Should I expect Maxwell (980 Ti specifically) to be neglected like nuts like Kepler, Femi, Tesla, and so on?

[WangKe]

As much as I've been trying to get a 390, 390X, Fury, or even a Fury X, hell even to the point of getting a 290X, I'm somewhat left to the point that the only card I can buy from my uncle's story is a 980 Ti.

His Sapphire cards of nearly every variant (from 390 to Fury X, dunno why even the Fury X as well) even have a waiting list, coupled with the part that he doesn't order GPUs of any company very much due to fear of overstocking, which explains my other thread because its hopeless to get a Sapphire GPU from him (unless I go as low as a 380, which strangely doesn't sell as much), and he just sold his last MSI 390X and 390's. Well, he doesn't stock Powercolor, XFX, and Visiontek due to how he had a hard time selling their 290 and 290X variants and to him counts as never stocking too many brands as well kind of experience for some reason, having just finished his last stocks on them around five months ago, so thats annoying.

So, why my uncle? Well, he'll give me a discount on-top of his store's Christmas discount, so I can pretty much buy a brand new 390X for $250 or a 980Ti for $450 (because they have separate discount rates) if I bought it at a right time when he has a sale going on. But yeah, I don't know if I should still stick to Team Greed-I mean Green. Looking at AMD's efforts throughout 2015, they are really trying so hard that I want to support them. But yeah, since my 780 Ti turned to a brick due to my nephew's curiosity and thinking my 780 Ti should still overclock like a boss despite losing the silicone lottery, I really need a new GPU. No way in hell will I stick to a fuckin' Intel HDwhatever iGPU. It feels like a crime, makes me feel filthy. I regret ever letting him do it. FYI, my 780 Ti appears to not have a dual bios (MSI 780Ti though).

So, should I pull the trigger and expect my (if ever I do buy it) 980 Ti to be neglected like crap once Pascal comes in? Or just tough it out and get a 380 and wait for Greenland? I game on a 1440p monitor though since I am no longer really a fan of 1080p (1440p has spoiled me this hard).

[Enderman]

all GPUs get old and eventually drop support...

[WangKe]

all GPUs get old and eventually drop support...

Let me correct myself

Yeah, but not like 1 gen old type of neglect (I.E. not giving it enough support to the point that a 780 Ti got its ass handed by a 970 and at one time beaten by a 960) in terms of support. Oh wait...

[Lord_Karango17]

It should be ok... Most of the uproar I have seen is regarding the gameworks features in witcher 3, which if nvidia is to be believed is due to maxwells better tessellation capabilities.

 

I have not tried older driver to see if I have vastly higher performance, but I doubt there is a noticeable difference.

 

All cards will fall off the company's radar and get less support as a result.

[WangKe]

It should be ok... Most of the uproar I have seen is regarding the gameworks features in witcher 3, which if nvidia is to be believed is due to maxwells better tessellation capabilities.

 

I have not tried older driver to see if I have vastly higher performance, but I doubt there is a noticeable difference.

 

All cards will fall off the company's radar and get less support as a result.

Well, I'm somewhat conflicted. I don't wanna support Team Greed-I mean Green anymore.

I can forgive it if its like 2 generations worth of how old a GPU generation is, but not like 1 gen old being good enough to neglect kind of treatment. 

[Samfisher]

[Lord_Karango17]

Well, I'm somewhat conflicted. I don't wanna support Team Greed-I mean Green anymore.

I can forgive it if its like 2 generations worth of how old a GPU generation is, but not like 1 gen old being good enough to neglect kind of treatment. 

Well any company is going to want you to buy their newer products... I guess some companies are a bit more "aggressive" about it.

