| JEMC said: ^I would refrain my enthusiasm. After what AMD said and the rumors we have, it seems clear that AMD is focusing on mainstream products, not high end, but will they be able to deliver Fury X/980Ti performance at less than 175W for $300-350? Or to put it another way, AMD has always talked about 2 or 2.5x performance/watts improvement from the current gen of cards to Polaris, and the 390X is a 275W card, so half of that is 138W. Will those extra 35W and the newer architecture make up for the roughly 35% performance advantage the 980Ti has over the 390X? |
I know, that's why I'm lucky to be able to wait, I'm late in playing my backlog as AMD is usually late in delivering what it promises. 
Also, when AMD scales down its chips it usually gets better results per watt and per dollar than when it scales them up, and another positive factor is that although CPU performance, once it's high enough to not be a bottleneck, doesn't provide big graphics performance boosts if it increases further, the new CPU architecture and its switch to smaller process too should contribute to a large improvement in overall system power consumption and efficiency even if it won't be as large as promised. Systems with new ZEN CPUs and Polaris GPUs or APUs using both a ZEN CPU and a Polaris GPU, and DDR4 main RAM and latest GDDR5 or HBM graphics RAM, should help AMD delivering a real boost per watt not too far behind the ideal one.
Essay Pro