GTX 960 is expected to launch next month.

[USER8000]

Lucky you. In the UK, R9 280X's are typically £170-£220 and most GTX 960's typically £150-£180. Like for like (same brand) an Asus R9 280X is "only" £200 but an Asus GTX 960 is "only" £180. $149 (£100) is more like the average 750Ti. Same with CPU's - at time of build I bought my i5-3570 for same listed price as an FX-8350. It may depend on location, but I'm really not seeing this "AMD are always massively better value" thing where I live. Nor seeing any mid-range R9 28x / GTX 960 anywhere near £100 / $150. In fact I often wonder how much of the "nvidia price problem" is more to do with AMD's "slash & burn" drastic price cut policy leading to a flood of abnormally cheap cards to try and clear stock / inventory before the 300 series?



Ironically, the GTX 960 makes a perfect 4K HTPC card due to the ability to play 4K H264/H265 in as little as 3 watts above idle with 1% CPU load and GPU clocks locked at 135MHz idle without the fans spinning up once due to being the only Maxwell with a full H265 fixed-function-decoder (as opposed to the usual "assisted" part hardware / part software playback). The GTX 960 also supports HDCP 2.2 (4K content protection over HDMI 2.0) and has 2/3rds of the power consumption (115w vs 185w), both ideal for higher end HTPC rigs (most of whom probably aren't going to argue over $30 if they can afford a giant 4K TV).

Hopefully AMD's 300 series will give better competition in the perf-per-watt area, as the high-end HTPC market tends to be one where "cheap room heaters" doesn't cut it as a metric by itself.

R9 285 cards from MSI are as low as £133 and £135 from Scan and Novatech and pre-overclocked R9 280 cards as low a £130 until recently too.

Also in the UK there is a lack of 4K content from major broadcasters like Sky and the BBC. Even streaming 4K content is severely limited as simply the internet connection are not always fast enough. You are still lucky to see even 5 to 10 MBS in many parts of Kent unless you are in an area which has fibre to cabinet and you live close to the exchange or the cabinet.

Plus go into any major electronics retailer - see the dozens of 4k TVs....I thought not.

Its a niche feature at best and just a tick box feature currently.

By the time it becomes important it will be supported by Intel and and igps and that is happening in the next year anyway.

Plus Nvidia still has not launched the gtx950 which they will be doing I suspect and I expect that would make the gtx960 redundant for media purposes.

Just like the r9 285 the gtx960 is a card finding a purpose and needs maximum marketing and tickbox feature lists to hard sell to people and it will work too.

They are both some of the most useless midrange cards launched in years.

The new 8600gt and 2600xt. They sold well too.

 

[Qwertilot]

iirc it does WoW in 4k ultra/60FPS too? And 30 in Civ.

You can actually make a pretty good case for the 960 being as a (the?!) logical companion to a 4k monitor. Its certainly what I'd get if doing a new build with a 4k monitor right now.

Yes, you can't run demanding games at native resolution at all, but you're looking at very serious money/heat/etc to do that whatever you do right now 3xx stuff won't change that. So you just accept you're downscaling those games to 1080 and it'll cope fine.

Going up to 970/290 etc wouldn't change that balance for very many games so a bit pointless.

Meanwhile it can do the undemanding stuff fine at native resolution, with very little noise/heat in the process. Then when Pascal/4xx etc comes along and a sane midrange card can run 4k native happily enough, you upgrade.

 

[USER8000]

Lol if u expect the gtx960 to do 60fps at 4k, you must be having a laugh especially after the last patch. Plus using the absurd logic you might as well not bother with a gtx960 if u are to turn down the resolution as a gtx750ti will do the same then.

In fact why bother spending so much on a 4k monitor when you can a faster card and a decent lower res monitor?

No one I no who games and got a 4k monitor at £350+ is using a cheap card with it.

Even the non-gamers who buy a 4k monitor for image editing purposes are not buying the cheaper tn panel ones either, and even then a much lower end card would be fine for basic display purposes,and looking at some of the software which is GPU accelerated I am not sure ifcthr gtx960 has enough grunt or is a big enough upgrade over a gtx750ti even.

 

[Qwertilot]

In the 'hugely' demanding world of warcraft it does http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_G1_Gaming/25.html

Bang on 60 in fact. Ditto 30 in Civ BE from the same review.

Based on those two scores the 960 is almost precisely on the break point for coping with a broad range of strategy games at native 4k. Almost spookily so actually

Of course the alternative of running a 750ti/whatever with all games down to 1080 is fairly rational too!