[Enderman]

Yeah, but not like 1 gen old type of dropping of support. Oh wait...

no....

support drops after about 5 -10 years

like the 100 and 200 series and whatever they dropped support this last year

 

this just means that new drivers wont be made from them, you can still keep using the old cards with the last working drivers though

 

recent GPU generations like 500, 600, 700 series, etc.. those still will get drivers even when the next few generations are released

the only difference is that more efforts are concentrated to optimizing drivers for the latests cards, so that new games released will get performance boosts when using the newest generation

 

this doesnt mean that the 980ti will stop being supported, that wont happen for a very very very long time, it just means that instead of spending hundreds of hours tweaking the newest drivers for it, they instead spend a few dozen hours making sure the drivers work, and then spend hundreds of hours optimizing performance for the next generation (GTX1000 or whatever)

[tomas710]

Well, I'm somewhat conflicted. I don't wanna support Team Greed-I mean Green anymore.

I can forgive it if its like 2 generations worth of how old a GPU generation is, but not like 1 gen old being good enough to neglect kind of treatment. 

You're not supporting a team, there are no teams, it's just a collective delusion some people have that companies give a fuck about them, the 980ti is the the best GPU in the market right now, that's all that should matter.

[TheElt]

Yeah, but not like 1 gen old type of dropping of support.

The newest drivers I can get off the Nvidia website for the onboard GeForce 6100 (10 years old now) are from 10 months ago. The GTX 2XX series last had a driver 1 month ago (Looking at GTX 295), and the GTX 4XX series are still supported on the newest WHQL drivers (Looking at GTX 480). The Quadro NVS 140M chip in my Dell Latitude has drivers 1 month older than the Quadro 6000M, and that's a Tesla core.

 

Show me Nvidia dropping support of Kepler when Fermi still gets the newest drivers

[Kobathor]

The newest drivers I can get off the Nvidia website for the onboard GeForce 6100 (10 years old now) are from 10 months ago. The GTX 2XX series last had a driver 1 month ago (Looking at GTX 295), and the GTX 4XX series are still supported on the newest WHQL drivers (Looking at GTX 480). The Quadro NVS 140M chip in my Dell Latitude has drivers 1 month older than the Quadro 6000M, and that's a Tesla core.

 

Show me Nvidia dropping support of Kepler when Fermi still gets the newest drivers

Not dropping support, but not optimizing.

 

My 7970 is still optimized today, now being as powerful as a GTX 960 in some games. Its Kepler competitor, the 680, barely keeps up with the 960 in anything. At all.

[WangKe]

Wow... it looked like most of their driver support for the 480 capped out at 2014.

 

Well any company is going to want you to buy their newer products... I guess some companies are a bit more "aggressive" about it.

I just wish they weren't that aggressive.

 

no....

support drops after about 5 -10 years

like the 100 and 200 series and whatever they dropped support this last year

 

this just means that new drivers wont be made from them, you can still keep using the old cards with the last working drivers though

 

recent GPU generations like 500, 600, 700 series, etc.. those still will get drivers even when the next few generations are released

the only difference is that more efforts are concentrated to optimizing drivers for the latests cards, so that new games released will get performance boosts when using the newest generation

 

this doesnt mean that the 980ti will stop being supported, that wont happen for a very very very long time, it just means that instead of spending hundreds of hours tweaking the newest drivers for it, they instead spend a few dozen hours making sure the drivers work, and then spend hundreds of hours optimizing performance for the next generation (GTX1000 or whatever)

Well, I think I phrased/worded out/pictured the word neglect far of from what I really meant. I didn't mean stop, I mean like how much effort will they decrease overtime even when the new line is out. Nevertheless, your post pretty much explained the situation.

 

You're not supporting a team, there are no teams, it's just a collective delusion some people have that companies give a fuck about them, the 980ti is the the best GPU in the market right now, that's all that should matter.

Well, its easier to verbally say Team (insert sin-I mean color here) than NGreed-I mean Nvidia. Plus, IMHO, its kinda catchier to call them by their team sin-I mean color. The 980 Ti is the best card right now, but will NGre-I mean Nvidia give it enough effort to not be eaten by a 1070 (assuming Nvidia calls it the 1070) or even a 1060 once pascal is out?

[Enderman]

 

Well, I think I phrased/worded out/pictured the word neglect far of from what I really meant. I didn't mean stop, I mean like how much effort will they decrease overtime even when the new line is out.

