If you're considering waiting, let's at least be serious about how long you're going to wait. I'm extremely skeptical that Nvidia is going to hard launch anything on 14/16 nm soon. If they were, they'd have had plenty of working cards last fall and have no need to send their CEO out to show off fakes in January. Remember that AMD showed off working cards publicly around the start of the year and isn't expecting to launch until the middle of the year. It would be very surprising if Nvidia can launch sooner.
But let's suppose that Nvidia does have new cards sooner. What would those cards be? Maybe they'll have cards with the performance of a GTX 960 and a GTX 980, but considerably lower power consumption. And higher price tags. Nifty for a laptop, useless in a desktop until the prices come down. That's the best you could realistically hope for "soon" from Pascal, and even that would probably be several months away.
And if they do launch soon, they're using GDDR5. Neither GDDR5X nor HBM2 will be ready for a launch within weeks. It looks like AMD is putting off HBM2 cards for next year, and AMD co-developed HBM along with Hynix. If you're still using GDDR5, you're going to need a really wide memory bus to justify trying for more performance than a GTX 980 Ti, which already has a high-clocked 384-bit memory bus. The last laptop card with a memory bus wider than 256-bit was, well, never. HBM will change that, but GDDR5 won't.
So even if you're right that Nvidia is going to launch Pascal within weeks, that means we're waiting for the generation after for anything faster than a GTX 980 Ti. And it's vanishingly unlikely that Nvidia will launch a Pascal lineup soon, and then have its successor out mere months later. The last time we saw a generation gap meaningfully less than a year was the GeForce 400 to 500 series, and even then, the 500 series was just a respin of horribly broken dies and still considerably worse than the 400 series was supposed to be in the first place.
Now, if you're willing to wait a year, that changes things drastically. I do expect Pascal and Vega to show up within a year or so. But a year is an eternity in the tech world, and if you're going to wait a year, you might as well wait for Zen, too, while you're at it.
You could make a case for waiting a year. A GeForce GTX 670 is still a capable card. But that's the time frame you should be thinking about if you're considering waiting for the next generation high end cards.
Not trying to throw this in your face. I was going to make a big post about how I thought you were *seriously* over estimating the time frames in this post.
I did a bit of googling to try to find some articles I had read in the past two weeks giving some rough timeframes for release when I came upon this:
The rumors has finally been confirmed - NVIDIA Pascal GTX 1080 will be announced at GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2016 which is scheduled this April 4 to 7, and will be made available to the public the following month at Computex 2016.
Edit: Looks like you were right about GDDR5, though im not particularly concerned over that as memory bandwidth hasn't been a chokepoint in GPU's for a long while.
However it would have been nice to be HBM2
Upon further review, it's possible that Nvidia will announce a little more about Pascal in April. Maybe Nvidia could even show off working cards, like AMD did with Polaris in January. But that's a long, long way away from having launched cards with wide availability at retail. And remember that AMD's comparison of Polaris 10 was to a GeForce GTX 950.
Again, there's a huge difference between "first Pascal GPU is out" and "Pascal GPU faster than a GeForce GTX 980 Ti is out". If you want something faster than a GTX 980 Ti, you're going to need more than a 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus. Realistically, that means either not a laptop card at all (like the GTX 980 Ti, GTX 970 Ti, GTX 580, GTX 285, etc.) or waiting for GDDR5X or HBM2, or both.
Remember also that the top end GPUs virtually never go into laptops. The most recent exception is the GeForce GTX 480M, which was a horrible, ridiculous, and mercifully short-lived part. Before that, you go all the way back to the Radeon HD 4870M from 2008. The reason is that dissipating 200 W in a desktop is no big deal, but 100 W in a laptop is a problem. So if the first parts are laptop parts, it's not going to be the top end, and probably isn't going to be meaningfully faster than the previous generation's high end.
No offense but why do you keep talking about laptops?
The only time I said laptop at all is because in the initial post I said that the current rumors is that they will announce the laptop variants first, and the desktop variants shortly thereafter. However that was all prior to this latest bit of news that came out a couple days ago which confirms that they are definitely at least talking about the desktop variants in early april, and indications are that a hard launch will follow 1-2 months later.
