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Pretty much the same performance as the 780 ti only it looks better and runs a bit cooler due to less power consumption, wow Nvidia you blew my mind!

The performance and features that the 970 in particular offers at its current price point presents a serious challenge to AMD, who have already tightened their belt on this generation to the point that they don't have a lot of room to move down further. If nV is able to get a 960 out based on a cut-down GM204, a la the Kepler generation's 600-series running on nearly one chip the whole time, that'll be extremely hard for AMD to match in the price bracket.

With regard to it being a "hoax," not sure how delivering such a tremendous perf:watt ratio improvement within the same process node is at all a hoax, but I kinda get the feeling that you might not really be talking about the industry so much as your own feelings on what a company is up to.

Which is fine, but, a different thing. You'd be mistaken to accuse virtually anyone of working toward efficiency right now of "hoaxing" anyone. Find the company having no issues scaling designs down to a 20nm or lower process that actually provides a significant improvement in distances for the transistors; Intel has what's looking to be the only remotely mature process for complex circuits, but process lithography for 3D requires some significant changes from previous patterning. Many of the specific patterns available for planar designs on a double-patterned process are invalid for non-planar designs. Lithography is still working with lasers an order of magnitude larger than the process they're working on.

What would you prefer?

I'm feeling hoaxed because there is no real innovation here that justifies the leap from 780 to 980.
I agree that the perf:watt ratio improvement is nice but it doesnt really interest gamers, performance that's the name of the game.

Besides the 1/3rd less power, the cores on the 980 are like 40% more powerful. The 980 will also intro MFAA anti aliasing which in short will give 8X quality at 4X speed. So, like if you're lagging at an 8X setting for example, lowering to 4X will give roughly an 8X quality at 4X's better speed.

I'm still really pleased with the GTX Titan Black 6GB in my new PC, it's killing everything I play. But the reality is it was about $1000 bux where as the 980 4GB is like $550 bux, or $100 to $150 less than a 780 ti prox. And the 970 is like $330.

All in all, not so bad really as a replacement for the well liked 780 ti. And the still to come 980 TI will be an even better replacement.




[Edited by element5, 9/25/2014 2:49:36 AM]

Replacement maybe, revolutionary successor hardly.

Gamers (and computer users in general) are going to have to get used to a slower cadence for improvement. I'm surprised most aren't already; we've been at the same TSMC process node for the last three generations now on nVidia's side (Kepler 1/GK104 doing the heavy lifting mainly, Kepler 2/GK110/210 introduction, Maxwell as 750Ti/GM107 and Maxwell as GTX 970 and 980/GM204). Consoles stuck us in DirectX9 for years and years.

Show me the people doing what nVidia isn't and I'll cede the point, but literally every company from integrated SoC makers to NAND makers to RAM makers to affiliated-fabs for companies like nVidia and AMD are -all- approaching things efficiency first. It is critical, because we're not going to get the kind of process node shrink march of progress that we were counting on before we understood how difficult it is to fab a single chip, or how expensive.

The economics that we had hoped for in accordance with the prediction of Moore's observation aren't holding true anymore. Transistor density is not doubling every two years. Performance that in previous generations has just been left on the table because a new process was coming soon and taping out a chip is incredibly involved so all resources had to be devoted to the new design instead of getting the most out of the old. Now, we've got companies actually spending time at a given node and working a great deal of additional performance out of it based on actual architectural refinements.

GM204 is still a 5+ billion transistor chip, enormous processing power on the order of, what, 5 TFLOPs, and yet they have it down to a 165W TDP. Compared to Kepler, already an extremely efficient design, that's down a solid two billion transistors from a GTX 780Ti, a card that draws 265W easy.

AMD is doing the same thing with Tonga, essentially tuning the crap out of their Tahiti XT architecture to improve efficiency. Thus far it's not been as impressive of a showing, and it would be a problem for them to deprecate their existing GCN 1.1+ parts because they can't really afford to quit making them yet (while nVidia has relied largely on die-harvested Tesla/Quadro intended chips for their top end product stack, AMD doesn't really have the same luxury as they are not well featured at all in the HPC markets apart from some linpack trick machines).

I don't see the problem. Amazing improvements to thread/warp scheduling and execution pipeline improvements bring the shader unit count down but efficiency dramatically up; an even more modular design than Kepler, with 128SMs per SMM as opposed to Kepler's 192 per SMX. Kepler had some odd situations because of its emphasis on efficiency and modularity, notably that the 650Ti and GTX 780 both had a peculiar situation where an academic difference in GPC count could occur based on which parts of the full chip had to be harvested; nVidia is good at running a full product stack from a relatively small chip base. AMD has no such luck at the moment and has tons of SKUs being actively fabbed right now.

Help me find the issue that nVidia isn't addressing but other companies are. Even the HPC side of things is virtually the same - look at what Intel is doing with an evolutionary approach, refining old P6 u-arch for ultra-parallelism for Knight's Landing. Efficiency efficiency efficiency, because believe it or not, efficiency has way more to do with performance than one might think if all one cares about is getting a vastly higher 3Dmark score one card generation to another

[Edited by Agreed, 9/25/2014 2:58:31 AM]

You hit the nail right on the head. While yes the new cards are not as big an improvement over the previous generation, they are more efficient in using what they have. One of the best examples is when I look at my Brother's and my Gaming PC's. We built them a year apart. Both systems have the same configuration, but different processors. His machine uses the Intel i7 2700K and I went with it's equivalent from a year later a i7 3770K. They both have the same clock speed, cache, and chipset. My 3770K is not noticeably faster, but it has a TPD of only 77W versus the 2700K's 95W.

Nvidia has been churning out cards a bit faster lately for sure, but that right there should tell you that not every card is going to be a "next gen" piece of technology. The 780s are a year old now and for people who are really into new parts it's worth it.

It's down to is it worth it for you? For me, I have a 690 and I want an upgrade, for me the 980 is a nice jump. The processing power alone is an increase I'm willing to pay for. Not to mention it's keeping a low power requirement, which keeps my heat level down and since this card is supposed to handle MFAA pretty well I'm certainly considering upgrading.