angrymoose

A lot of guys have been asking "Should I wait for Pascal or Arctic Islands, or buy a current generation Flagship (390X, 980, Fury X, 980 Ti)?"

 

It's a tough question to answer. It comes down to a lot of factors. Most importantly, what resolution are you running and what framerates are you looking to attain? Are you planning to CF or SLI, or do you want to run a single card for maximum reliability? Pascal and Arctic Islands are going to be the first process node shrink in about 4.5 years when it's finally released, and GPU's will feature new architecture and HBM2 memory. Needless to say, 2016 should be an exciting year in graphics cards.

 

I made a spreadsheet to show how former GPU flagships from nvidia and AMD have grown by generation. While we can't assume that Pascal and Arctic Islands will make the same jump as former process node shrinks, I think we can pretty safely predict that the jumps will be larger than non-process node shrink generations.

 

The graphs show pretty clearly how important a process node shrink is, and it's most well defined by looking at the AMD graph. nvidia's graph is pretty clear as well, but they've released more intermediary "Flagship" cards (280 > 285, 780 > 780 Ti, 980 > 980 Ti), which makes it slightly less pronounced (but it's still there). nvidia also has one outlier (the GTX 280), which jumped ahead by quite a bit without a node shrink, but I don't see it as much of a factor.

 

Here's the spreadsheet (if you're a redditor, you may have seen this already):

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1awOqzOXrnhwgcUP7ORB4vzbtdjXwQ-2t6xiwRiYkENo/edit#gid=0

 

Why did you take 4 hours out of your morning to build this spreadsheet?
I made it to explain with history the reason for the hype surrounding the forthcoming nvidia (Pascal) and AMD (Greenland) GPU's, and because an earthquake woke up my fiancee who later woke me up at 3am to tell me it was confirmed to be an earthquake, and I've been up drinking coffee since.

"But we won't see a full fledged massive die flagship until the end of the process node's cycle"
WHO CARES! The biggest improvement will be to the first available flagship chip on the node, as it always has been.

"If you look at it this way, there's always going to be a better upgrade around the corner"
This is admittedly true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. A node shrink is historically the biggest jump in performance, and within this spreadsheet is the statistics that prove it.

"AMD is trash" "nVidia fanboys are sheep"
Don't be a dummy. Buy whatever is the best bang for the buck for you. Are you waiting for Pascal? Your best bet would be to wait for both to arrive so you can make your best purchase. If one turns out to be faster than the other, you will likely see the slower one drop in price, followed by the faster one to stay competitive. Have a look at what's happening between the Fury X and 980 Ti right now.

"Why didn't you include Titan cards?"
Because they're $999 new. I limited this to single GPU 'Flagship' cards. I'm pretty sure every card on here except the Fury X is available from partners with aftermarket coolers and custom PCB's.

"But my card can overclock way higher"
I built this spreadsheet with reference cards running reference clocks so that you can compare Apples to Apples within the ATi/AMD or nVidia ecosystem. Chasing down which cards were better overclockers simply takes way too much time and really has no bearing on what the future cards will be.

Why didn't you include any benchmarks/charts/comparisons/real info?!
You have to click on the different sheets along the bottom. The first page is just a spec comparison.

 

If you're Linus, Luke or any of the LTT nerds (staff): Joe the janitor says hello.

I have an AMD GPU (right now) because when I bought my 7970 in 2012, it was UNBELIEVABLY good. Surprisingly, today, four years later, it's still a really good GPU at 1080p, so I haven't replaced it yet.

The 980 is superior.

Get the 980. Runs cooler, quieter, more efficiently, much much more OCing, more stable, day 1 drivers. Last but not least, it's faster.

As one who has owned 2x 290's and now owns a 980; get the 980.
 
Strix 980 OC running +204 (1508 boost) on the core and +301 (7604) on the memory @ stock voltage, daily, 100% stable and still doesn't kick off much heat.

100% return it now.
The 980 Ti is well known as the best of a card that it is because of partners like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus and Zotac slapping aftermarket coolers on custom PCB's. Sure the reference card is fast, but the non reference is faster and for very little extra cost.

Once you've overclocked both cards, the 980 is more than a little bit faster.

1 single more powerful gpu is always better the 2 smaller cards.