Some people do sink huge time into that sort of game though, so it'd maybe be worth it for the ~12-18 months they'd be running the 960 before Pascal/4xx arrives.

 

[RussianSensation]

In the 'hugely' demanding world of warcraft it does

Based on those two scores the 960 is almost precisely on the break point for coping with a broad range of strategy games at native 4k. Almost spookily so actually

Not a chance. Anyone who seriously plays WoW will tell you that even a 780Ti/970/980 can't maintain 60 fps in the most demanding situations at 4K.

Some people do sink huge time into that sort of game though, so it'd maybe be worth it for the ~12-18 months they'd be running the 960 before Pascal/4xx arrives.

Anyone who can afford a new 4K monitor, or especially a large 4K TV can afford to spend more money for a 970/290X style card. At 1440P, an after-market 290 = 960 SLI. Think about it, a semi-decent 4K monitor on the PC runs at $500+$200 for a 960 or + $240-270 for an R9 290...that means $700 upgrade vs. $740-770 upgrade with 50-75% more performance.

Also, particularly in WoW at 4K, R9 290 series cards will smash 960 into the ground. So your example for using WoW as justification for a 960 to fit some niche is really poor actually.

If someone is that devoted to Diablo 3 and WoW and LoL that they will actually go out and buy a 4K monitor/TV, I don't think such a gamer will have any problem whatsoever to spend another $50-120 for a 290/290X/970. Furthermore, your suggestion to keep a 960 as a stop-gap card for 12-18 months seems pointless. In 18 months a $200 Pascal card might be 60-70% faster than a 960 but 970/290 are already that much faster today.

An after-market 290 = 290X and that's 80% faster than a 960 at 4K. 960 is such a terrible card for high resolution gaming that even 2 of them in SLI can barely beat a single 7970Ghz by 9%.

Here is another perspective for you:

NV charges ~90% more for a 980 for 8-15% more stock performance over a $290 R9 290X
NV charges ~345% more for a Titan X for 45-48% more stock performance over a $290 R9 290X
<winner> AMD charges ~53% more for a 290X for 55-80% more performance over a $190 GTX960 2GB <winner>

Clearly, 960 is way overpriced or way too slow, and has too little VRAM for $190-200. Needs to be $179 for 4GB version at most. Even then it's still a worse gaming card than a $190 280X. Ouch. I can imagine that most people who will buy a 960 card are: (1) generally uninformed when it comes to GPUs/latest reviews/benchmarks, (2) only buy NV or have been mostly buying NV for the last 5-10 years, or longer (3) have done little to no research on PSUs required to run R9 280X/290 series (4) have done little to no research on after-market R9 280X/290 cards in terms of noise levels/temperatures.

960 is one of the worst mid-range cards NV has ever made, hardly an improvement over an old 760. It's up there with 8600GTS as one of the most disappointing mid-range cards NV released.

 

[Qwertilot]

It'd be as much people who buy 4k monitors for their general niceness when doing other things then play games too

The idea in the 'pascal generation' time frame wouldn't be to upgrade like for like its more to go up to the 970 equivalent which should then do 4k gaming quite well for a good while. Vendor neutral of course - much more about levels of performance.

I really don't think the extra performance of the current (and pending 3xx) mid/high mid end generation of cards is useful enough at 4k to make the premium worth it. The ultra high end stuff, probably yes if that's what you're after. The 980 isn't far off coping but an awful lot of money for that!

Only if going from new of course, if you've an existing set up that can drive a desktop at 4k you'd probably either wait with it as it stands or wait a year and upgrade the whole lot in one go.

 

[nvgpu]

No one wants 290W of heat dumped into their cases or into their room.

Hawaii can't decode 4K H.264 or 4K HEVC, making it pretty much unusable for HTPC setups. No HDMI 2.0 also is pretty much a dealbreaker.

AMD selling the 280X/290/290X at or below cost & losing money is their choice, Nvidia doesn't have to.

It's ridiculous that people would compare higher end cards to the GTX 960 just because of their extreme bias against it and ignore the merits of the GTX 960 which outweights the drawbacks.

 

[Headfoot]

No one wants 290W of heat dumped into their cases or into their room.

Oh you mean like non-watercooled flagship cards?

The 960 is garbage. You can get a card significantly (~45-50%) faster for $50-70 more. 290.

That's faster than the Titan X is faster over the 980 except instead of paying another $450 for the privilege, you can just pay $50.