 

well instead of getting fps improvements with every driver release it will pretty much stay at the same performance as when you bought it

[WangKe]

The newest drivers I can get off the Nvidia website for the onboard GeForce 6100 (10 years old now) are from 10 months ago. The GTX 2XX series last had a driver 1 month ago (Looking at GTX 295), and the GTX 4XX series are still supported on the newest WHQL drivers (Looking at GTX 480). The Quadro NVS 140M chip in my Dell Latitude has drivers 1 month older than the Quadro 6000M, and that's a Tesla core.

 

Show me Nvidia dropping support of Kepler when Fermi still gets the newest drivers

Well, I corrected myself. Check the post again. And by drop, I made a mistake thinking dropping also equated to giving just "compatibility" for the sake of it just working with it but not really getting eaten alive by a card thats one generation newer. So, yeah, more of lack of optimization, or lack of effort given into optimization.

[WangKe]

well instead of getting fps improvements with every driver release it will pretty much stay at the same performance as when you bought it

How come I have a feeling that if I get a 980 Ti right now, it'll be the same story as the 780 Ti? Like, at one point defeated by a 960 and is pretty much eaten by a 970.

 

Sure, benchmarks online will say otherwise regarding the 780 Ti VS the 970, but last time I went into a "LAN"-like party around a month ago and some benchmark tests (using Tomb Raider and GTA V because thats all we had at that time) with some fairly recent drivers (I don't remember which ones), the other dude with a 970 had to undervolt his card (but keep the power limit to 110%) and they were on par with barely 1-2 fps difference with the 970 having the advantage. Mine was overclocked to as high as it can because it lost the silicone lottery, but kept beating 290X's overclocked way back, and later on which a 970 when it came out would still beat the 290X (note: back then. But now, I think its a different story all in all) and what not.

Damn...

[Enderman]

How come I have a feeling that if I get a 980 Ti right now, it'll be the same story as the 780 Ti? Like, at one point defeated by a 960 and is pretty much eaten by a 970.

 

Sure, benchmarks online will say otherwise regarding the 780 Ti VS the 970, but last time I went into a "LAN"-like party around a month ago and some benchmark tests (using Tomb Raider and GTA V because thats all we had at that time) with some fairly recent drivers (I don't remember which ones), the other dude with a 970 had to undervolt his card (but keep the power limit to 110%) and they were on par with barely 1-2 fps difference with the 970 having the advantage. Mine was overclocked to as high as it can because it lost the silicone lottery, but kept beating 290X's overclocked way back, and later on which a 970 when it came out would still beat the 290X (note: back then. But now, I think its a different story all in all) and what not.

Damn...

that's what the drivers do

they optimize the latest GPUs for the latest games

 

drivers have really improved the 970's performance since launch

the 780ti's performance has remained about the same, with some minor improvements for games that were recently released

[WangKe]

that's what the drivers do

they optimize the latest GPUs for the latest games

 

drivers have really improved the 970's performance since launch

the 780ti's performance has remained about the same, with some minor improvements for games that were recently released

Well... fuck. I guess I'm going with a 380. I guess I'll have to go back to 1080p and wait for Greenland.

[TheElt]

Not dropping support, but not optimizing.

 

My 7970 is still optimized today, now being as powerful as a GTX 960 in some games. Its Kepler competitor, the 680, barely keeps up with the 960 in anything. At all.

I'll throw something in here, AMD are much quicker to ditch support for legacy hardware than Nvidia are. I can get drivers for my 6100 that were released on 24/2/2015, but the latest drivers for my X1300 Pro were released 24/2/2010.

 

I cannot get drivers from AMD at all for the Mobility Radeon 9700 chip in my 2004 laptop, whereas I can get drivers from Nvidia for even the Riva TNT cards.

 

Your 7970 still runs an extremely similar architecture to the newer AMD cards, don't quote me on this because I don't know exactly what it's like but I can imagine anything that benefits, say a 390 will also not need much changing if any at all to give your 7970 an improvement too. For Nvidia it's a lot more work to make an improved driver for several different architectures. If AMD moved to the side of Nvidia with a different arch each generation and not just different iterations, you would see the same story from their side. Older Nvidia cards do still see improvements with the newer drivers, it's just less than it was in the first year or two after release, and less than AMD cards see due to the extra work that'll need putting in to make and test them.

