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Apparently whatever mantle issue was encountered with BF4 was short-lived and you just happened to hit the window when there was one? You're the only site reporting BF4 issues with it that I saw in the comparisons. Then again, you're also the only site that I'd believe actually retests things with new card reviews and doesn't just haul out 4-6 month old test results and call it good.
That being said...
At what point was the 285 *ever* hands down faster than a 280? From this very site's review in the 285 vs 280 head-to-head, they were largely dead even, with the 285 being better in Crysis 3, the 280 being better in TR@1600p and the 280, overall, having better minimum frame rates.
The 285 was pushed because the 280 was no longer being produced and the 285 was a decent replacement and people were worried that a smaller bus and chopping out 1/3 of the ram would cripple the mid-range card. It was never about the 285 being faster, it just needed to be as fast as the 280 (which it largely was).
Have driver updates affected the 285 so dramatically as to make it definitively better across the board now? Just curious. My 7870xt is still doing just fine @ 1080p, so it's more of an academic question here.
edit: I ask because the 280/285 prices are so much lower now, reliably so, than is reported here. 280s can be found for as little as $170 after MiR and 285s for $180 after MiR. Sales push those even lower (newegg has the example 280 on sale right now, pushing it down to $150 after MiR).
The amount of bitching and QQing across the interwebz about this card and nvidia hate going on is almost classical.
Its not designed or priced to be a high end GPU people, thats the 980. You get what you pay for.
Or just go to AMD and please stuff it already....
, neither of which are what cards in this price range and tier are sought for."Even" BF4? You sound surprised, as if BF4 was not one of the most expertly optimized games ever developed. Its "requirements to visuals ratio" is second to none. And somehow it doesn't even require 3 or more gigabytes of VRAM, like unoptimized ubi ports.
At reference clocks its basically no better than the 285.
Completely wrong. The Maxwell architecture was built for mobile devices like the newly announced Tegra X1, then scaled up, not the reverse. This is evident in the power saving and efficiency of the architecture.
If it's based on the much-desired GM204 (cut down from 980/970), then probably not for a while. 970s are still selling way too well. No reason for them to give up on the easy profits so soon.
If it's a cut down 970 it would probably depend on how good their yields are. They'd need enough chips that are just slightly defective to open a new SKU between the 960 and 970 level, without cannibalizing 970 sales.
Well something is really wrong with the "efficiency" here when you consider a 980 is 85% faster than the 960 while using only 40% more power. The 2048 cores on the 980 beats the 2880 on the 780 ti yet it takes 1024 on the 960 to beat the 1152 on the 760 by around the same percentage. This Maxwell card has some very poor efficiency scaling compared to the 970 and 980.
You can't compare efficiency based on the # of cores the two cards have. There are other differences that account for the performance gap, namely memory bandwidth.
You missed the entire point. The fact that the 980 is 85% faster while only using 40% more power shows the 960 has much worse efficiency.