Be Excellent To Each Other

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/kfa2-gef ... 87-kf.html

That is your $599 card. It should cost around £499 but quelle surprise it doesn't. This is pretty much more of the same.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-gefo ... 26-ms.html

But has MSI tax on it. However, those coolers are utter rubbish. They were provided on the 980ti for a lower price but they're noisy and not very efficient. They're plastic too...

From what I have seen the biggest seller so far has been the EVGA FTW because at one point yesterday it was the cheapest card with two power connectors. People are convinced that it will do far more than 2.1ghz with better power delivery. However, from what I have seen from actual owners so far the card has shitty yields once you hit 2ghz, indicating strongly that Nvidia have basically wrung its neck.

Not only that dude but in the actual real world it's 300 points faster than an overclocked 980ti in Firestrike Extreme. The 1080 @ 2.1ghz 100% fan (or it throttles within minutes) scores around 5500 and the 980ti Amp ! clocked to 1.5ghz scores 5200.

I was trying to think of why this could be, then it dawned on me. All of the reviewers were using 5960x CPUs which really change the entire structure of Firestrike, given that it will use as many cores as you can throw at it...

Honestly, this really is 780ti - 980 all over again. When the dust settles and all is said and done this card will be about 5% faster than the 980ti.

So, with that said, I would keep an eye out for 980ti prices. If you can get one at around £350 then do so. I mean fuck I just saw one sell today for £330. Was an MSI dual fan Armor X2....

I also predict that real world numbers on the 1070 are going to be quite disappointing because not only is it clocked slower (something you don't usually see from lower end cards with less going on) but it also has a whopping 30% less shaders. There's a high chance it will not be as good as the 980ti and could cost around the same. Nvidia made mistakes with the 980 and 680 because they were both barely any faster than their "70" siblings yet both made their big brothers redundant. So I predict (well I don't, Nvidia have come out and said so) that the 1070 will be quite a chunk slower this time around and will make more people want the 1080 at its incredibly bloated price.

I also think that they are playing the wolf in sheep's clothing trick and playing "good cop bad cop". People see the price of the Flounders Edition then say "Fuck me a FTW for £30 less !" and buy. That seems to be the general consensus. One guy on OCUK posted a thread thanking OCUK for their prices on the after market cards so it all seems to have worked swimmingly.

Oh yeah forgot to say that I fitted my hydro kit ! The guy I bought it from negated to tell me that it was actually the 980 kit (they're all the same apart from the shrouds). So it had an unused 980 shroud. So I cracked out my plotter and bought some brushed alu vinyl and chrome vinyl and sorta made it my own.



Here it is fitted.



I loaded up EVGA Precision X and eventually settled for 1400 on the core with no change to the memory. This makes it dead even with the 1080. If I pushed on I would need to install a third party bios to unlock the voltage and TBH I see absolutely no point. It just eats anything I throw at it.

I bought this today too, given how well Windows 10 seems to handle multiple sound devices (I've currently got a SB XFI Titanium HD, Aune tube amp DAC (its own sound device) and a Xonar USB external powering the speakers).



I will set it up so that the Graham Slee Novo (very spenny headphone amp) powers the Grado RS2E, the Aune will power my Musical Fidelity cans (very bassy good for rap and beat driven music) and these will be connected to the Asus.



Which are supposedly out for delivery today

The 980Ti would have to be quite a lot cheaper than the 1080 to make sense though, even if the 1080 is 'only' 10% faster or something like that.

I'll stick around and wait for all the reviews and benchmarks to come in. There really isn't any hurry, especially since I still mostly play Hearthstone

You spent £500 on a Titan X two weeks ago, and then spent more money on a hydro cooler. It doesn't matter if the cash came from other parts you sold on at a loss or cash you had in your pocket.

Ars on the GTX 1080: "Faster, cheaper, quieter than Titan X"

Of course they were. That's because the idiots on the forums you get all your advice from will fall for any old shitty thing. Maybe -- maybe -- nVidia actually have power delivery problems on the board. Or more likely, that second connector is the GPU equivalent of go-faster strips and a whale tail added to an Escort XR3i.


"Oh noes my card has no headroom for overclocking and only performs at the published specified level."


Assuming what you've said is true, the correct conclusion here is "Firestrike is a shitty benchmark because it's CPU bound." I have no idea how you've arrived at "the GTX 1080 isn't very fast."


