No, what you don't understand is few people care about any of these things except performance when it comes to high end video cards. Less power? Really? You think owners of exotic sports cars are arguing about who gets better fuel economy? So long as it isn't like 5 MPG, no one shopping them is going to care how "economical" they are. If the difference in power bills between a Nano and a 980ti is something you lose sleep over, you're involved in the wrong hobby. The only reason anyone cared about the terrible power usage of the 290x was because of the godawful OEM cooler AMD slapped on it which made the card miserable to live with.
Card size? Again who cares? Cases are probably one of the least frequently upgraded components of a PC. Has anyone been sitting around hoping for a Nano sized card because their case can't accommodate a regular sized video card and they have been stuck with onboard video for the last 3 years? I own a Silverstone Fotress ft02 pictured below (not my system)
As you can see, there is ample space for expansion cards. I have no complaints about this case and plan to keep it for years to come. Give me a non-idiotic reason why I should want a smaller sized video card when I have such a case?
As I've already discussed earlier in the thread I'm not blinded by shiny new things. The age of the tech means nothing to me.
Just because you can come up with some niche scenario where any of these things matter, doesn't mean the rest of us need to care. This isn't an Nvidia vs AMD debate. As long as the video card is within reasonable bounds of all the things you listed, the only one I care at all about is the performance. Up to this point HBM has not demonstrated any real world benefit. The speed of the individual components is meaningless to me, only the performance of the finished product. If Matrox comes out of no where and releases a card with EDO DRAM that is faster than a card using HBM, that's what I will buy.
I agree. Power consumption and size goes out the window with high end parts. However, HBM is faster than GDDR5. The potential is there.
More importantly, you're overlooking an important part about HBM. It consumes less power. Now, I know. I just said it doesn't matter at the high end. But, it does matter. By consuming less power, NV/AMD can use that extra TDP on performance. NV/AMD seems to recognize that the max TDP for a reasonably sized high end GPU is around 250-275 watts.
Anandtech on GTX 980TI clock speed increase and performance vs power consumption.
Anandtech said:The gains from this overclock are a very consistent across all 5 of our sample games at 4K, with the average performance increase being 20%. ......
..... The cost of that 20% overclock in terms of power and noise is similarly straightforward. You're looking at an increased power cost of 30W or so at the wall in-line with the 25W increase in the cards TDP
By using HBM, you can expect to save roughly 20 watts or so in TDP.
Anandtech said:Whats the real-world advantage of a 15-20W reduction in DRAM power consumption? Besides being able to invest that in reducing overall video card power consumption, the other option is to invest it in increasing clockspeeds.
Now, I understand that 20 watts reduction doesn't sound like much. Fortunately, that 20 watts translates to 10-15% in performance increase on a GTX 980TI. So, it does matter.