I got my Radeon HD 7970 back in Jan 2012, and I can still run almost all games on my 1440p IPS monitor pretty well. I remember reading about the card back dec 2011, how much better power usage, speed and heat dissipation was improved because of the new 28nm process size.
3½ years later I'm really getting the upgrade itch. 3½ years later there must be much faster, cooler running cards with much less power consumption.
But now I can see all new chips are still on 28 nm process and even "the yet to be released" AMD top of the like is still likely to be 28 nm.
How much progress can be made to heat and power consumption by just optimizing "old tech"? Seems like waiting another generation for a smaller process tech to be used, for real gains in heat and power consumption, for a small system would be smart? 4 years on the same fab size seems like forever.
3½ years later I'm really getting the upgrade itch. 3½ years later there must be much faster, cooler running cards with much less power consumption.
But now I can see all new chips are still on 28 nm process and even "the yet to be released" AMD top of the like is still likely to be 28 nm.
How much progress can be made to heat and power consumption by just optimizing "old tech"? Seems like waiting another generation for a smaller process tech to be used, for real gains in heat and power consumption, for a small system would be smart? 4 years on the same fab size seems like forever.