5%, you say. Uh-huh.



(122 - 95) / 95 = 28%. You can narrow that gap by overclocking the 980Ti, and you can move the numbers around a little by choosing a different game from a different GTX 1080 review, but you can't make it 5%.

I tried to multi quote you but for some reason it kept all of my quotes in there too. I CBA to sort it out so I will reply to your post with bullets, providing of course you weren't just being obnoxious. If you were then just argue with yourself I have no wish to argue with you.

* I did spend £540 on a Titan X yes. However, that was not cash from my pocket and had I put it there I would have rendered two computers unusable. Maybe one day when I quit using games altogether I may sell up and pocket the cash but I would still need a PC as all of my sound equipment is driven by a computer.

* I don't get advice from forums. In fact, I have stopped posting on pretty much all computer forums because they defy logic and common sense. These days I only post on one forum I have been a member on for many years and it's not terribly exciting. I read other forums yes, and I am glad that I do. As you say, when you see idiots part with £650 you tend to learn very quickly that they should have just kept their 980tis instead of making a massive loss on them for hardly any more real world performance.

* Since when has a computer part that can not be overclocked been good? That's the whole point to overclocking, free performance. If Nvidia are doing it and charging you for it then that kind of defeats the point.

* Firestrike is CPU bound yes. However, what evidence do we have of the 1070? a Firestrike score. One that makes it look better than Titan X. A stock Titan X.

* Yes, I say 5% and yes, you can make it 5%. I've seen Firestrike Extreme (the best scenario for any GPU) scores where the 1080 hit 5500 points at 2.1ghz (on a 5820k, so the score was lower than benchmarks using the 5960x) and the overclocked 980ti managed to hit 5300. From where I'm sitting that sounds right around 5%.

Going back to that review for a moment. I figured I would benchmark my Titan X and see how close I could get by running the Tomb Raider benchmark. Only he's not given exact details just -

"Each game was tested at 1080p, 1440p, and UHD (4K) resolutions at high or ultra settings, along with both a stock and overclocked 1080."

So basically he's not going to tell me which settings he used exactly so I can't run the benchmark to find out.

I can't overclocking my power supply.

I'll throw it away.

I over clocked my monitor and now it's got more colours

OK I decided to bench Tomb Raider. First I benched it on high but I just got silly FPS. Like 140+. So I decided to use his 1440p benchmark. He's using DX11 (because nothing Nvidia make is very good in TR DX12) and I used ultra settings.

My GPU is overclocked to 1364mhz but for some reason in this game the clocks show lower. I am not thermal throttling though as you can see from the temps.

My score.



So just over 80 FPS. This is his score.



OK so he scored 90 with his 1080 overclocked. If we just took the two scores at face value we would be looking what? 10-11% yes? only there are differences. He is running a 5930k @ 4.5ghz. Whilst my CPU is pretty much the same (5820k) I can only get 4.4ghz game stable out of mine. He is also running 3000mhz ram, I am running 2133.

However the biggest issue is throttling. The guy in the review is highly likely to have used a open bench to test the 1080. Well here is what happens in a Fractal Define S....



So even when the card is holding its full overclock it only scores 10-11% faster than a Titan X @ 1364mhz. If I upped the clocks obviously that gap would close but I CBA. However, most good 980ti (the Zotac card for example) can do 1500mhz. This then brings that gap in even closer.

My clocks and temps for reference.



You'll also find that Tomb Raider is one of the better games for the 1080. However, if I'm able to close that gap to 10% with a two minute overclock then I'm sure I would be able to close it even more if I pushed on. I don't need to though, because I pretty much knew what Pascal was going to be before it even came out. It's just a die shrunk Maxwell on speed.

I do spend most of my free time reading up on these things and studying them. I like to see everyone's opinion (because there are no reviewers just salesmen) and from that I can garner the facts. The people who bought them on OCUK for example are pretty gutted with them, as once again they have been made out to look about as good as they can be by Nvidia but in the cold light of day they've just sold a card for £350 and bought one for £650 and gained hardly anything. And this was the case when people were panicked into selling their 780ti and buying a 980 that ended up being about 8% faster when both were overclocked. No reason at all to spend £650.

The next card to have is the 1080ti. However, Nvidia have now set a new precedent and I can guarantee it will be 800 notes or more. It would be, it's a larger die that costs much more to produce and uses more wafer than a 1080.

