Pascal was a price/perf/watt/temp balancing act that was never executed as well before. High clocking, relatively small dies with fantastic performance on a solid node. Excellent boost technology that would only keep giving. No frills or BS technology to hide something that was sub-par, because quite frankly there wasn't anything.
Sort of the place where RDNA2 is right now, as well.
We're quite the same then, but this is a forum, which is meant for talking
As much as Nvidia is ready to pre-empt and frontier with new technology, they're also the proprietary bosses that we never like to see. Its when DLSS can move to mainstream and GPU agnostic that we can start cheering universally, IMHO. I'm totally unimpressed when companies can fine tune a single title with manual work. Wooptiedoo, tons of hours went into making something nice, except you're done looking at it after a tiny fraction of said hours. That math doesn't check out and won't survive the market.
Pascal was called Paxwell for a reason. It was mostly just Maxwell on a smaller process, which allowed for higher clocks, plus a few optimizations.
Custom 980 Ti's beat custom 1070's out of the box. Maxwell overclocked way better than Pascal overall. Maxwell had alot left in the tank. Pascal did not. GPU Boost worked much better in Pascal, so headroom was lower.
GM200 especially had insane OC potential and headroom. Custom versions delivered like 15-20% performance over reference, and you could easily gain an additional 15-20% more.
There was a night and day difference between reference 980 Ti and a custom card with max OC. Nvidia gimped the reference card alot. Altho they still hit around 1450 MHz post OC, but could get noisy, custom cards were much cooler and quieter post OC. 980 Ti reference only ran around 1200 MHz 3D clocks at stock. Thats like 300-400 MHz lower than it potentially could.
At 1400-1450 MHz you were beating 1070 with ease. At 1550-1600 MHz you were around 1080 level and 6GB vs 8GB never really meant anything back then, 980 Ti had 384 bit bus afterall. 1070/1080 only 256 bit. Today 6 vs 8 might matter but none of the cards can max out games at 1440p anyway, so VRAM requirement won't be as high. Pretty much no games break 6GB usage at 1440p maxed out today. Only modded ones.
1080 Ti is the only Pascal card I remember as being truly great. Yet I would barely consider it being mid-end today.
I AM NOT SAYING 1080 is a bad card, I just say it's nothing spectacular. Maxwell was great too and IMO there was not much difference between Maxwell and Pascal.
970 was insane value even with the "3.5GB". Still holds up very well today in 1080p gaming. It was almost too close to 980. Nvidia separated x70 and x80 more since 900 series as a result (I guess - because 970 sold like crazy compared to 980)
The best GPUs in the last 10 years probably is 980 Ti, 1080 Ti, 7970 and 7950. Random order. All of them aged very well and/or overclocked alot.
Hell 7970 was released like 3 times; 7970 -> 7970 GHz Edition -> 280X
I remember when Cata 12.11 hit, Tahiti really took off then.
7970 @ 1200/1600 was my last AMD GPU.
I has no use for it, I only has experience with 1.0 which sucked and especially 2.0 which is great
