littleg
Senior member
- Jul 9, 2015
- 355
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You pointed out that the 7970ghz eventually pulled away from the 680 as befitted a high end card vs a midrange card.
Both cards retailed for $499. But the 680 which took the crown at release has failed to keep up.
ergo the 7970ghz which was basically equivalent when released was a better value over time than the 680 per your own comment.
This has been repeated with the 780 when it was the high end gaming card and to a lesser extent the 980.
My other point was if NV is going to use GDDR5X for Pascal instead of HBM2 then in my opinion it's due to a strong business case as opposed to a technical reason.
There's no reason for NV to skip HBM's superior power efficieny, form factor and bandwidth for pascal unless there is a significantly limited supply or a significant risk of delaying Pascal.
AMD doesn't have the luxury of waiting another round for HBM2, NV does.
Aside from potentially constrained initial supply, cost may be an issue for the low and mid range cards.
We don't have any data on the relative costs of GDDR5X vs HBM but if there is a non-trivial additional cost for HBM then that would drive the price of low and mid range cards up.
Both vendors will have price points they want to hit in each segment for optimal volume and profit. It may be the case that it's not really feasible at the moment to offer a card in the lower segments of the market with HBM and still hit those price points.