Couple of other things I should mention. My card is only running at X8



Which could lose me 3% of full X16 performance. I know why. It's because the board I have has a very odd way of distributing the lanes. I could get X16 if I moved it down a slot but for the extra performance I would get out of it (and disrupting the entire airflow of the rig) I decided to leave it.

I have also not overclocked the memory on my Titan X either. I should be able to get it to overclock but it's something I don't really want to entertain as it could lead to damage, even without extra voltage shoved through it.

So yeah, that's about it really. Open up EVGA precision X, move a slider and you will be within 10% of the 1080, even overclocked, all of the time.

Quick n dirty 1414mhz.

I agree that the 1080 may not be a massive performance hike over the 980Ti, but if the prices of the two cards are close, then there's no reason not to get the 1080 over the 980Ti.

Current snapshot from prices at Overclockers are £480 for the cheapest 980Ti, and £525 for the cheapest 1080 (that 'cheap' 1080 must have appeared some time this afternoon, because it wasn't there the last time I posted to this thread).

At those prices the 1080 is the obvious choice, but if the prices of the 1080 hold firm at north of £500, and the 980Ti drops down to maybe £350 or less - then yes, you could make a case for the 980Ti, as it'll be a monster at 1440p, and there's still no single GPU that can properly handle 4K, be it 980Ti or 1080. (I envisage sticking to 1440p for the foreseeable future.)

It'll be interesting to see how the prices of everything settle down, and of course the 980Ti won't be around for that much longer now either.

I don't think you will see massive price drops on stock already for sale. People will want to go SLI so they will probably still sell.

However, as you and I both know Hearthly OCUK do get stock later on for a fraction of the original RRP. As such both you and I gave purchased Fermi cards for a snip (£175 here for a GTX 470, £230 for a revised 6979 Lightning and your 480 was very cheap too).

Around two months back OCUK got a large shipment of MSI cards (780 gaming,780ti gaming, 6gb 780) and were selling them off cheap. IIRC it was £140 for the gaming, £165 for the 6gb and £220 for the TI).

The 980ti was a big seller so we could see remaining stock being sold on the cheap.

BTW I also got my GPU clock wrong. I am running 250mhz over stock so 1290 or so, not the much higher clocks Precision is showing.

Fckin auto correct *fumes*

Did some more research last night and it seems I didn't quite get GPU Boost 2.0 (which the Titan X uses). Apparently there is the base clock (which goes up when you add mhz) then there's the boost clock (which goes up when you add mhz) and then there is some sort of Direct X game boost. So I was actually running the card at 1414mhz. I decided to wind it back 20mhz to keep the VRMs cool and instead take a look at this memory overclocking malarkey. Apparently the Titan X uses very good Samsung memory, so overclocking is easy. Didn't touch the volts and instead of going for the 500mhz extra that seems to be the norm I added 400mhz. And...



So in Tomb Raider I am now within spitting distance of the 1080. In other news : 1080 buyer is absolutely gutted.



That's taken from a forum I read. You can see there how much of a difference a 5960x makes to the score. I can only get about 16k with my GPU on the CPU I have.

Any way what to take of all this? well, not much really. If the 1070 were not about to launch (which obviously won't be quite as good as a 1500mhz 980ti but will be new and cheap) then it would have more of a point to it. However, the 1070 is about to launch and when it settles down it will make the 980ti look expensive, even at £330 or so. I guess if the price of the 980ti were to literally drop through the floor at around £250 then it could still be a great buy if you find somewhere selling them that cheap

So many gutted people across the net right now though. They fell for it. Another genius stroke from Nvidia... Take Maxwell, shrink it down and overclock it to buggery and call it Pascal. 18 months ago there was to be no "Pascal" it was Maxwell and then Volta. So no doubt now they are going to shrink down Titan X, sell that as a new Titan and 1080ti and then.... Well actually Nvidia are not using the full sized Pascal die for either card. They are going to cut it around first, so they may even be able to squeeze another launch out of it before they even get to business with Volta.

Again JC I'm not really disagreeing with anything you're saying, although I can't personally remember any grand claims for Pascal ahead of release that suggested it was much more than a die shrink of Maxwell with the accompanying clock-bump. (Which given how good Maxwell is, is still pretty good.)

