Nvidia is anything but a quiet company. They have branding out the wazoo, and their CEO is pretty much a larger than life personality.
AMD has nothing close. Richard Huddy might be the closest they had to anything like that.
The problem has always been image. There was a TED (not TEDX) talk about it. The strongest images stem from "why", a purpose, conviction, or ideal that they sell. In that regard AMD sits at the bottom. It feels like they're a directionless company, not even in a financial or tech sense, the company simply looks like it lacks conviction from the outside. Leaders like Intel and Nvidia who dominate their markets may simply let their products, promotions, and market dominance speak for them, but AMD really can't afford to keep quiet.
Roy Taylor is probably good for them in some way. He was the one behind Nvidia's TWIMTBP IIRC, which went well for them. He helped create the image that Nvidia seeks to deliver the best gaming experience, bar none. The name is self explanatory. Now he's at AMD, goading people on twitter and what not, trying to rally the fanboys and build fervor. It's a good idea. AMD needs a strong personality.
All this talk about brand loyalty is just useless if Nvidia does not have the top performance. The minute AMD have a faster GPU the enthusiasts will switch without any hesitation. There will be a few who stick to Nvidia due to some negative experience with AMD products in the past but the vice versa also happens.
This is simply not true at all.
It has happen before (HD5870 era)
There are very few actual enthusiasts in that case.
Just a small headsup about recent rumors from China:
R9 370 is supposedly exactly 62% faster than R9 270
Just a small headsup about recent rumors from China:
R9 370 is supposedly exactly 62% faster than R9 270
That would put it a bit ahead of AIB OCed 960s so if it's efficient might be some decent price competition ahead.
Just a small headsup about recent rumors from China:
R9 370 is supposedly exactly 62% faster than R9 270
World of Warcraft: WoD
AIB OC 960 at 165.3 FPS vs R9 270X at 119.9 FPS
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_G1_Gaming/25.html
Here's an attempt to make sure there was plenty of action on the screen:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/World...ials/Test-Benchmarks-Tuning-Tipps-1142547/#a5
WoW has always favored Nvidia cards quite heavily.
Again not raiding environment. WoW in raids is very CPU bound and one of the things that adds to the CPU bottleneck is combat log parsing. Back in Throne of Thunder hunters were able to bring down the FPS in raids dawn to a crawl just by summoning 4 extra pets. That's something you can't simulate outside of raids.
Sure, a 980 can bring you nice FPS in the open world, but that isn't going to be the case in raids. There are people running a 970 and get FPS as low as 40 and that's in the garrison.
so would the performance penalty be larger on amd cards?
A lot of sites that claim AMD is going to re-brand Hawaii without a replacement GPU to compete with 970/980 is going to have egg on their faces. It's a ridiculous assumption because R290/X cannot compete with 970/980 long term (its only a stop gap solution). It uses 75-100W more and is slower. Nobody in their right mind would buy it when its priced similar to the 970. If its priced much lower, AMD may as well burn money because a 512 bit bus PCB with that TDP and 4GB vram is not cheap for their margins & AIB profits to be worthwhile.
I was just going by the core games where Nvidia does very well at 1080P vs AMD GCN cards as that will be the main driver of any price warring in that SKU bracket, imo.
World of Warcraft: WoD
AIB OC 960 at 165.3 FPS vs R9 270X at 119.9 FPS
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_G1_Gaming/25.html
Watch Dogs:
AIB OC 960 56.6 FPS vs R9 270X 42.8 FPS
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_G1_Gaming/23.html
Given AMD's anemic marketing and Nvidia's well financed and managed marketing, especially social media and steering tech review coverage, they'll need to be clearly ahead performance wise to drive prices down. Being faster in everything, or nearly so, won't be something that can be countered by mere marketing spin.
That's called cherry picking. Russians overall using TPU is more accurate. Saying that though, I'll be really surprised if the 370 can match 780 performance. We'll see???
Now we have journalists saying 390X performance is a lot more than the leaks at R290X + 50% at similar power..
That's called cherry picking. Russians overall using TPU is more accurate. Saying that though, I'll be really surprised if the 370 can match 780 performance. We'll see???
Not very optimistic about 390X in light of Titan X's release. NV seems pretty confident about what's to come from AMD camp. As an aside, I have a hunch that TSMC is playing favoritism as well. Reviews do not mention it (not because they write in bad faith but because they do not have information) but majority of Maxwell's efficiency gain probably has direct correlation with improved TSMC's 28nm. Qualcomm benefited hugely from that as well on mobile front last year.
One can dream of a 2nd coming of HD 5870. That card debuted @$370, shattering all performance records at the time by huge margins. Oh and the first DX10 compliant. A card like that from either camp might rekindle my enthusiasm on PC gaming.