 

Well, I corrected myself. Check the post again. And by drop, I made a mistake thinking dropping also equated to giving just "compatibility" for the sake of it just working with it but not really getting eaten alive by a card thats one generation newer. So, yeah, more of lack of optimization, or lack of effort given into optimization.

Well, I'm somewhat conflicted. I don't wanna support Team Greed-I mean Green anymore.

I can forgive it if its like 2 generations worth of how old a GPU generation is, but not like 1 gen old being good enough to neglect kind of treatment. 

See above.

[Lord_Karango17]

How come I have a feeling that if I get a 980 Ti right now, it'll be the same story as the 780 Ti? Like, at one point defeated by a 960 and is pretty much eaten by a 970.

 

Sure, benchmarks online will say otherwise regarding the 780 Ti VS the 970, but last time I went into a "LAN"-like party around a month ago and some benchmark tests (using Tomb Raider and GTA V because thats all we had at that time) with some fairly recent drivers (I don't remember which ones), the other dude with a 970 had to undervolt his card (but keep the power limit to 110%) and they were on par with barely 1-2 fps difference with the 970 having the advantage. Mine was overclocked to as high as it can because it lost the silicone lottery, but kept beating 290X's overclocked way back, and later on which a 970 when it came out would still beat the 290X (note: back then. But now, I think its a different story all in all) and what not.

Damn...

The 780ti was similar to the 960 in one game, with one setting turned on.

It will shit on 960 in most games, and will continue to do so for a long time.

 

If you are so worried about nvidia gimping performance, just go with an amd card. Even with reduced attention from nvidia, the 980ti will still be faster than the 380 by a long shot.

[WangKe]

I'll throw something in here, AMD are much quicker to ditch support for legacy hardware than Nvidia are. I can get drivers for my 6100 that were released on 24/2/2015, but the latest drivers for my X1300 Pro were released 24/2/2010.

 

I cannot get drivers from AMD at all for the Mobility Radeon 9700 chip in my 2004 laptop, whereas I can get drivers from Nvidia for even the Riva TNT cards.

 

Your 7970 still runs an extremely similar architecture to the newer AMD cards, don't quote me on this because I don't know exactly what it's like but I can imagine anything that benefits, say a 390 will also not need much changing if any at all to give your 7970 an improvement too. For Nvidia it's a lot more work to make an improved driver for several different architectures. If AMD moved to the side of Nvidia with a different arch each generation and not just different iterations, you would see the same story from their side. Older Nvidia cards do still see improvements with the newer drivers, it's just less than it was in the first year or two after release, and less than AMD cards see due to the extra work that'll need putting in to make and test them.

 

See above.

To be fair, they did drop their pre-GCN cards which sort of, just sort of, makes sense. But the part that they never stopped giving up on even the likes of the 7970 (sure, its allegedly the same architecture that can be found on the 200 series and maybe 300 series, don't quote me on that either) is remarkable. IMHO, if they (by that I mean AMD or Nvidia, if this was the case) aren't gonna give it enough effort to atleast have some FPS increase, which based on Linus' video, which 5 years later the 480 is given a pretty decent boost of FPS but pretty much 10% +/- after capping out at 2014, a total of 15% increase wouldn't hurt over 5 years worth of support. But if they're just gonna give it that much effort, why not just totally drop it after 3 or 4 years? Not sure if there's a market for guys who just wanna stick to a single GPU, or a single laptop, for around a decade or something. Better than somewhat giving the consumers some kind of false hope that drivers mature over time. Architecture does play a role on how much the guys at AMD and Nvidia can do to it with driver support, but if it can't take it because its THAT old (like a 500 series card kind of old), why not just drop it?

 

 

The 780ti was similar to the 960 in one game, with one setting turned on.

It will shit on 960 in most games, and will continue to do so for a long time.

 

If you are so worried about nvidia gimping performance, just go with an amd card. Even with reduced attention from nvidia, the 980ti will still be faster than the 380 by a long shot.

