memory is accessed through a different segment. If the driver has to be segment aware when accessing memory, then that would make sense. But, NVIDIA writes and provides the drivers. And people install drivers on their own, separate from the benchmarking program. So it would be either Nvidia's screw up to not provide the right drivers, or an installation problem by the benchmarkers...

Today more information was received from Nvidia and there really is an slow segment of memory. Some other things were discovered also:

Let’s be clear – the performance of the GTX 970 is what the performance is. This information is incredibly interesting and warrants some debate, but at the end of the day, my recommendations for the GTX 970 really won’t change at all. It still offers incredible performance for your dollar and is able to run at 4K in my experience and testing. Yes, there might in fact be specific instances where performance drops are more severe because of this memory hierarchy design, but I don’t think it changes the outlook for the card as a whole.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970

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