With AMD in the doldrums it makes no sense for Nvidia to blow their own products out of the water with the launch of the new cards. Leaving the 1080Ti up its sleeve for a few months down the line is a reasonable move too, from a business perspective at least.

Anyone who's believed the hype and dropped full price on a 1080 Founder's Edition to replace a 980Ti without even waiting for some real world benchmarks and reviews, particularly from the user community, probably has more money than sense so might not be that bothered anyway

Nvidia need to be properly challenged by AMD in the GPU arena, the same as needs to happen to Intel in the CPU arena - whether or not AMD is capable of that though, remains to be seen.

Both of them are great cards. Both of them are too expensive, especially for what they are. If you take a look at this slide you can see there is no Pascal.



After Maxwell we were headed straight for Volta. Only after AMD started fucking things up all of a sudden we get Pascal.



I would stick my neck out and say that Pascal is literally what that Scottish chap said it was - Maxwell on a die shrink (or on speed as he put it). It was probably just a test by Nvidia to see how Finfet production went. Yet all of a sudden AMD fuck up and it becomes a reality.

TBH? I would say fair play to them if it were not for the price and their marketing behaviour. All of the reviews are gimping the cards we had before making these cards look like must haves. For example the 1080 is clearly being marketed at every one, not the 980 users it is supposed to court. They are clearly showing it beating their Titan X by 30%. Yet in the only benchmark that gave a clue to the settings used I got within 4% or so.

And now the hype train marches on with the 1070 also "Thrashing the Titan X" as the forum user who uploaded this picture declared.



Here we can clearly see it well ahead of the Titan X and even a "980ti OC". However, when we step back into reality and overclock a Titan X here is what happens.



And the link.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/12239746?

Only it won't let me actually validate my score because my CPU apparently is running at 0mhz. However, all I did was boost the CPU to 4.4ghz using the Alienware tools and overclocked the GPU by 250mhz on the core (1414mhz DX11 boost speed) and 400mhz on the memory and I am within 1% of a 1080.

The 1080 and 1070 are fantastic feats of engineering, not design. The design was already done with Maxwell and the engineering was the Finfet process. And that's fantastic for everyone, all apart from the price Nvidia are asking. I just feel that they are never worth the asking price given that in theory (because the dies are far smaller and that means massive yield improvements in % over bigger dies) and that Nvidia are just taking the piss.

So what you're saying is a £500 Titan X plus an aftermarket water cooler plus a hefty overclock is almost as fast in a single synthetic benchmark as a £525 1080 with the stock air cooler at normal clockspeeds? Amazing result.

Oh, and a new Titan X appears to be £900 on OCUK. So to summarise: you think it's outrageous that a new £525 graphics card is only very slightly faster than the old £900 graphics card, if you spend further £££ on a water cooler and overclock the £900 card without mercy.

That's not quite how it is though is it? yesterday I benched the Titan X against an overclocked 1080 using a game and came to within about 4%. I had a slower CPU and far slower ram (which does make a difference if you look here).

http://www.techspot.com/article/1171-dd ... page3.html

I managed 5 or so FPS lower than the 1080 with my overclocked Titan X. That is not synthetics that is a game (ROTTR) sadly given how scant these settings are being used I can't really compare my card to the 1080 in much else, however I would imagine that is deliberate. I benched my card in Firestrike vs the 1070 just to show that the 1070 is not actually faster like pretty much every review depicts.

On paper at the clock speeds I am running the Titan X should be up to 10% faster than the 1080. However, other factors are kicking in here like the fact that the reviews I am going up against use faster memory and higher overclocks on the CPU than I can. And that's understandable really, I'm just a lowly buyer not some one who continually has engineering samples thrown in his lap

I'm not exactly running a hefty overclock either. My Firestrike score was with my GPU clocked to 1414mhz Direct X 11 boost (which is higher than the clocks you can see, you work it out as you overclock and run DX11 basically) which is the clock I managed to settle on that was fully stable after two days of benching and over six hours of gameplay. I did push it higher but without adding any voltage (which I was not prepared to do as it could lead to real damage) 1414 was where I settled.

The card I am running does have an aftermarket cooler yes. However, they can be bought like this (though sit yourself down for the price).

