Well, of course the newer microarchitectures will have a big impact on performance. What's the point of making them if they don't improve things? .

I expect them to be more like 350mm², and while some of that die space will be "wasted" with newer features (DX12 and Vulkan stuff), HBM controllers are smaller than the GDDR 5 ones.

I don't have 480X/1070 details either, but they are supposed to be the second best cards (I hope AMD stops the "X" and "non-X" nonsense and launches less cards), they can't be sloughs.

...

My Win7 OEM copy came in a box like this one

Now I'm also confused.

@Bold Not as big as going to a newer process node. It's not to say that newer microarchitectures don't give us performance benefits but we mostly owe it to moore's law to give performance boosts ... 

Personally, I think the future is a lot like the Intel Larrabee. One day, we might even get software rendering on GPUs! 

They will continue to do so, just as much NVidia will continue with the Ti Suffix. That much I can guarantee, marketing will not allow this to change.

About the whole discussion between you 2: I doubt a 480X/1070Ti will come close to Fury/Titan, for 2 reasons:

1. Price. It would kill off sales of their old cards in an instant, and not give them much a margin. Unless they will be priced 400€/$ and up, but then I fear for the worst for the price of 490/Fury/1080/Titan. 1000€/$ for an enthousiast GC? No way there will be enough to sustain that price.

2. TDP. Even if the Dies would shrink perfectly by factor 2, the consumption wouldn't be anywhere close to do so. Unless massive Cherry picking (like for the Nano) and underclocking/volting, this just couldn't work out. The reason is, while the generated heat goes down significantly, so does the surface aera at which this heat gets generated, and thus the heat per sqare centimeter (or inch if you prefer) doesn't go down much.

Mine came in a thin DVD case, plastered all over with holograms.

However, it's possible this changed since then. At least I heard retail copies of Win 10 would be a rare sight, so it might come preinstalled now no matter what.

To fatslob and Bofferbrauer about the next gen cards: Maybe I'm being optimistic as I'm hoping to buy one of the next cards, but I honestly believe what I'm saying.

fatslob, the conjuction of a new architecture and a new process is what will give the next cards a nice performance bump. After all, every time that both things have happened together, the performance jumps have been of at least 20% if not higher in all the price segments. Why would it be different now? Fine, the 480X/1070 maybe won't beat FuryX/980Ti, but they should beat Fury/980 by a big margin.

As for the cost, the jump to 16nm makes the chips a tiny bit more expensive, but so more to completely change the current pricing scale:

And bofferbrauer, sorry but your first point is completely wrong. AMD's HD 6870 was on par or faster than the HD 5870, and the 7870 did the same with the 6970. And in Nvidia, the GTX 570 was on par with the GTX 480, and the 670 was faster than the 580. Even the 780 was almost as fast as the original Titan for a lot less. Saying that it won't happen because it would destroy the value of those high end cards is simply not true.

Also TDP is a problem, yes, but AMD has already found a solution for that problem with the cooler of the Fury X.

A Geforce 980Ti is only 50% faster than a Geforce GTX 970. So of course the Geforce GTX 1070 will beat a 980Ti, and we should expect a Radeon 480X to be at least on par with a R9 Fury X.

Like JEMC said, a new architecture plus process shrink is a big thing. Historically it means twice the power.

JEMC, what GPU do you have now?

Wow! How is that possible?! Like you say, Evoland is easily worth at least 2 Euros by itself! Instantly bought.

Hopefully some of those games include trading cards.

You said 1070/480 would be as strong as Titan/Fury, not 980/390. You would have to compare the 6970 with the 7770, the 6770 with the 5870, the GTX 560 with the GTX 480 and so on, all of which would fail hard.

If you meant 980/390 with high-end, then I misunderstood you, but when someone says high-end graka I always assume their biggest consumer models, which would be Titan and Fury. 1070/480 being at least ± as strong as 980/390 is basically what needs to happen every generation - unless they're both stalling (3770 vs 2900 XT/ 8800 GTX vs 9800GTX comes to mind)

As for watercooling (Fury X cooling solution), not everyone likes that, for different reasons: too complex, too cumbersome, not silent enough (pumping noises, noisy condensators depending on design) and a general fear of mixing water with electricity. I wouldn't want one, btw, even though my case is made for watercooling

A new microarchitecture only improves performance by 10% from now on. The reason why the newer GPUs are performing better has to do with the fact that games are now designed to be compute limited so flops will actually matter this time when it comes to game performance ... 

2x transistors =/= 2x performance ...

You can't expect perfect scaling when it comes to increasing shader resources ...