Wait, what? Every review I see compares the card they're reviewing to stock competitors. It's a serious complaint I have. I don't give a flip how the Fury X compares to the stock 980TI. I care about how it compares to the OCed 980TIs that cost $20 more than stock.
It doesn't strike me as being out the ordinary. I don't like it, but it isn't something just one reviewer does.
Yes, but when trying to assess DX12 on its own, we need to see how a stock GTX980Ti compares to a stock Fury X and then look at their relative standing in DX11 in other games. When you introduce variables like overclocking performance, it means now we have to find DX11 reviews with Asus Strix 980Ti. We are trying to conclude on the impact of DX12 vs. DX11, not trying to argue if 980TI is faster than the Fury X overall. We are not trying to prove whether or not Fury X is better than 980Ti as that's not the point (we know 980Ti is better because it has 20-25% OCing headroom and 50% more VRAM).
Look at what I am saying:
1080P Asus Strix 980Ti is
27% faster than the Fury X in DX11 games
But under a DX12 game, that advantage drops to
17%.
Ashes of Singularity shows the same scenario where GCN benefits much more from DX12 than Maxwell does.
Furthermore, Fury X beating 390X by only 3 fps at TR could suggest some driver optimization issue as well here.
So what you're saying is "they shouldn't use products readily available on the market for reviews"? It isn't the reviewer's fault that no good OCed Fury X models exist. .
That's not what I am saying at all. The test is used to compare the impact of DX12 games on existing architectures/products. Therefore, we need a stock 980Ti data point as a reference to make this point clearer. There is nothing wrong with considering/including an after market 980Ti cards in the real world and no one says it shouldn't be done, but the point is to see the impact of DX12, we need stock basis (it's OK to include an after-market 980Ti that's 15-16% faster but then it should be labelled on the graph as an after-market card).
Just imagine the alternative scenario if we compared a stock GTX660Ti to an 1200mhz HD7950 in Fable Legends and concluded that 7950 is faster by 30-40%. That's telling us more about overclocking capabilities of the latter, rather than DX11 vs. DX12.
Again, we already know that an after-market 980Ti beats the Fury X but a DX12 benchmark goes far beyond that. In other words, imagine if we included a 1.5Ghz 980Ti in the benchmarks and focused solely on 980Ti trashing the Fury X. Would you then conclude that Maxwell's DX12 performance is as good as AMD's? Not necessarily because now you are comparing overclocking performance above 980Ti's stock, not isolating DX12 variable. You need to look at other cards too to see whether or not 980Ti's crazy overclocking is skewing the data. In this case, it clearly is.
This is exactly why using a factory pre-overclocked 980Ti that shows Maxwell in the best light possible is misleading for the
overall conclusion because we clearly see all
other NV cards like 960/970/980 are doing much worse against R9 380/285/390/390X.
Do you see my point now?
I mean sure it's real world that a $650 980Ti with a 15-16% factory pre-overclock is beating a Fury X by 17%, but looking at that only overshadows how an after-market $230 R9 290 is 70%+ faster than a $200 960, how $280 390 is on the heels of a $450 980, and how an R9 290X is beating a 970. 980Ti's excellent performance is a testament to NV's awesome GM200 design here but the rest of NV's line-up is not fairing good at all given the price/performance points of their $160-500 cards.