- Joined
- Dec 24, 2015
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GTX 1080 after some thought isn't faster than 980 SLI, it's just faster in VR than SLI 980, maybe. These are only marketing numbers from Nvidia, to take with a grain of salt, I don't think they are accurate. I expect custom 1080 to be 10-20% faster than 980 Ti custom and 1070 clearly slower. I expect the 1070 to be 10-20% faster than 980 (non Ti)..
That is most likely the case, going by the Fire Strike numbers of the ~1800MHz GTX1080 from a couple of day ago.
Polaris on the other hand not only has the arguably better tech (14nm) but smaller chips too, they have no problems starting a price war with Nvidia. I expect R9 490 to be about ~ GTX 1070 level with a smaller chip and better production tech. The days of AMD, starting with the biggest chip and 384 bit, are over I guess. Wasn't exactly a smart move anyway (talking HD 7970, vs. the smaller, but more efficient GTX 680 back then). Now they are doing the opposite again, reminds me of HD 6970/6950 days vs GTX 560 Ti/570/580. Better be small and efficient than too big to fail. Price cuts/wars are no problem that way.
Edit: corrected 980 Ti SLI to 980 SLI.
Well... a couple of things to remember: First, if AMD doesn't clock Polaris high enough and focuses on power consumption, then even the Polaris10 XT won't beat the 1070. I do think that the Polaris 10 chip is highly capable of competing with the Fiji chip if clocked aggressively, which is the primary reason why the GP104 based cards are able to do so well against the GTX980 TI.
The second point to be made is Samsung's 14nm vs TSMC's 16nm finfet processes. I'm not sure which one is better, but the fact that AMD was able to cram 2560 SPs into a ~230mm^2 chips is impressive. Remember this is the same number of SPs that the full GP104 chip has.