It's ridiculous that people would compare higher end cards to the GTX 960 just because of their extreme bias against it

You are in no position to accuse other forum posters of bias.

 

[Qwertilot]

Do have to agree with his main point If you're cross shopping a 960 and a 290 you're asking a very strange question.

They're almost entirely different with very different strengths and there's a very obvious answer depending on what you value more.

The 960, valued rationally, is a relatively niche card, designed to be low power and (very!) low noise. It does actually does that, for htpc and some other uses, very well.

Sadly its only viable competition in that segment is the 750ti, so yes, it has a premium attached Maybe AMD will get the efficiency of the 3xx stuff up enough to produce a few cards like this. They'll surely want something like them for notebooks anyway.

 

[RussianSensation]

No one wants 290W of heat dumped into their cases or into their room.

GTX470/480/570/580/780Ti/Titan X users all beg to differ, as well as all those gamers with those cards in SLI, as well as 670 SLI and greater.

Anyway, your 290W of power in gaming for an after-market R9 290 might apply to the beastly R9 290 Vapor-x but it's not true for all R9 290s. MSI Gaming R9 290 uses a lot less. I frankly don't remember you criticizing the power usage and perf/watt of GTX780/780Ti before Maxwell was released.

Hawaii can't decode 4K H.264 or 4K HEVC, making it pretty much unusable for HTPC setups.

That's nice. So according to you every GPU made before Maxwell was worthless? Boy, how did we live in the world without 4K decoding.....according to you then 99% of all PCs in the world are worthless since they do not have a CPU/GPU capable of 4K decoding speed of a 960 and HDMI 2.0....right.

No HDMI 2.0 also is pretty much a dealbreaker.

Really?

Steam PC monitors = 0.05% at 3840x2160

Japan is one of the countries that adopts the latest tech quicker than about anyone else:

"Manufacturers are pushing ultra-high definition (UHD) 4K televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, but analysts in Japan, where the first sets were launched in December 2012, say there's little to get excited about amid a lack of content.

"There is no 4K content being broadcast on television, and that's keeping sales of (4K)TV sets from really taking off," said Ichiro Mitsukoshi, executive analyst at retail sales research firm BCN.

In Japan, sales of the UHD 4K sets, which have resolutions four times higher than conventional high definition (HD) television sets, reached a record 7.3 percent of overall flat panel liquid crystal display (LCD) television sales in November 2014, the latest figures from BCN show.

But with most owners watching movies on Blu-ray discs that were converted to 4K resolution from 2K resolution, "any further sales expansion is dependent on original 4K broadcast content distribution," Mitsukoshi said." January 2015 ~ Source


The reason we talk about 4K benchmarks for higher end cards is because someone buying a 4K monitor/TV is more likely to own a $300+ GPU. Furthermore, cards are becoming so fast now for 1080P @ 60Hz gaming that GPUs like Titan X are often overkill without having a 120-144Hz 1080P/1440P monitor.

AMD selling the 280X/290/290X at or below cost & losing money is their choice, Nvidia doesn't have to.

We are consumers not shareholders. If AMD/NV sold their Titan X/390X for $500 and it was profitable enough, why would I care? When someone goes out to upgrade his GPU, are they really concerned that GTX960 is making more money for NV, which is why they should buy an NV card so that NV makes more money? How is supporting NV's 55-56% gross margins going to make my games run faster or help with high resolution texture packs on that 2GB VRAM card?

It's ridiculous that people would compare higher end cards to the GTX 960 just because of their extreme bias against it and ignore the merits of the GTX 960 which outweights the drawbacks.

It's all about objective price/performance and future-proofing not bias. While future-proofing generally doesn't work for GPUs, in the case of GTX960 vs. R9 290/290X, it absolutely does because for very little increase in price you get "next generation 1060 performance." Also, you've been ignoring the low performance of 960 from day 1, sighting every other possible metric BESIDES gaming performance and even ignoring its awful performance in 2GB VRAM limited situations.

960 4GB costs $240 which is laughable. If someone wanted to save $ on electricity, they would just get a used Xbox 360/PS3 or a Wii U. If 2 GPUs perform very close to each other, then it's obviously better to buy 1 with better features, lower power usage assuming they cost similar too. In the case of 960 vs. 290, they are world's apart in performance. It's not as if one can't buy a cool and quiet R9 290 either as plenty are available in the $250-270 range.

