OK we have had lots of guesses and wild ideas about just how fast the new cards are gong to be from both AMD and NVidia, but I thought it might be an idea to try to look at things a bit more sensibly.
So below I have laid out what I think is a sensible look at things how they stand, but as always there will be people that disagree, ad people that want to voice their own suggestions of how thing will pan out over this year. Sensible Debate is good. trolling and ridiculous comments are not.
Ok so AMD are showing us the first Benchmark from Polaris 10 at the Capsaicin Live Event tonight at around 11:00pm. Hopefully the numbers they show us, will give us something to work with to extrapolate the bigger parts performance.
For this post I will be using the charts from Techpowerup, as we know they give quite a broad range of benches with gives a reasonable indication of overall performance. Yes there are other sites and benches that can show differing results, but for this thread I will be using these.
What we know about the AMD side of things.
AMD flagship card as it stands today is the FuryX, performance wise it sits just behind the NVidia 980ti and moving to just in front of the 980ti as resolution increases.
Here is the latest TPU review showing the order of cards dated FEB 12th ( I'm not looking at the exact numbers here just an overall view of the order of cards.)
Edit: TPU's test specs here
Now the part AMD are showing tonight, should show us that it is capable of being VR ready in the Steam VR benchmark test. (if it isn't then I really do not see the whole point of tonight's presentation) this should put it around the 290X/970 performance bracket. (seeing as they are the minimum specs for VR).
Now for Polaris 11, the bigger of the two Polaris chips that we know about, you would have to think that it will be AMD's fastest single ship card, as it just seems bonkers for AMD to launch a new card and it not be quicker than the FuryX. I mean if they can get 290X performance out of Polaris 10 then Polaris 11 being nearly four times bigger must be able to reach the FuryX. (Of course if the image isn't to scale than that blows that one out of the water, but if the image isn't to scale then what was the point of it in the first place.)
Now we come to the crux of the matter on the AMD side, the FuryX2 or whatever they end up calling it.
We cannot get around the fact that it is late to the party, AMD showed us it back in June last year, saying it would be available in the fall, here we are in March and it still hasn't arrived.
But that lateness aside, what sort of performance are we going to be looking at. Well with reportedly with two Nano chips on board it will be giving performance something like Nano crossfire.
Edit: TPU's test specs here.
Now is Polaris 11 going to make this card completely obsolete in a matter of a couple of months or is it not going to be as fast as this. Look at the 1080p graph there, that is a pretty small window to squeeze into (between FuryX and Nano crossfire). the gap is certainly bigger at 4k, but still not massive.
My self I am not sure how things will pan out on the AMD side of things.
Now on to the NVidia side of things
We know that NVidia will release new chips this year, there have been rumours, but very little solid info from the green camp.
The presentation slides that NVidia have shown show things like 10 times faster and high speed NVlink, but we know that those sort of performance claims are for very specific circumstances and for a very specific aspects of the chip, (Even Jen-Hsun called it CEO math and rough estimates) Bottom line we certainly do not expect a general 10 times performance increase from Pascal.
This is where we run into problems, because other than showing us a mock up drive px2 unit, not with actual Pascal chips on it and telling us some numbers that don't really equate to gaming at all, we haven't seen anything about NVidia's new Pascal chips at all.
Hopefully NVidia will give us medium Pascal first, unless they go for a smaller design first like they did with the Maxwell 750's, but the most recent Nvidia cards have been of the smallest Maxwell chips GM206, so replacing them so soon. It all gets into speculation and I wont go there.
Bottom line we know next to nothing about NVidia's Pascal chips, with any luck we should find out more at GTC.
It seems quite odd, that even though AMD have shown us more leaks and titbits than NVidia have rumour would have it that NVidia might announce first.
This entire post is just my thoughts and opinion's on the subject, things may be incorrect and mistakes happen but hopefully you will get the point.. I certainly look forward to reading other peoples thoughts on realistic performance expectations, because lets face it most of us would love the new cards to be 10 times more powerful and a quarter of the price, but we know that isn't going to happen. ( I know that is the first time I have mentioned price, this is deliberate, as the price of the new cards and indeed even the current cards is another discussion altogether.)