 

Still dunno if I should be offended that a 970 eats a 780 Ti or not. The 780 Ti ain't exactly that old.

I'm more worried about getting ripped of hard a generation later. A 980 Ti will always beat a 380 (unless Nvidia does something about it in a negative way), but sure as hell I don't want to see it eaten alive by a 1070 (or whatever the $300-$400 Pascal GPU is gonna be called) or even losing once to a 1060. Which is why I do kind of want to go to AMD after seeing the 290X mature over time, and even the 7970.

[Lord_Karango17]

To be fair, they did drop their pre-GCN cards which sort of, just sort of, makes sense. But the part that they never stopped giving up on even the likes of the 7970 (sure, its allegedly the same architecture that can be found on the 200 series and maybe 300 series, don't quote me on that either) is remarkable. IMHO, if they (by that I mean AMD or Nvidia, if this was the case) aren't gonna give it enough effort to atleast have some FPS increase, which based on Linus' video, which 5 years later the 480 is given a pretty decent boost of FPS but pretty much 10% +/- after capping out at 2014, a total of 15% increase wouldn't hurt over 5 years worth of support. But if they're just gonna give it that much effort, why not just totally drop it after 3 or 4 years? Not sure if there's a market for guys who just wanna stick to a single GPU, or a single laptop, for around a decade or something. Better than somewhat giving the consumers some kind of false hope that drivers mature over time. Architecture does play a role on how much the guys at AMD and Nvidia can do to it with driver support, but if it can't take it because its THAT old (like a 500 series card kind of old), why not just drop it?

 

 

 

Still dunno if I should be offended that a 970 eats a 780 Ti or not. The 780 Ti ain't exactly that old.

I'm more worried about getting ripped of hard a generation later. A 980 Ti will always beat a 380 (unless Nvidia does something about it in a negative way), but sure as hell I don't want to see it eaten alive by a 1070 (or whatever the $300-$400 Pascal GPU is gonna be called) or even losing once to a 1060. Which is why I do kind of want to go to AMD after seeing the 290X mature over time, and even the 7970.

You seem a lot more preoccupied about how your card will stack up against the competition, rather than the experience you are getting which is the whole point.

 

Performance is not going to degrade with newer drivers, so if the gaming experience is good now what is the problem?

 

Sure newer more efficient cards may get closer in performance than the price gap indicates, but is that making your gaming experience any worse?

 

Also getting a much slower card for the sake tier uniformity is not the solution either.

[TheElt]

To be fair, they did drop their pre-GCN cards which sort of, just sort of, makes sense. But the part that they never stopped giving up on even the likes of the 7970 (sure, its allegedly the same architecture that can be found on the 200 series and maybe 300 series, don't quote me on that either) is remarkable. IMHO, if they (by that I mean AMD or Nvidia, if this was the case) aren't gonna give it enough effort to atleast have some FPS increase, which based on Linus' video, which 5 years later the 480 is given a pretty decent boost of FPS but pretty much 10% +/- after capping out at 2014, a total of 15% increase wouldn't hurt over 5 years worth of support. But if they're just gonna give it that much effort, why not just totally drop it after 3 or 4 years? Not sure if there's a market for guys who just wanna stick to a single GPU, or a single laptop, for around a decade or something. Better than somewhat giving the consumers some kind of false hope that drivers mature over time. Architecture does play a role on how much the guys at AMD and Nvidia can do to it with driver support, but if it can't take it because its THAT old (like a 500 series card kind of old), why not just drop it?

If you look at it in terms of driver improvements per architecture, Nvidia wins hands down, like I said, if Nvidia stuck with Pascal like AMD have with GCN and only released different iterations of it (Like Pascal for the 10XX, Pascal 2 for the 11XX, and so on) you'd most likely see the same improvements as you have with your 7970. Say it takes 3 weeks to come up with new drivers for a card (No idea how long it actually takes), then Nvidia have to do that back to the GTX 400 series which means it would take a lot longer, and that can be a pretty big financial dent considering that's time that could be spend making new drivers for the newest game releases. I like to know that when I upgrade from my 970, in say 10 or 20 years if Nvidia are still around I can get drivers without having to resort to Windows default ones or going to some sketchy places in the hopes of getting something, I don't see why AMD won't have the driver files there, even if you had to go through some special menus on the website to download them. It more gets me wondering, if Nvidia had the man power and time and all the stars aligned to allow them the kind of driver optimisations AMD have had for GCN, for things like Fermi, how much faster they would be.