The person buying a 960 now will likely want to upgrade again when something 50-70% faster is out. Why even bother waiting 18+ months for that when R9 290 gives you that performance today.

Lucky you. In the UK, R9 280X's are typically £170-£220 and most GTX 960's typically £150-£180. ...... It may depend on location, but I'm really not seeing this "AMD are always massively better value" thing where I live.

Even in the UK with higher prices of 290, 960 is still way overpriced.

MSI Gaming 960 2GB = 164 pounds
MSI Gaming 290 = 226 pounds (37% more expensive for 50-80% more performance and 2x the VRAM!)

MSI Gaming 960 4GB = 200 pounds whiste

 

[AnandThenMan]

It's ridiculous that people would compare higher end cards to the GTX 960 just because of their extreme bias against it and ignore the merits of the GTX 960 which outweights the drawbacks.

People are biased against bad value, do you understand that? Not to mention 2GB is not good enough going forward. At all.

 

[BSim500]

Even in the UK with higher prices of 290, 960 is still way overpriced.

MSI Gaming 960 2GB = 164 pounds
MSI Gaming 290 = 226 pounds (37% more expensive for 50-80% more performance and 2x the VRAM!)

MSI Gaming 960 4GB = 200 pounds whiste

And yet take a look at Amazon's Top 20 "Best sellers" in the Video card category right now and what's selling the most. At time of writing : 1. GTX960, 2. GTX970, 3. GTX970, 4. GTX750Ti, 5. 8400GS, 6. GTX980, 7. GTX970, 8. HD5450, 9. GTX970, 10. Titan X, 11. GT 730, 12. GT 610, 13. GTX970, 14. R9 280, 15. GTX750Ti, 16. GTX970, 17. GTX960, 18. HD6450, 19. GTX960, and 20. GTX980. It seems the market in terms of what's actually selling the most consists of people who have far broader purchasing criteria than simply "lowest possible price-tag, nothing else matters". The number of people with PSU's with 2x PCI GFX cables are still in the minority (as are self-build high-end gaming desktops). In that respect, getting the GTX 960 down to needing only 1 cable and under 120w is a pretty smart move as they've virtually doubled if not quadrupled their potential buyer base who can plug it in without needing to buy and swap out a new PSU on top.

Same argument as the 750 Ti vs the R7 260X : Q. "Who on earth would buy nvidia at a $20-30 premium?". A. Millions of people with pre-builts with no PCI-E GFX power cables on their sub 300-400w PSU's at all... There are a lot of people out there who simply bought "a computer" (rather than assembled components) from HP, Dell, etc, that wasn't designed from the outset to be a high-end gaming rig, but want to just plug in a card without changing anything else, and aren't interested in 4K gaming "e-peen" contests or the 8x most VRAM bloated games.

The GTX 960 may not be your choice of card personally, but it has its place. I tested one in a friend's HTPC recently matched with an i5-3570 fed off a Seasonic G360 (360w). Power draw in many games was only 100-150w. For the whole system. Ran every game in his collection at 60fps (there's more to life than Crysis 3 on Ultra). He's pleased with it and I was seriously impressed that with 60fps capped VSync on, overall power draw in many games was often surprisingly 15-25w lower than an R7 260X / 7790, sometimes barely above a 750Ti. Temps didn't exceed 62c, and GPU fans didn't even spin up on many games, in a cramped case cooled by a single 700rpm 120mm silent fan. An R9 290 wouldn't have even booted up on a single power cable let alone maintained 15db acoustics on sub 65c temps over several hours.

Just sayin' - different people have different needs & purchasing priorities. What doesn't work for you may work perfectly for someone else.

 

[Headfoot]

Just sayin' - different people have different needs & purchasing priorities. What doesn't work for you may work perfectly for someone else.

I sincerely doubt the GTX 960's good sales are based on people who looked up the reviews and rationally chose that GPU over another for that reason.

Far, far more likely is that nVidia is cashing in on the GTX X60 name with a card that doesn't belong there.

The GTX 460 1GB OC's were fanstastic cards price/perf wise, 560 Ti's were good if not as good as the 460s, 660/Ti were good, the 760 at launch was decent -- the 960 is the only X60 card that's been total crap at launch.

Most consumers probably feel safe buying the X60 as the "best value" nVidia card, as it has been since at least the 460, but now with the 960 it's definitely not.

 

[Ranulf]

In the 'hugely' demanding world of warcraft it does http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_G1_Gaming/25.html

Bang on 60 in fact. Ditto 30 in Civ BE from the same review.

