For the 100th time, RX480 is an HD7850/7870 replacement. It was never designed to compete with or outperform a GTX670/680 replacement card (that's 1070/1080). For the latter part of your post, it's factually incorrect. AMD held the performance crown with 9800XT, X800XT PE/X850XT PE, X1900XTX/X1950XTX, HD7970Ghz and using latest benchmarks R9 290X vs. 780Ti. It's also unrealistic to expect AMD to release a 230ish mm2 chip for $199 that beats NV's 314mm2 $379-449 chip. AMD would not leave $100-200 MSRP on the table like that for a faster chip.
That's not what they said. They insinuated that 3-way and 4-way SLI was going to work with a special Enthusiast Key but I could already tell it meant beyond 2-way SLI on 1070/1080 was not going to work well with games from that statement. Still, it is a change of marketing statement from what they said during the launch.
Factually incorrect again. NV never flat out state that the Enthusiast Key will not allow 3-way and 4-way SLI to work in games. It was implicit in their statements that the key would unlock 3/4-way capability in any apps where NV's driver was coded to take advantage of the extra cards. Now, they are flat out saying that they won't even code the driver for any game specifically for 3/4-way SLI. That's the difference you are missing.
Yup, he is just spinning it, doing his usual PR damage control. More signs nothing on the GPU industry that comes out of his this poster can be taken with any seriousness. The entire forum is better off putting him on ignore.
It would be smart of them to re-enable at least 3-way SLI on GP102 cards. This way even if they charge $799-899 for GTX1080Ti, there will instantly be gamers who'll buy upgrade from 1080 SLI to 3x 1080Tis because it would have been cheaper than 4x980Tis/Titan X's last gen. If NV is smart, they will do this.
In fairness, I think it's more fitting to focus on 2-way SLI than to have poor SLI support overall. I also think it's better to leave 3-4 way SLI to true flagships of a generation - 1080 isn't that product. What will be interesting to see is if all the gamers who bought 3-4 way SLI for years for supposedly superior gaming performance will now go AMD 4-way Vega if NV limits all of their cards to 2-way SLI only. :sneaky:
7970/Ghz was in the lead from June 2012 until May 2013 when 780 showed up. I am not including $1000 rip-off OG Titan as that was $ flushed right into the toilet. X1950XT series vs. 7900 series was also no contest, especially in shader intensive modern games at the time. AMD/ATI also had superior MSAA IQ for years.
NV's loyal customer will take this news as NV is re-doubling its efforts on 2-way SLI because they guys working on 3-4 way SLI will have more time devoted to 2-way SLI specifically. If this becomes true, we won't know for a while but in theory it makes sense. I think 2-way SLI is still very important. I am strongly considering getting 1070 SLI as 1080 seems like a rip-off and wouldn't even be an upgrade for me. In 5 years or so, I think unless things change, once GPUs become fast enough for 4K, multi-GPU might go away completely.
^^^
Point On