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/evga-gef ... 87-ea.html

The cooler does help a lot but even on air users can push 200mhz extra through EVGA Precision X, which will bring them to a rough boost speed of 1364mhz in game boost mode. This is only 50mhz shy of what I managed to do with a liquid cooler, so temps are not the limiting factor with the Titan X. It's more down to the 6+2 phase design and the fact that you can not overvolt the card without adding a custom bios. However, if you are brave there's another 100mhz to be had and I've seen them clock to 1550mhz.

TBH? the best card to buy right now would probably be the 980ti. Most came with custom coolers for £520 new and most can do at least 1450mhz because they have slightly cut back cores when compared to the Titan X. I would say at around £300 or less (because they soon will be due to the 1070) they would actually be the better buy.

Just noticed your second post. I didn't pay £1050 for my card and I am comparing it to a £620 card that has serious issues due to throttling and fan speeds (see here).

https://www.techpowerup.com/222895/nvid ... ing-issues

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... an-issue-/

So what I am basically saying is it's probably better to hoover up a nice cheap 980ti and overclock it yourself.

You didn't pay £900 for your Titan X because you bought a second hand cut-price one. It's nonsense to compare that to a brand-new anything.

Also, you just boasted that even at £500+ for Titan X plus cooler (£1100 new, you just linked to), it was "within 1%" of the 1070. The 1070 is a $449 card. Which makes the 1070 sound amazing.

Edit -- wait there's more! $449 is the stupid Founders Edition. Third party cards will be around $379. And you're recommending a "nice cheap" £475 980Ti instead, right?

I'm saying buy a second hand 980ti at around £300, or, just less than the equivalent 1070 because the 980ti is the better card. Most come highly boosted out of the box too (like the Zotac amp). I guess you are not seeing the prices I am, but on current pricing a 980ti (even before the 1070) they are going for £320.

My Titan X is not within 1% of a 1070 either, it's a good 10% faster. That's in the only benchmark I can run and get accurate results from because the rest are all very vague. I do know that only ROTTR has a built in bench and the other stuff they could bench on any level with any settings and I would not be able to accurately replicate those benchmarks/games.

When you consider that the 970 launched for £239 and on release day you could buy one with a pretty pants cooler for £250 and £281 for the MSI gaming card (which was about the most popular) $450 sounds a bit off. That will probably equate to £400 on launch for the FE cards and maybe if you are lucky you may bag one for £350 with a pants cooler. Over £100 more than they charged for the 970. And in performance terms it's pretty much the same leap from the high end card it "replaced". What I mean is it reviewed to be much faster than a GTX 780 or Titan yet when you overclocked either there wasn't much in it but at least it only cost £250 or so.

Also don't even compare that £525 card because it is even worse than the FE, which is already pretty appalling. Still waiting on real world figures for the hefty cards with enormous coolers and silly power phases.

I'll just sit on my current PC for as long as it takes for all this to settle down and the facts of the case become clear.

I'm not even sure why I'm keen to spend £1500+ on a new PC when all my current one really does is Hearthstone, fruit machine emulators, MAME and Pinball Arcade.

Still, new shiny thing, innit.

http://videocardz.com/60631/asus-rog-st ... erclocking

Oh dear oh dear.

So the small Polaris has now surfaced. Stock performance is on par with the 970 and 390 however apparently it overclocks to about the speed of an overclocked 980. For $199 !

The price combined with the performance and power consumption could be a winner for AMD. Hurrah ! And with Vega due October/next year depending on who you believe they could well be firing up the big engines too.







Oh yeah,overclocked 1070 vs overclocked 980ti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMr7grvBljk

7% slower than the 980ti when overclocked. That makes sense, because from the limited testing I have done the 1070 was 10% slower than an overclocked Titan X when overclocked. Which is about spot on. Titan X is 3% faster than the 980ti at the same clocks, 980ti clocks slightly higher (usually toward the 1500mhz mark rather than 1400mhz of the Titan X) so can make up the difference.

I expected this. Even overclocked the 1070 only closes the gap to 11% with the 1080 at stock. Overclocked the 1080 jumps back into the lead by 21%. I heard that Nvidia did not want the same scenario with the 670 and 970 where both could be overclocked to perform around the same as their stock larger siblings. It makes sense too, because the 980 was too expensive and pretty much every one bought the 970 and overclocked it.

Blogs praise nVidia, challenge everything:
...followed by thousands of words of attempting to challenge the benchmarks by cherry picking data.