Based on those two scores the 960 is almost precisely on the break point for coping with a broad range of strategy games at native 4k. Almost spookily so actually

Of course the alternative of running a 750ti/whatever with all games down to 1080 is fairly rational too!

Some people do sink huge time into that sort of game though, so it'd maybe be worth it for the ~12-18 months they'd be running the 960 before Pascal/4xx arrives.

The techpowerup numbers look fairly spot on but I guarantee you they did them all in low population areas with minimal combat going on.

Not a chance. Anyone who seriously plays WoW will tell you that even a 780Ti/970/980 can't maintain 60 fps in the most demanding situations at 4K.

Indeed. I doubt you'll maintain 60fps at 1080p in raids. My 7870 (with the 8350) tops out at 110fps at 1080p in low pop/traffic. I get spikes even in my Fort with just npcs running around down to 55-70 (which gets annoying on a 60hz monitor). In a major city or in a raid with 10-15 people I'll be lucky to get 50-70 fps. Beyond 35 people on screen with spell effects/combat its a slide show from 1-10 fps.

One of these days I'll get around to testing WoD on my 2500k with 290 as well as the 290 with my AMD system.

I've been itching to get a new nvidia card for over a year now. I almost wish I'd bought a 760 last year at this point. If the 960 4gb was $175 I'd be tempted to just pick that up for now, shifting it to my htpc down the road and using it in my 2500k for nvidia favoring games.

 

[RussianSensation]

Just sayin' - different people have different needs & purchasing priorities. What doesn't work for you may work perfectly for someone else.

How shall I respond to your message without getting banned or called out for being an AMD marketer? I don't know, but there is a lot more to sales than just price/performance, absolute performance and features. Let's see the Samsung S6 wipes the floor with the iPhone 6/6S in terms of specs and customizable OS but it doesn't mean it will outsell iPhones. You do realize that Bose and Beats outsell tons of FAR superior brands/products but it doesn't mean their products are actually great. The power of the brand matters a great deal to a lot of people.

(i.e., when 3 random buyers of a Mercedes C-Class were surveyed, it becomes obvious how brand supercedes technical characteristics for many consumers when making a purchase). You know some people just don't have time or don't want to do research. They pick a budget $100, $200, $300 and pick their preferred brand - NV = done with literally 5 minutes of research. One major advantage of forums like ours is to educate gamers so that they don't buy overpriced / poor products and get a lot more for their $.

But you bring up a very interesting point in your discussion that I am always amazed by -- the average (i.e., noob) PC gamer's complete reluctance to upgrade their PSU. My Corsair 520HX was purchased on July 30, 2007 for $98 with a $20 rebate = $78 (I still have the e-mail in my inbox). This PSU survived Q6600 OC +HD4890 OC, Core i7 860 OC + GTX470 OC, Core i5 2500k OC + HD7970 OC (until I went multiple and got the SeaSonic). It still runs today perfectly fine and would have 0 problems powering a Titan X/R9 290X with an i5 CPU. I think you don't need for me to calculate the annual cost of ownership of such a PSU from July 2007 to see that at $78 it was a bargain over such a long period of time. Not only was the power sufficient for many high end CPU/GPU upgrades, but the consistent current/ripple that it delivers gives one a peace of mind that some POS 360-430W PSU won't degrade your components and compromise one's overclock quicker. If you want my opinion, people who buy a modern PC with a 360W PSU are noobs that would benefit greatly from learning by reading forums such as ours.

And that's the thing - a well-informed and knowledgeable PC gamer would NOT buy a pre-assembled rig at BestBuy and even if he did, would definitely not get ripped off by poor price/performance products for the next 7-10 years JUST to save $60-75 on a new PSU. So guess what, I hate to offend your friend or other people in this position, but the types of people who buy low performance and low powered cards and refuse at all costs to upgrade the PSU only have themselves to blame for not thinking outside the box. I am sorry but this is an enthusiast forum. So really, I am not denying that tons and tons of people will be buying a GTX960 for the reasons you mentioned - and a lot of those will be uninformed noobs who can't even upgrade their PSU or calculate TCO of a new PSU over 7-10 years, which is exactly what I pointed out in this thread.

Over the next 10 years, these same people will lose more $ and more performance by being forced to buy power consumption gimped overpriced GPUs (regardless if they are from NV or AMD). Anyone who has experience with building gaming PC rigs knows that the 2 most important components to invest into a new system are the PSU and the monitor, because those will outlast all other components (except perhaps high end headphones/speakers). If I were building a brand new gaming PC/HTPC today for myself or a friend, I would absolutely invest more $ into a PSU and monitor because sooner or later the CPU/mobo/memory/GPU will all be upgraded.

