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Never heard that before, source please?
GCN was an amazing design. I used my 7870 for years. It's saddening that AMD didn't create a new arch, but its done pretty well all things considered. It's been said before but hopefully the real effort is being put into nextgen so they pull a zen moment in the graphics space.
GCN hasn't been ideal for more than a couple years. It's obvious today that rather than put their eggs into the hbm basket AMD should have been working on nextgen. They've been throwing cores at an architecture that appears to have hit it's most effecient #of cores long ago.
So true. I care not much about the power bill because it probably won't budge much. But a card that's hitting 85c at stock is not going to have a ton of headroom. And is a space heater sitting on/under a desk.
Isn’t it pretty standard not to buy a GFX every generation but instead skip every other?
This is a rumor/guess but many people suspected GK104 was intended to be something like GTX 660/670 given "4" ending and its small size. Nvidia used to produce huge chips just to have performance crown and did make GK100 which then got used only in high end professional cards and by all means they would use it as GTX 680 if they had to. This was at the time we were really getting some serious performance gains each generation mind you.
290X was pretty nice card. At this point it was good decision to go with GCN
One reason I can find for still bothering with GCN are next-get consoles for which GCN would be preferred because of backwards compatibility. It could be done with different GPU, especially with some clever trickery but using GCN again will make everything pretty simple and more compatible. Not that PC market needs Navi to be rolled out because of consoles but it would be pretty strange if AMD had next architecture and consoles used older (like it was with Playstation3 not using G8x derivate...) and AMD most probably is still developing its next-gen architecture. Also console GPUs probably took a lot of engineers effort to develop and with consoles being high volume market it is understandable AMD would care to do it right.
Not quite. For example Fury X was pretty competitive to GTX 980Ti which was high-end part
HD40x0 were pretty good and especially HD50x0 was totally awesome cards. HD60x0 seemed like step backwards with questionable design choices like moving from VLIW5 to VLIW4 and some picture quality degradation hacks (AF looked worse) but still decent cards compared to Fermi+
If this GPU was designed for consoles it makes a lot of sense that it should be just that...
I care about noise... Hot cards run loud.
Wrong. They go for $999 each now, two of those is $2k, not four rofl.
I only see one on NE for $999. They are still normal price of between $1200 and $1400.
Between Amazon and Newegg there have been many $999 models available, some sales even hit as low as 900 such as the Newegg via ebay sale over the holidays. These cards perform within a couple of percent oc to oc or stock to stock... The kingpin card is for ln2 benchmarking pro enthusiasts, not gaming.