 

I'd hazard a guess that as soon as AMD move past GCN they'll quickly phase out support and improvements for anything GCN based. Nvidia you get support for a long time after you get the card, AMD you get support as long as the architecture is still being used.

 

Still dunno if I should be offended that a 970 eats a 780 Ti or not. The 780 Ti ain't exactly that old.

I'm more worried about getting ripped of hard a generation later. A 980 Ti will always beat a 380 (unless Nvidia does something about it in a negative way), but sure as hell I don't want to see it eaten alive by a 1070 (or whatever the $300-$400 Pascal GPU is gonna be called) or even losing once to a 1060. Which is why I do kind of want to go to AMD after seeing the 290X mature over time, and even the 7970.

You can't really compare the two because the architectures are completely different, so on paper and in real world can be wildly different. The 780 Ti scrapes 180 points ahead according to 3DMark's comparison list, but drivers, colour compression and all the other features that Maxwell has over Kepler can easily give it the edge in some places.

 

I'd say get the 980 Ti, unless Pascal is priced lower or the tiering scheme is shook up due to top end card performance (Which I doubt, their "10x Faster than Maxwell" claim is from double floating point numbers, which Maxwell is abysmal at) then you'll be fine. Or you could get something cheaper now like a 380, then see what Pascal/Arctic Islands brings to the table with HBM2.

[WangKe]

You seem a lot more preoccupied about how your card will stack up against the competition, rather than the experience you are getting which is the whole point.

 

Performance is not going to degrade with newer drivers, so if the gaming experience is good now what is the problem?

 

Sure newer more efficient cards may get closer in performance than the price gap indicates, but is that making your gaming experience any worse?

 

Also getting a much slower card for the sake tier uniformity is not the solution either.

Well, if I could buy a 390, 390X, or Fury, I'd go AMD no questions asked and this thread wouldn't have to be posted. But since I don't wanna buy from the other local stores because I won't get as much of a discount, I'm left with the 980 Ti and a 380 as my choices (go for whats the top-tier now and get shat on once the next generation comes, or take a cheap card and wait for the top tier card of the next generation)

I'm more concerned with how long will a company keep supporting its product overtime at a reasonable span of time. Once newer games are out, I don't want to see the same thing like the 780 Ti VS the 970 all over again, where my patience for waiting for a high/top tier card gets eaten by a card thats one or two tiers of a generation after that. As someone who's had a 460, I waited THAT long for a top tier card. If anything, the 780 Ti should be able to perform evenly when stacked up against the 970. And the funny part is that AMD, a company that I'd call "Idiots who make an effort to improve themselves" didn't just let the 290X just still be a 290X. Hell, it finally beat the card that beat the original Titan and is atleast above the 970. Did I mention that the 290X is technically older than the 780 Ti? Sure, the 780 Ti beat the 970, but look at the gap between the two? And hell, I've seen live performance benchmarks (saw them in person) of a 970 with a barely aggressive overclock (1400+ mhz) beating 780 Ti's that have similar overclocks as yours (based on your signature)

I don't mind dropping the settings to maintain a certain amount of FPS, but I don't want to drop the settings too hard. I want my gaming experience to be great today, slightly worse a generation after, and worse than that when another generation comes in. But I don't want to see it go down hard to the point that a card half its MSRP (on the day of release) be eaten up like that in a fairly short amount of time. Game optimization go hand-in-hand between game developers and software engineers from the likes of Nvidia and AMD, whether both are talking to each other about it or not.

If my gaming experience is bad due to bad FPS, one could argue its because the game may be hard to run. But if I see a card half its price perform even slightly better when overclocked decently on said game thats hard to run, thats a slap to the face.