Blogs praise AMD, take it at face value:

Yeah that was before I edited my post to show that actually what I have been saying is absolutely spot on. If you overclock a 980ti the 1070 can not touch it, even when overclocked. So it's actually not just me saying that. Remember all of those millions of videos on Youtube? I've been watching them for weeks.

But hey, if you feel that the prices of the 1080 and 1070 are good (especially when AMD just launched a card that can perform like the Fury for $199) then hey, knock yourself out.

As for praising AMD? why wouldn't I? they have just released a VR card for the masses that costs £150. And it's Finfet and it's a completely new core technology.

Well Nvidia seem to be doing pretty well out of the 1080 gouge-fest so far.

All the (cough) 'cheap' ones (i.e. less than £550) are sold out and on pre-order only, but help yourself to a reference card (sorry FOUNDER'S EDITION) for £635.....

In many cases it looks like it's 2-3 weeks before any stock is expected back in.

I'm definitely sitting this one out for a reasonable period of time, the desire not to get royally ripped off far exceeds my desire to get a new PC.

Anyway I was playing GTAV with the chaps earlier in the week and my current PC can still push that around pretty much maxed out at 1440p, albeit with a few nips and tucks in the settings and framerates that drop down into the 40s sometimes (but are usually 50-60, with v-sync engaged). Yes it'd be nice to put everything to maximum and keep a bulletproof 60FPS - but not £2000 worth of nice....

I really do hope AMD have a nasty surprise for Nvidia in the works, they need taking down a peg or two IMO.

What they've done just stinks tbh.

People pre ordered and paid for aftermarket cards on OCUK and the dates continue to slip. This means that people have grown impatient and changed their orders to FE cards. I know there's little you can do about people like that but it's cuntish because Nvidia have basically fucked over their own AIB (add in board) partners and they (Nvidia) are the only ones making sales ATM.

This is already having a knock on effect as for example EVGA (who can't even talk about actual specs for their custom cards) are not allowing EK to make water blocks for their cards as they're making their own.

It kinda feels like Nvidia are basically fucking over the very people who have made them what they are today.

Apparently it's also impossible right now to unlock the voltage either and Nvidia are on the warpath trying to stop it.

Madness. I can see why Intel told them to fuck off now. Apparently they're a real arse hole of a company to work with.

Looks like it has plenty of bang for-your-buck, it'll be interesting to see how the launch goes.

That seems a normal business model. A Compnay designs and sells a product. They want to sell it before it is farmed out to other manufactures.

No but you see all the other graphics cards in the world don't work any more so people have no choice but to buy. It's very sad

Except, no.

The way Nvidia are playing the launch of the Pascal cards is unusual in two main ways.

1) They've rebranded 'reference cards' as 'Founder's Edition cards' and are charging something in the order of an extra £100 for them. Ordinarily there'd be sufficient stock of both reference cards and the more interesting partner cards, whereby the partners put their own coolers on, power circuitry, overclocks and all that stuff. As it stands at the moment, all you can get are the ridiculously expensive Founder's Edition cards - what partner cards there were all sold out quickly and are now on 2-3 week lead times.

2) The second-tier card, the 1070, is nowhere to be seen, and it looks like Nvidia are in no hurry to get it out of the door either - so are truly gouging for the 1080 (and the 'Founder's Edition at that), in the meantime.

Not withstanding Doc's snarky comment, of course no one has to dance to Nvidia's tune, and no one's existing graphics card stops working overnight - but as the SOLD OUTS everywhere demonstrate pretty clearly, enough people have bought into the Pascal hype and the somewhat predatory stock control policy, to have made it very much worth Nvidia's while to act like twats.

Who knows, maybe it'll backfire, folks like me for example who were holding off on getting a new PC until the 1080/1070 launched, are now waiting longer until the prices and stock levels achieve some resemblance of sanity - in which time AMD's higher-end Polaris offerings might end up being a better proposition....

Clearly, they said "You know that new product that we're seeing high demand of that returns a decent margin? Let's only fill half of it and then watch the money roll in as we're in a fast moving techno industry with small windows to make a buck and the customers will hang about to buy an outdated thing a few months from now. The board will totally buy this strategy".

Exactly how many people in the world are willing or able to spend SIX HUNDRED POUNDS on a graphics card anyway? We're talking about a niche market here, aren't we? Units in the thousands, not millions.

