Judging by what's happened regularly with nVidia. Driver optimizations for Maxwell in new games is due to stop when GP102 releases. You won't be liking the 970 when that happens.
I noticed the prices dropping for last generation cards and so I made a performance/price comparison between GTX960, GTX970, RX 480 and GTX 1060.
I used Tomshardware for benchmarks and I eliminated the tests that seem to show poor scaling with the GPUs or skewed results in favor of AMD or nVidia. Out of 8 DX11 games I was left with only 4.
Hitman was showing better performance in general, under AMD cards.
Project CARS had more love for nVidia.
The Division and The Witcher 3 are not scaling well (CPU bottleneck ? dunno ...)
The prices are in euro without vat, cheapest cards on the market. The performances are relative to GTX 970.
Code:| | DX12 | DX11 | GPUs | Price | Perf. | FPS/Price | Perf. | FPS/Price | ---------------------------------------------------------------- GTX 960 | 131 | 62.91% | 0.205 | 61.33% | 0.425 | GTX 970 | 212 | 100.00% | 0.201 | 100.00% | 0.428 | RX 480 | 256 | 112.91% | 0.188 | 90.45% | 0.321 | GTX 1060 | 259 | 107.75% | 0.177 | 107.73% | 0.378 |
Seems to me this is a good time to buy a GTX 970.
Another thing to mention. Very few models of RX480 were available (3-4 models, but I don't know about actual quantities) and were sold in 2-3 days.
GTX 1060 came with a lot of models and now are almost all out of stock (to be available again in few days).
The writing's on the wall for 970, it's FPS/$ will shine bright until the end of the year then become the first tragic casualty of the DX12/Vulkan onslaught.Seems to me this is a good time to buy a GTX 970.
Seems to me this is a good time to buy a GTX 970.
I noticed the prices dropping for last generation cards and so I made a performance/price comparison between GTX960, GTX970, RX 480 and GTX 1060.
I used Tomshardware.
I keep hearing the argument with DX 12.
DX12 is not an issue and will not be for years. Some of the mainstream games only recently migrated to DX11. Some are on older APIs.
Stop right there, you had to discard so many games because of crazy bias. Come on, Toms included such old games, who plays Metro anymore. Project Cars? Why, when Forza 6 kills it for visuals, performance and driving sim?
Some very interesting die shot of Polaris 11:
Does anybody know what's interesting with this?!
GloFo made Polaris 10, it's USA plant. Why does this have a Made in Taiwan stamp on the die itself?
http://www.globalfoundries.com/about/vision-mission-values/globalfoundries-fast-facts
Is there a Samsung 14nm FF production in Taiwan??
From time to time I'm playing something like Skyrim or I would like to play The Witcher 3.
Well I think we can put to rest this idea of AIBs doing a better job with their versions of the RX480
It's simpleGloFo made Polaris 10, it's USA plant. Why does this have a Made in Taiwan stamp on the die itself?
Well I think we can put to rest this idea of AIBs doing a better job with their versions of the RX480
<SNIP>
A full 80 watts more than the 1060, for less performance. The RX480 doesnt even beat the 970 in terms of performance per watt.
<SNIP>
It's simple
- Waffers and dies are manufactured at GloFo USA
- Die/chip packaging done at Taiwan
It's GCN 1.0 vs Kepler all over again. RX 480 was possibly the worst foot to put forward after singing about efficiency for the last few months. The switch and bait "we meant the RX 470" isn't helping their cause.
Well I think we can put to rest this idea of AIBs doing a better job with their versions of the RX480
A full 80 watts more than the 1060, for less performance. The RX480 doesnt even beat the 970 in terms of performance per watt.
Normally that's the stamp on the package.
Stamp on the die *usually* is from source of production.
Well it's a big step for them, Hawaii vs Maxwell was much much worse.
As for performance:
Power usage for Asus 480 is onpar with custom 1060. Performance is single digit % different. Pretty close and these guys didn't include the other DX12 titles.
Guess what happens when they throw in a few more DX12 titles in their benchmark suite? We'll see it in a few months.
One card vs the rest of the cards. This iteration of Polaris 10 came out as a pig. And users are being told to fiddle with options to address its hunger. I doubt the majority of users will go the extra mile.
Throw in DX12 I'm pretty sure power consumption will go up some more. Unless you think those idle bits won't use power when they get called in to service.
If you mean turning the fan up, sure. That will get you the 1266 boost as well. I already tested it and works fine as well.
I don't think it's crazy to adjust a fan profile, but that's just me.
Convo is about power draw, not thermal throttling.
If one does the extra steps to crank down the power draw, the fan change isn't necessary.
For the average consumer you're right. AMD screwed the pooch here by launching the card with overly aggressive voltage profiles and aftermarket cards are hit and miss (just look at the Asus vs. Sapphire power consumption differences).
However you can't really ignore the elephant in the room. Having native hardware support for DX12/Vulcan will *improve* performance per watt per frame for the 480's and likely erase any power efficiency lead the 1060 has.