Agreed with all but the first bolded juvenile crap and the second which is bull. Nvidia delivered twice the performance increase on 60nm and 40nm that they have on 28nm.
This card is impressive because it raised the bar @ 1080p and being the fastest card is worth something. Bringing new levels of performance that were not available before is awesome. It's a subpar nvidia flagship though imo, and using Tom's results, is less of an improvement over the 580 than the 7970 was over the 6970.
Yeah I care about 1600P, so I guess I am biased. :sneaky: Also, very surprised at nvidia shifting their emphasis from delivering the most performance they can, to lower performance but more efficiency. I don't like noise/heat, but don't care about power consumption, power is cheap in Canada - we make tons of it
while its subpar for an nVidia flagship its also very much well above par where their midrange performance has historically settled and thus bodes very well for any prospective "true" monster flagship part if we can correlate GF104/114 performance to GF100/110 performance and thus extrapolate what we might get from GK100/110 from GK104.
You said any game would break any configuration of hardware with mods. Which is 100% incorrect.
You are correct, the VRAM advantage is moot. I had a 2GB 6950 which was more than enough, too. You just made an incorrect blanket statement, that's all
wow, you are taking things way too literally, I had inferred anyone here would know that I meant any modifiable game could be made to break any hardware, which was what we were talking about
And really just about any PC game can be modded. The games you list simply aren't common for mods. Heck, I've already found mods for Witcher 2 and Mass Effect with some quick Google-Fu
http://kotaku.com/5880354/mod-makes-mass-effect-on-pc-look-absolutely-incredible/gallery/1
http://www.gamingreality.com/2011/06/witcher-2-mods-list.html
my point was that if someone with the know-how was determined enough they really could create a mod for any game that could make even the most powerful rigs come to a crawl
It doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to figure out why we don't see 3rd party image quality mods benchmarked (at least not on a regular basis as I'm sure you'd be quick to point out that someone, somewhere, at some point in time has done such tests, and I am sure it has happened)
People saying 3GB doesn't matter aren't the kinds of people who buy once and hang onto the card for 3+ years before upgrading again. 3GB VRAM and better high-res performance is more futureproof than 2GB with worse high-res performance. Esp. with 3D thrown in for good measure.
On the other hand: People who upgrade frequently don't really need that 3GB unless they are at very high res or 3D. Also, adaptive VSync, GPU Boost, PhysX, and CUDA may be attractive to some people.
its generally not very economical to blow your wad all at once and expect it to last: by the time the extra VRAM is truly a difference maker, chances are you're going to be turning settings down regardless because the GPU will have lost its edge and becomes a bottleneck on its own accord. It really would be better to spend half the money twice as frequently to keep up to date with midrange parts than to go all in with high end parts and cling to them for years and years.
Of course this is where AMD still has the advantage (and really has for some time) as they actually have "midrange" parts available for this generation and have typically had very strong offerings in that niche. Even though we could argue they are currently overpriced, they currently lack competition.
This is kind of round about thinking, they don't code a game so that it won't run on gaming machines. Developers and modders will however provide ways to leverage the bleeding edge.
That was my point, and it was also my point that the line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise we can always cook up some scenario where one option is better than another when those extreme scenarios really don't matter for the vast majority. If we throw enough 3rd party textures at a game, of course the GPU with more memory is going to favor from it. However most people simply won't care because most people aren't going to be running those mods.