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Mummelmann on 20 May 2015
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JEMC said:
Mummelmann said:

That's a real letdown then, I was ready for 8GB!

It could be that at least one of these cards beats the 980 on performance though, I'm going to need more info on pricing before I make my decision. Even though AMD are always great on pricing; the increased noise, heat and driver issues might not be worth the savings in the end.

I think that we all are ready for at least 6 or 8GB.

The pricing worries me. I've read (but not fully understood ) the HMB article on SemiAcurate and it looks like HMB will be more expensive than GDDR5 for a while. I don't know if by much or just a little, but it will be more expensive, which is bad for our interest in keeping the card "cheap".

As for your other cons: drivers are a mistery, specially with DX12 around the corner. I guess it will depend more on how many games use GameWorks and then don't bother making the game run properly on AMD cards. And that means that every Ubisoft game will run poorly (but who buys Ubisoft games, right?). But on the bright side, AMD cards hold better than Nvidia cards over time. Have you seen the benchmarks of The Witcher 3? It runs like sh!t on Nvidia Kepler cards! Of course that has more to do with Nvidia wanting (or forcing) you to upgrade rather than the cards not being able to run the game.

And as for heat and noise, the reference cards will be watercooled so they will make little noise and run quite cool (but ads to the total cost), and third party vendors will probably ship them with their great air coolers that will take good care of them too.

Yeah, I try to avoid stock GPU's, I find that the 3rd party coolers and clockers add more stability and longevity than simply overclocking stock cards.

I hope the driver issues don't persist, if AMD are taking charge of fronting new and more efficient memory solutions and they're already delivering the graphics to all three 8th gen consoles; there really is no huge reason to not back them more in the PC space than developers/publishers have been.