I remember when Nvidia discontinued the 200 series completely, months before Fermi's launch. This left Nvidia only partners for dead, and a couple of companies (BFG included) went bankrupt. They had nothing to sell for about five months. XFX on the other hand told Nvidia to screw and now only work with AMD.

As I said, their business practices over the years have not been very nice. As Kov said that is the nature of business, but they managed to piss off Intel so badly that Intel refused to license them any more sockets. So Nvidia's motherboards and chipsets came to an end.

I'm very keen now to see how AMD handle the launch of Polaris, because they are appealing to an enormous audience so I pray they don't screw it up. IMO Pascal wasn't entirely ready but Nvidia are just doing the hare again (from the hare and the tortoise).

Hopefully the 490 (because come on, who makes an entire chip technology from scratch just to release one mid range card?) will be good at a really good price AMD did say "The $100-$300 range" and as yet have only released a $200 part (well, and a $239 8gb 480).



How many people bought the 64gb iPhone 6? you'd be surprised Dave. Nvidia are the Apple of the GPU world, and there is obviously an enormous audience or they wouldn't keep cranking their prices like they are.

But this is the rub for me. It's the most transparently obvious gouging imaginable, and only the biggest fools can possibly be falling for this, and I simply cannot muster any sympathy for those people.

"Predatory pricing" is selling bottled water for £10 in a drought, or getting newborn babies addicted to free formula milk then charging over the odds for it. It's not charging £2000 for go-faster stripes on a Lamborghini. nVidia is just monetising the impatience of a group of consumers with far more money than sense. It's not very pretty, for sure.

Nor is there any deception here on nVidia's part. It's not a con job. Everyone knows that the stock 1080s will be out in a matter of weeks or months and the 1070s won't be far behind and these cards will be the same or better as the reference designs.

Surprise me.

I agree with you. People don't have to buy them and they're piss weak to be doing so. It isn't that that has pissed me off, these people deserve what they get (fan revving, unstable cards etc). I very rarely buy anything at launch for the issues you get more than anything else but usually like to stay a generation (or card) behind.

What is pissing me off is how they are playing the "every man for himself !" card, screwing over loyal AIBs. They did this inititally with the GTX 460 too, though I will admit they had a lot more to lose then (I think the 460 brought them back from the brink tbh, ATI had been making DX11 hay for months and the 480 and 470 were pretty much failures). But after Maxwell their only excuse is pure greed.



I was speaking hypothetically. As in "£600 phone sells out in seconds". Not exact figures.

This isn't even remotely the same thing and this comparison is hopelessly bogus.

For most people, a smartphone is no longer a discretionary purchase. For most people, the 1080 doesn't exist. They have no idea what it is or why they'd want it. So the value deviced from £600 of phone is completely different from the value of a £600 graphics card.

Most people don't pay £600 for a phone, they get it "free" or for a few quid from a carrier.

Steam has about 125m active users. 5% of them have a 970. That's six million or so cards and I'm pretty comfortable that there are basically zero 970s that aren't connected to Steam. Apple sells more iPhones than that in the opening weekend. Apple quite possibly sells more phones in a year than nVidia has sold GPUs in the last decade. These businesses are not comparable.

No one gets it free. The package you opt for will have the price of the phone in it. So for example phones like the iPhone 6 come on plans costing £50 a month.

I would hazard a guess and say you don't spend your entire day reading enthusiast forums. I said Nvidia are the Apple of the GPU world and they are. They have a following just like Apple does and their products sell out at launch just like Apple does and so on. They also have cut throat marketing strategies and so on so there are plenty of similarities between the two. They also can't put a foot wrong right now it seems and everything they do changes into gold. At one point at the end of last year they had pretty much 80% of the GPU market. That's dropped again now and AMD have about 30% but yeah, it was worrying for a while there.

I did not say they were the 100% absolutely everything spot on Apple of the GPU world. They act the same and trust me, they have the same loyal following. And that's why they can bring out a card with a 10% performance increase (vs overclocked Titan X or 980ti) and not only up the price by £150 or so over the previous gen but also screw over all of their AIBs at the same time *and* still sell out on day one.

Do you seriously, actually, really think I don't know this?

John,

I think you are missing the point. no one needs to upgrade their phone or the graphics cards every few months.

You are complaining about Nvidia's business model. As far as I can see the older card still allows every one to play games but the new card allows a bit more shiney. Is it £600 worth of new shiney, i doubt it, as in 6 months there will be new shiney again, I would have a guess a the 1100 or something similar.