So below I have laid out what I think is a sensible look at things how they stand, but as always there will be people that disagree, ad people that want to voice their own suggestions of how thing will pan out over this year. Sensible Debate is good. trolling and ridiculous comments are not.
Ok so AMD are showing us the first Benchmark from Polaris 10 at the Capsaicin Live Event tonight at around 11:00pm. Hopefully the numbers they show us, will give us something to work with to extrapolate the bigger parts performance.
For this post I will be using the charts from Techpowerup, as we know they give quite a broad range of benches with gives a reasonable indication of overall performance. Yes there are other sites and benches that can show differing results, but for this thread I will be using these.
What we know about the AMD side of things.
AMD flagship card as it stands today is the FuryX, performance wise it sits just behind the NVidia 980ti and moving to just in front of the 980ti as resolution increases.
Here is the latest TPU review showing the order of cards dated FEB 12th ( I'm not looking at the exact numbers here just an overall view of the order of cards.)
Edit: TPU's test specs here
Now the part AMD are showing tonight, should show us that it is capable of being VR ready in the Steam VR benchmark test. (if it isn't then I really do not see the whole point of tonight's presentation) this should put it around the 290X/970 performance bracket. (seeing as they are the minimum specs for VR).
Now for Polaris 11, the bigger of the two Polaris chips that we know about, you would have to think that it will be AMD's fastest single ship card, as it just seems bonkers for AMD to launch a new card and it not be quicker than the FuryX. I mean if they can get 290X performance out of Polaris 10 then Polaris 11 being nearly four times bigger must be able to reach the FuryX. (Of course if the image isn't to scale than that blows that one out of the water, but if the image isn't to scale then what was the point of it in the first place.)
Now we come to the crux of the matter on the AMD side, the FuryX2 or whatever they end up calling it.
We cannot get around the fact that it is late to the party, AMD showed us it back in June last year, saying it would be available in the fall, here we are in March and it still hasn't arrived.
But that lateness aside, what sort of performance are we going to be looking at. Well with reportedly with two Nano chips on board it will be giving performance something like Nano crossfire.
Edit: TPU's test specs here.
Now is Polaris 11 going to make this card completely obsolete in a matter of a couple of months or is it not going to be as fast as this. Look at the 1080p graph there, that is a pretty small window to squeeze into (between FuryX and Nano crossfire). the gap is certainly bigger at 4k, but still not massive.
My self I am not sure how things will pan out on the AMD side of things.
Now on to the NVidia side of things
We know that NVidia will release new chips this year, there have been rumours, but very little solid info from the green camp.
The presentation slides that NVidia have shown show things like 10 times faster and high speed NVlink, but we know that those sort of performance claims are for very specific circumstances and for a very specific aspects of the chip, (Even Jen-Hsun called it CEO math and rough estimates) Bottom line we certainly do not expect a general 10 times performance increase from Pascal.
This is where we run into problems, because other than showing us a mock up drive px2 unit, not with actual Pascal chips on it and telling us some numbers that don't really equate to gaming at all, we haven't seen anything about NVidia's new Pascal chips at all.
Hopefully NVidia will give us medium Pascal first, unless they go for a smaller design first like they did with the Maxwell 750's, but the most recent Nvidia cards have been of the smallest Maxwell chips GM206, so replacing them so soon. It all gets into speculation and I wont go there.
Bottom line we know next to nothing about NVidia's Pascal chips, with any luck we should find out more at GTC.
It seems quite odd, that even though AMD have shown us more leaks and titbits than NVidia have rumour would have it that NVidia might announce first.
This entire post is just my thoughts and opinion's on the subject, things may be incorrect and mistakes happen but hopefully you will get the point.. I certainly look forward to reading other peoples thoughts on realistic performance expectations, because lets face it most of us would love the new cards to be 10 times more powerful and a quarter of the price, but we know that isn't going to happen. ( I know that is the first time I have mentioned price, this is deliberate, as the price of the new cards and indeed even the current cards is another discussion altogether.)
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