I still maintain my position that it was probably a better idea to wait, despite the GDDR5. I have a strong suspicion the 1080 will be about as fast as a 980ti.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
If you're considering waiting, let's at least be serious about how long you're going to wait. I'm extremely skeptical that Nvidia is going to hard launch anything on 14/16 nm soon. If they were, they'd have had plenty of working cards last fall and have no need to send their CEO out to show off fakes in January. Remember that AMD showed off working cards publicly around the start of the year and isn't expecting to launch until the middle of the year. It would be very surprising if Nvidia can launch sooner.
But let's suppose that Nvidia does have new cards sooner. What would those cards be? Maybe they'll have cards with the performance of a GTX 960 and a GTX 980, but considerably lower power consumption. And higher price tags. Nifty for a laptop, useless in a desktop until the prices come down. That's the best you could realistically hope for "soon" from Pascal, and even that would probably be several months away.
And if they do launch soon, they're using GDDR5. Neither GDDR5X nor HBM2 will be ready for a launch within weeks. It looks like AMD is putting off HBM2 cards for next year, and AMD co-developed HBM along with Hynix. If you're still using GDDR5, you're going to need a really wide memory bus to justify trying for more performance than a GTX 980 Ti, which already has a high-clocked 384-bit memory bus. The last laptop card with a memory bus wider than 256-bit was, well, never. HBM will change that, but GDDR5 won't.
So even if you're right that Nvidia is going to launch Pascal within weeks, that means we're waiting for the generation after for anything faster than a GTX 980 Ti. And it's vanishingly unlikely that Nvidia will launch a Pascal lineup soon, and then have its successor out mere months later. The last time we saw a generation gap meaningfully less than a year was the GeForce 400 to 500 series, and even then, the 500 series was just a respin of horribly broken dies and still considerably worse than the 400 series was supposed to be in the first place.
Now, if you're willing to wait a year, that changes things drastically. I do expect Pascal and Vega to show up within a year or so. But a year is an eternity in the tech world, and if you're going to wait a year, you might as well wait for Zen, too, while you're at it.
You could make a case for waiting a year. A GeForce GTX 670 is still a capable card. But that's the time frame you should be thinking about if you're considering waiting for the next generation high end cards.
Not trying to throw this in your face. I was going to make a big post about how I thought you were *seriously* over estimating the time frames in this post.
I did a bit of googling to try to find some articles I had read in the past two weeks giving some rough timeframes for release when I came upon this:
The rumors has finally been confirmed - NVIDIA Pascal GTX 1080 will be announced at GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2016 which is scheduled this April 4 to 7, and will be made available to the public the following month at Computex 2016.
Edit: Looks like you were right about GDDR5, though im not particularly concerned over that as memory bandwidth hasn't been a chokepoint in GPU's for a long while.
However it would have been nice to be HBM2
Upon further review, it's possible that Nvidia will announce a little more about Pascal in April. Maybe Nvidia could even show off working cards, like AMD did with Polaris in January. But that's a long, long way away from having launched cards with wide availability at retail. And remember that AMD's comparison of Polaris 10 was to a GeForce GTX 950.
Again, there's a huge difference between "first Pascal GPU is out" and "Pascal GPU faster than a GeForce GTX 980 Ti is out". If you want something faster than a GTX 980 Ti, you're going to need more than a 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus. Realistically, that means either not a laptop card at all (like the GTX 980 Ti, GTX 970 Ti, GTX 580, GTX 285, etc.) or waiting for GDDR5X or HBM2, or both.
Remember also that the top end GPUs virtually never go into laptops. The most recent exception is the GeForce GTX 480M, which was a horrible, ridiculous, and mercifully short-lived part. Before that, you go all the way back to the Radeon HD 4870M from 2008. The reason is that dissipating 200 W in a desktop is no big deal, but 100 W in a laptop is a problem. So if the first parts are laptop parts, it's not going to be the top end, and probably isn't going to be meaningfully faster than the previous generation's high end.
No offense but why do you keep talking about laptops?
The only time I said laptop at all is because in the initial post I said that the current rumors is that they will announce the laptop variants first, and the desktop variants shortly thereafter. However that was all prior to this latest bit of news that came out a couple days ago which confirms that they are definitely at least talking about the desktop variants in early april, and indications are that a hard launch will follow 1-2 months later.
I still maintain my position that it was probably a better idea to wait, despite the GDDR5. I have a strong suspicion the 1080 will be about as fast as a 980ti.
If waiting a few months just gets you a card that is about as fast as a GTX 980 Ti and for about the same price, then why wait? New cards that are substantially faster than the previous generation are generally priced accordingly.