It doesn't take a lot of research to find that you can purchase 450-600W small form factor PSUs that will easily fit inside the spectacular Raven RVZ02 chassis.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&cm_re=silverstone_PSU-_-17-256-109-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&cm_re=silverstone_PSU-_-17-256-084-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&cm_re=silverstone_PSU-_-17-256-063-_-Product

And then you can knock yourself out and drop a 250W Titan X inside a chassis smaller than the Xbox 1.

So the truth of the matter is, with research and 2 human hands, one doesn't need to compromise on much when building the smallest HTPC in the world. Silverstone RVZ02: i7 4790K + Titan X = no problem. Since I joined this forum and started learning, I like to stay open minded and instead I research for a solution until all options are exhausted. Today, it's possible to build a powerhouse HTPC with a 600W PSU and enjoy years and years of 88W Intel i7s and 250W TDP flagship GPUs. You never know if you will get a job promotion, etc. and will be able to afford $350 CPUs and $700 GPUs in the future; so why not invest into a proper PSU from day 1, or at least upgrade one later?!

 

[xthetenth]

I think a great many people, even enthusiasts consider investments in terms of dollars spent in this build rather than dollars spent over the lifetime of the component. Attempting to do accounting over a period of ownership is hard and laced with conjecture, but it's very important to keep from spending unnecessarily. I also think that there's an unwillingness to put money into unsexy things that don't give more FPS or give a greater feeling of performance, even when things like a better monitor would give overall better image quality than 5 more fps on a garbage screen.

Despite the grand tradition of car analogies in computer forums, I'm going to make a different one. Before WWII, the Japanese navy set out to jam as much combat capability as they could into their ships, and on paper what they made were incredible killing machines for their weight. Unfortunately they'd cut corners on things like the amount of stability and hull strength in their designs, and when a fleet exercise was hit by a typhoon, it was a disaster. A lot of ships ended up being a lot more expensive than they needed to be in the long run because they put too much emphasis on hard stats and not enough on the unglamorous things that make the rest work.

People cut margins to the bone on the things that'll last the longest to get fractional increases on the sexy stuff, and either they have to spend extra to fit things into those constraints once the sexy stuff loses its luster or they have to spend extra on the infrastructural stuff that could have lasted a long time. It always ends up costing more in the long run.

 

[snorge]

Don't forget soon the GTX 960ti/965 with 3 GB/192 bit will be released probably pushing the normal 960 prices down. From the leaked benchmarks it appears to be quite a bit faster.

 

[Ranulf]

Don't forget soon the GTX 960ti/965 with 3 GB/192 bit will be released probably pushing the normal 960 prices down. From the leaked benchmarks it appears to be quite a bit faster.

And that might be a worthy upgrade. I'd have more respect for nvidia if they'd put the 960 out last September at $200 and a new ti card drops its price down 6 months later. If a new ti card drops the price down after just 2-3 months, thats a screw job.

 

[Leyawiin]

Not a chance. Anyone who seriously plays WoW will tell you that even a 780Ti/970/980 can't maintain 60 fps in the most demanding situations at 4K.

You're right, but only in the new Warlords of Draenor expansion zones. They've been totally reworked and are surprisingly demanding in certain areas of it. I have a GTX 780 and using DSR @ double my native resolution (1920x1200) it slows to 45 FPS in the Alliance Garrison, Stormshield and War Spear. In most the older parts of the game it can do 60 FPS on Ultra. That said, I bought an R9 290 in late November to replace an MSI GTX 970 with pretty bad coil whine (sent it back to Newegg the first week). On Ultra the 970 was much smoother at 1920x1200. The R9 290 would have little stutters in those demanding areas (dropping from 60 FPS to 56/57/58 FPS). I ended up replacing the R9 290 with a GTX 780 I caught on sale and it performs just like the 970 - smooth as butter at all times on max settings with 8X AA (which wasn't even available in the game when the R9 290 was having its little dips - probably be worse now). It just doesn't have the coil whine like the 970 did.

This was all with an i5-4690k - WoW is an Intel favored game. Its also seems to be an Nvidia favored game at anything from 1440p on down. The AMD cards may do better at 4K in FPS, but I would be money they're not smooth even though they're beating the top Nvidia cards.