[WangKe]

If you look at it in terms of driver improvements per architecture, Nvidia wins hands down, like I said, if Nvidia stuck with Pascal like AMD have with GCN and only released different iterations of it (Like Pascal for the 10XX, Pascal 2 for the 11XX, and so on) you'd most likely see the same improvements as you have with your 7970. Say it takes 3 weeks to come up with new drivers for a card (No idea how long it actually takes), then Nvidia have to do that back to the GTX 400 series which means it would take a lot longer, and that can be a pretty big financial dent considering that's time that could be spend making new drivers for the newest game releases. I like to know that when I upgrade from my 970, in say 10 or 20 years if Nvidia are still around I can get drivers without having to resort to Windows default ones or going to some sketchy places in the hopes of getting something, I don't see why AMD won't have the driver files there, even if you had to go through some special menus on the website to download them. It more gets me wondering, if Nvidia had the man power and time and all the stars aligned to allow them the kind of driver optimisations AMD have had for GCN, for things like Fermi, how much faster they would be.

 

I'd hazard a guess that as soon as AMD move past GCN they'll quickly phase out support and improvements for anything GCN based. Nvidia you get support for a long time after you get the card, AMD you get support as long as the architecture is still being used.

 

You can't really compare the two because the architectures are completely different, so on paper and in real world can be wildly different. The 780 Ti scrapes 180 points ahead according to 3DMark's comparison list, but drivers, colour compression and all the other features that Maxwell has over Kepler can easily give it the edge in some places.

 

I'd say get the 980 Ti, unless Pascal is priced lower or the tiering scheme is shook up due to top end card performance (Which I doubt, their "10x Faster than Maxwell" claim is from double floating point numbers, which Maxwell is abysmal at) then you'll be fine. Or you could get something cheaper now like a 380, then see what Pascal/Arctic Islands brings to the table with HBM2.

But architecture shouldn't be a good enough reason to give it "faux" drivers (for the lack of a better term).

I mean, look at this. How is a 290, yes, a two ninety without an X, suddenly keeping up and getting real close to the 780 Ti? 

And Kepler is just one generation behind. If Nvidia wants us to upgrade every year, then make the cards cheap like $200 for their top tier card while their lower tier cards are lower than that, with an expiration date or something while they're at it.

Its more of architecture improvements than driver per architecture with the way Nvidia's been doing it. Hell, no company should just leave their previous gen cards out like that for that short of a time.

[TheElt]

But architecture shouldn't be a good enough reason to give it "faux" drivers (for the lack of a better term).

I mean, look at this. How is a 290, yes, a two ninety without an X, suddenly keeping up and getting real close to the 780 Ti? 

And Kepler is just one generation behind. If Nvidia wants us to upgrade every year, then make the cards cheap like $200 for their top tier card while their lower tier cards are lower than that, with an expiration date or something while they're at it.

Its more of architecture improvements than driver per architecture with the way Nvidia's been doing it. Hell, no company should just leave their previous gen cards out like that for that short of a time.

More architectures means more work, more work means more time, more time optimising drivers for older cards means less time to come out with day 1 driver updates and better optimisations for the newest batch of cards.

 

780 Ti is EOL and on an architecture from early 2012 that was succeeded in late 2014 (3 years is the usual dropoff point for driver improvements, Kepler seems to be capping out). The 290 is not EOL and on an architecture that hasn't changed much from early 2012, and has not yet been succeeded by a new architecture. I can't find any graphs for it but I bet next year the improvements are going to start falling off for at least HD7XXX GCN cards, if not the rest of the cards on GCN too (If my thinking of improvements are more architecture based than individual card based are right, or at least slightly)

 

They need to make a profit, that's why. I doubt anyone but AMD would complain if Nvidia dropped their prices for top end cards down that low and they were only short term investments, but unless the performance actually degrades after a year you could stick with it for a good few years.

 

Fermi had good gains from drivers up until the usual dropoff point, you can refer to the video posted earlier for that. If there was a comparison for Kepler as well you'd most likely see the same, same for GCN as well.