A better analogy would be buying a new car at registration day, or buying it slightly later pre registred and all the loss has been taken of it.

I'm not missing the point. You're correct, no one needs to upgrade or jump on the latest shiny. Sadly due to the nature of the human race they do though. And they're being exploited. Do I care? no, not really, but that does not excuse the way Nvidia have handled this release. I think you are missing the point on that. Am I personally bothered? no of course not. I bought a Titan X before launch as I knew what was coming. Does it bother me people are getting screwed over? of course it doesn't.

Do I like watching it though? no, not really. Even though I don't understand these people that need the latest shiny and think they're daft that doesn't mean I like to watch weak people being exploited.

How are they getting screwed over, it is their choice completely. Their life if no worse by waiting or not having the card.

As the Doc said, expolited is charging £10 for water at a drout.

As I already explained I really couldn't give a toss what people buy or don't buy. However, the way Nvidia are handling this release will have a negative impact on PC gaming as a whole as well as other things.

Well, unless AMD actually deliver what they have promised (but given their history of promising and failing I'm not holding my breath and wait to be surprised, I have no expectations of Polaris at all for example)

PC gaming is better when PC gaming is cheap. The more people who can access it means the more devs want to release games for it that actually work and so on. The bigger the audience the more money there is to be made therefore more PC games.

Ok, i am curious, how will limiting selling a new shiny card have a negative effect on gaming?

No cards in folks PCs have stopped working (although i need to get a new one to support windows 10), so all games will work as they did..

Or am I missing something?

JC's argument would hold water if games developers were exclusively targeting only the most capable cards, but that's not the case (except in some rare instances I would imagine)

Any game released recently (except Arkham Knight, trololol) will scale down nicely on older cards - sure, you might not get 90fps or whatever, but it will still be playable on (sometimes much) older hardware.

Only that's exactly what they do these days. Build workstations with the very latest cards in, ditch the older ones and make it so that new games run the best on the most current hardware.

Fallout 4 as an example. Looks pretty bad, runs like crap even on a Titan X if you set everything to ultra. And that's not even a good looking game, and I get 39 FPS mins with an overclocked Titan X !

Plus there's history. GTAIV launched and was so hard to run that they had to disable things in the menu and announced that "Higher settings are for future hardware".

Devs are lazy and will do as little as they need to with PC games. That's why SLi and Crossfire are pretty much doomed now*.

*OK basically back in the days of the 360 and PS3 devs had to code for specific platforms. IE - they first had to code a game for the 360 and to do that they needed to optimise for the hardware. They got really good at this, because it was set hardware. However, moving that code onto a PC meant that they had to rewrite large portions of the code in order to get it running on a PC, so whilst they were at it they would code in AFR support for games so that Crossfire and SLi worked (Alternate Frame Rendering).

However, then two new consoles come along that pretty much run on PC hardware and now the work needed to get a PS4 game (for example) running on a PC is far less. And because it's far less that means they don't need to bother rewriting the graphics code for example, so pretty much every release for over 8 months has not worked with either SLi or Crossfire and has not even been AFR friendly and thus, Crossfire and SLi have stopped working almost completely (Fury X Crossfire was the worst experience ever, it simply never worked).

And that means that Nvidia and AMD have to go to these lazy companies and ask them specifically to rewrite portions of code to make the games work and they just haven't been.

As of a few days ago Nvidia officially announced to Ryan Shrout (PCper, the guy that exposed Crossfire runt/dropped frames) that they were no longer supporting 3/4 way SLi. However, they did say that they would continue to support SLi with two cards. In other words, they won't support it as there is nothing they can do, but maybe if DX12 multi adapter actually becomes a thing two cards may actually do slightly more than one.

And this is all down to devs wanting the cheapest, easiest, most money making life possible.

So yeah, PC game devs have got form.

Windows 8.1 still works, but if i want Windows 10 i need to upgrade.. yes I see the irony

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-gefo ... 2a-ms.html

Wow.....

$375 eh Nvidia?

Edit. Before they pull that page like all of the others. Cheapest pauper edition with lousy cooler is £390. Most expensive so far has been a Galax, at £455.

Word of the day is "Suggested" taken from MSRP. Nvidia suggested it would be $375 for a non FE, they start at £390.