No. It would be very hard to find someone who is willing to spend the cash to buy your "novelty" card.
 
Honestly your best bet is to swap it for that pair of 980's. Two 980's will pretty well eat anything for lunch, including 1440p at high framerates or 4K at an average of around 60fps.
 
Right now, that Titan Z is a boat anchor, the fact that anyone's offering something current and actually GOOD is surprising to me.

You'd be surprised. The MSI 390x gets ridiculously hot even though the cooler is 50% larger than your average 290x cooler. It's because it needs a ton of airflow and exhaust to move air efficiently to cool the GPU. I get 73c with stock settings but that's because I have a fan pointed directly at the GPU and a lot of airflow. The MSI 390x is one of the worst cards you can buy for silence/temps. 

If someone's willing to trade two 980' s for a Titan Z, you shouldn't wait.

I'm not sure on AMD CPUs, so that voltage may be fine.  If it was Intell..ohh boy.

I don't intend to make an "information round up" for every new generation of graphics cards for both companies. I only made this thread because of the amount of bs being spread by news sites' bad reporting and amount of misconceptions. I don't see a similar amount of confusion for AMD's next generation, and I haven't seen a lot of information about their new stuff in the first place.

Just to clarify, all we know is that they improved compute performance a lot, we don't know anything about gaming performance. Don't say "they only focused on compute and aren't improving gaming". It could be 30% faster for gaming, could be 500% faster for gaming. We have no idea since they haven't talked about it at all.

Victor, I think you're asking in the wrong place. Your best bet is to ask other professionals what their opinion is. This forum is probably approximately 99% gamers.

Victor, I think you're asking in the wrong place. Your best bet is to ask other professionals what their opinion is. This forum is probably approximately 99% gamers.

Victor, I think you're asking in the wrong place. Your best bet is to ask other professionals what their opinion is. This forum is probably approximately 99% gamers.

Nope. I have the MSI Gaming 390x. I'm not too satisfied with it. The temps are alright but once you use voltage to overclock it gets loud as hell. My max overclock without voltage is 1120/1625. With voltage it's 1160/1700. Sillicon lottery people. That's pretty good but it's not significantly higher than the 290 series. Not to mention that the 390x reaches its TDP limit which makes it impossible to go higher than 1230 on the core stable(that's the BEST overclocking cards). I know that clock for clock the 390x is better than say, the 980. But a 60mhz overclock is just PATHETIC. One thing I HATE about the MSI 390x is its inability to keep cool with air flow restrictions. This made it impossible for me to setup crossfire easier. Overall, coming from the 290, the 390x is just Meh. 

Actually AMD really doesn't need to please any of us PC enthusiasts because such a small portion of their income comes from selling enthusiast grade cards(390 and up I would say). However, if they do plan on expanding and becoming a true competitor to Nvidia in the growing PC gaming industry, they DO need a new architecture. The Fury X has proven to be a unappealing competitor to the 980Ti even with DX12. Nvidia could easily wipe the floor with the Fury X. AMD already looks bad, they need to go above and beyond to knock out Nvidia, or even have a fighting chance. 

It's honestly a wash, really. The two will perform at about the same level for most things. The extra cores on the 5820K will lower some video render times for sure, but if you're just a hobbyist it doesn't really matter much. The 6700K has better single threaded performance, and likely will outperform the 5820K on anything that doesn't take advantage of all 6 cores and 12 threads.
 
The 6700K is the one to go with, given that your cost is identical.

I'd grab a i5 6600K and a cheaper mobo and invest the saved money into a 980Ti for a smoother 1440p gaming experience. That's just me though.
 
To answer your question, the 390 is going to be the better choice at 1440p. MSI and Sapphire have the best models though, Gigabyte is kinda bottom tier for AMD cards.

Bro. This is the dumbest argument ever. Who buys a reference 980 Ti with a blower? Honestly. EVERYONE buys partner versions, and they all have aftermarket coolers, many of them have custom PCB's too. This is the whole reason it makes no sense to buy a Titan X over a 980 Ti if you're just using it for gaming.

one 980ti is better than one titan X
 
so what do you think happens when you add a second 980ti

they are basically the same card but the titan x has 12 GB of vram, so 980 Ti SLI

Easy, the game is CSGO