You mentioned laptops before I did. If a GPU chip has both desktop and laptop versions, then that's generally not a high end GPU. The last top end desktop chip that was reasonable to get in a laptop was what, a decade ago now? And before desktop cards were anywhere near the 300 W cap of the PCI Express form factor.
No offense but why do you keep talking about laptops?
The only time I said laptop at all is because in the initial post I said that the current rumors is that they will announce the laptop variants first, and the desktop variants shortly thereafter. However that was all prior to this latest bit of news that came out a couple days ago which confirms that they are definitely at least talking about the desktop variants in early april, and indications are that a hard launch will follow 1-2 months later.
I still maintain my position that it was probably a better idea to wait, despite the GDDR5. I have a strong suspicion the 1080 will be about as fast as a 980ti.
If waiting a few months just gets you a card that is about as fast as a GTX 980 Ti and for about the same price, then why wait? New cards that are substantially faster than the previous generation are generally priced accordingly.
You mentioned laptops before I did. If a GPU chip has both desktop and laptop versions, then that's generally not a high end GPU. The last top end desktop chip that was reasonable to get in a laptop was what, a decade ago now? And before desktop cards were anywhere near the 300 W cap of the PCI Express form factor.
Ok, enough about laptops. Literally the ONLY reason i brought it up is (at the time) there was strong evidence that they would be announcing the laptop variants of the card in april, and the desktop variants a month or two later. I'm not saying the desktop variants were some "upgraded" version of the laptops or vice versa, it was simply a point on a timeline. The ultimate point that (at the time) it was thought we would be hearing about the full blown x80 version of the desktop pascal cards in 1-2 months time.
That has since panned out to be that we will be seeing the full blown 1080 hard release in likely 2 months to be available.
However, to your last point, if its about as fast as a 980ti and about the same price, then yes, you are right. However i suspect that will not be the case. My guess is the 1080 will be around 550 like usual, and will be around as fast as a 980ti, which unless they've gone down substantially will be roughly the same performance, perhaps slightly slower, with 2gb more vram, for $200 less.
Either way i don't want to get into a semantics argument, lets just agree to disagree ;-).
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
You bought a heavily overclocked GPU and then overclocked it further? That is such a bad idea. If you're getting plenty good enough frame rates at stock speeds, then leave it at stock speeds. The stock clock speeds on consumer GPUs are so aggressive to begin with that further overclocking on a model that already has a big factory overclock is a totally unnecessary risk.
It's been a while and I discovered GPU Boost 2.0 after overclocking. I only managed to get a measly +74MHz while stress testing which got me to around ~1365MHz.
Hours later I found out about GPU Boost and my card was actually overclocking to 1515MHz (which is insane). I originally wanted 1400MHz and found out that at stock settings my GPU boosts itself to 1404. You're absolutely right - these clocks overclock much more aggressively.
I have since removed the overclock and am sitting on stock settings.
Comments
No offense but why do you keep talking about laptops?
The only time I said laptop at all is because in the initial post I said that the current rumors is that they will announce the laptop variants first, and the desktop variants shortly thereafter. However that was all prior to this latest bit of news that came out a couple days ago which confirms that they are definitely at least talking about the desktop variants in early april, and indications are that a hard launch will follow 1-2 months later.
I still maintain my position that it was probably a better idea to wait, despite the GDDR5. I have a strong suspicion the 1080 will be about as fast as a 980ti.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
You mentioned laptops before I did. If a GPU chip has both desktop and laptop versions, then that's generally not a high end GPU. The last top end desktop chip that was reasonable to get in a laptop was what, a decade ago now? And before desktop cards were anywhere near the 300 W cap of the PCI Express form factor.
That has since panned out to be that we will be seeing the full blown 1080 hard release in likely 2 months to be available.
However, to your last point, if its about as fast as a 980ti and about the same price, then yes, you are right. However i suspect that will not be the case. My guess is the 1080 will be around 550 like usual, and will be around as fast as a 980ti, which unless they've gone down substantially will be roughly the same performance, perhaps slightly slower, with 2gb more vram, for $200 less.
Either way i don't want to get into a semantics argument, lets just agree to disagree ;-).
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Hours later I found out about GPU Boost and my card was actually overclocking to 1515MHz (which is insane). I originally wanted 1400MHz and found out that at stock settings my GPU boosts itself to 1404. You're absolutely right - these clocks overclock much more aggressively.
I have since removed the overclock and am sitting on stock settings.