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DJL99 said:
Are you joking?
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Yea of course he's joking.

No one know the exact date that the mainstream big Maxwell will come yet. But it wouldn't be so soon, as Nvidia will be launch the big Maxwell in the form of Titan 2 or whatever it is call first- which I doubt you would be buying unless you are prepared to pay £830-£1000 for it. Nvidia will milk the new Titan for at least a good few months to half-year, before launch the mainstream Maxwell...possibly as the 980Ti (or 1080 or similar if Nvidia decide to call it a next gen card) with cut-down spec comparing to the Titan 2.

There are other external factors as well...such as the timing of when AMD be launching their next gen cards. I mean look at how quickly Nvidia launched the 780Ti after AMD launched the 290/290x.
 
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DJL99 said:
So why don't I just get the 980? Is it better than the R9 290?
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I suggest you actually read the replies in this thread....
Mainly the ones from Marine. To echo what he said, in short. The 980 on your current setup will be no better than the 290. If you've got the funds to upgrade the CPU+GPU at the same time, then the 980 paired with a 4790k will offer a bump in performance, however if you've got limited funds or have to split the upgrade in two, it makes more sense to upgrade the CPU first and graphics later.
 
DJL99 said:
So why don't I just get the 980? Is it better than the R9 290?
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Because while it is faster, it is not going to be a big enough upgrade from the 290 for the amount of money you will be spending. While Nvidia called the 900 series "new gen" card, performance wise it still belong in the same gen as the 290/290x/780/780Ti.

Sure you can go grab a 980 now, but that would also mean you will be missing out of the opportunity to play with the 20nm true next gen big maxwell when they are out...unless of course, you don't might spending another £550-£600 again on graphic card.

Just as I mention before, while the 980 is faster than the 290, with a 8350...you simply won't benefit from the upgrade due to the CPU bottleneck. Regardless of you graphic card upgrade decision, you cannot go wrong with upgrading from the AMD CPU to Intel CPU and platform first.

Just to make it clear, all my suggestion for you is regardless the graphic upgrade is base on respecting your wish to switch to Nvidia, and I have not intention or trying to get you to stay with AMD or go with AMD again in anyway. All I'm saying is that...if you spend £430-£450 now getting a GTX980, yes you will have a graphic card that's more efficient, and around 10-15% faster than the 290; but if you spend £550 on the mainstream big Maxwell in say may be 6-9 months time, you'd have a card most likely 50% or more faster than the 290, AND even more efficient than the 980 due to the process move from 28nm to 20nm.

Another thing worth considering is that I don't know if you have any plan for 4K gaming in the future, but for cards at the moment, you need three of them to game at 4K comfortably...yet the SLI scaling is quite poor for the 3rd card. If you go for a big-Maxwell card, it would probably be able to provide enough grunt for 4K gaming with just 2 cards, so poor SLI scaling for the 3rd card wouldn't an issue.
 
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Just to add some figures to what everyone on the thread has been saying:

The 290 and 970 are the same performance level and only differ in temperature (less of a problem for the non-reference 290's) and power consumption:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1068?vs=1355

The 980 is quicker than a 290, but not "unplayable settings become playable" quicker, so to most people it's difficult to justify the cost in changing:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1068?vs=1351

As everyone has said, if you want a noticeable difference in performance, you're going to have to wait for the next generation of GPU to come out. If you just fancy a change to try a different and don't mind spending the £150-£300 to change over, then go for whatever you fancy as neither will be slower than what you're running now except in some games and it's your money/life/desires.
 
After reading Marines advice, I am going to change platform first. Then when the 20nm cards come out, I'll get one of those. I plan to stay at 1080p because it's still really good and I enjoy it. Will my 290 + 4790K be ok for Far Cry 4, GTA 5 and Project Cars? Because these are the games that I really want to be able to run well on Ultra with AA at 60+ fps.
 
What he said ^ Wiki has a lot of information on it regarding 28nm, and 20nm fab processes. Click Marines link then you could post back what nm is as some of us could do with an education in this field.
 
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The term die shrink (sometimes optical shrink or process shrink) refers to a simple semiconductor scaling of semiconductor devices, mainly transistors. Die shrinks are popular among semiconductor companies, such as Intel, AMD (including the former ATI), NVIDIA, and Samsung for enriching their product lines. Die shrinks are beneficial to end-users as shrinking a die reduces the current used by each transistor switching on or off in semiconductor devices while maintaining the same clock frequency of a chip, making a product with less power consumption (and thus less heat production), increased clock rate headroom, and lower prices.
 
I'm going to buy the I7 4790K and Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK bundle first, then buy the more powerful Maxwell GPU, when they arrive. :)
 
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