What I find absolutely amazing is the gushing some of these early reviews are doing for these cards.
Most of them who reviewed reference 290/290X cards should be. They ignored after-market 290/290X varieties and harped on how hot and loud those cards were. This means their comparison reviews have to look at their old 290/290X standings, which means they have
no choice but to acknowledge that the newer cards are cool, quiet, have double the VRAM and offer better value than the competition that either costs more (980) or has crippled VRAM (970). Sites like TechSpot or Computerbase/Sweclockers don't need to do that since they used after-market 290/290X cards or raised fan speed to 100% to remove throttling to reflect true performance of 290/290X cards. That's why those sites have shown objectivity for years.
I think 290X performance was understated due to the reference benchmarks from 2 years ago.
Of course. Computerbase.de showed that a reference 290X would thermal throttle over time and run at 850-940mhz after more than 2 min of benchmarking. So all those reviews with reference 290X cards never showed the true potential of the card.
Imo also the good thing about 390x is it shows 970 and 980 is utterly uninteresting from a performance perspective. Damn all that hype those cards got for same as 290 perf...
Yup, but if you paid attention Sept 2014, there very a lot of members on AT that did criticize 970/980 for barely moving the mark in terms of performance 10 months later yet they were overwhelmed by perf/watt crowd. The perf/watt crowd kept ensuring to downplay the awesome value of after-market 290/290X cards for the last 1.5 years (going as far as using reference 290/290X cards in comparisons against after-market 780 back in the days) and now the same people are saying "Oh look, you can just buy an after-market 290/290X/290X 8GB for $240-270"
What is with all of the "rebrand" comments here lately? A "rebrand" is taking the exact same card, same clocks, same everything, and slapping a new sticker on it. A "refresh" is changing something about the card, possibly more than one thing, and slapping a new sticker on it. This card has numerous (though minor) changes, anybody saying that it is merely a rebrand has an agenda. I see AMD loyalists criticzing Hardware Canucks constantly around here, and even they termed it a refresh.
Good post. 390/390X are like 680->770. 770 was praised by green supporters, despite being only 8-10% faster than a 680 and despite it offering absolutely awful price performance against AMD's 280X ($299) vs. $379 (770 2GB) or $449 (770 4GB). In fact, originally the
770 came out $100 less than the 680, which was actually more expensive than 7970Ghz. Today, 390X is coming in at $120 less than a $549 290X, and also doubles the VRAM. The $399 version of 770 had the same VRAM as a 680. 770 actually used more power than a 680 but 390/390X do not use more power than a 290/290X despite offering 8-10% more performance.
I am not saying 390/390X are a great value in the context of 290/290X, but it just puts things in perspective how 770 got none of the criticism of being VRAM gimped, overpriced, while offering only 8-10% more performance than a 680, yet it sold like hot cakes, was called a refresh, not a rebrand, and was praised by reviewers and many of the same people on this forum that are calling 390/390X rebrands.
Given how GCN just keeps on maturing so gracefully, maybe by the end of this year, 390X will straight out be faster than 980 with a wider gap.
I am not sure about faster than a 980 but next year NV will have to optimize drivers for Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal -- 4 different architectures. Among those architectures, there are some serious issues (Fermi and Kepler have weak compute performance, Maxwell has 970 that requires its own VRAM optimizations). I just don't see NV having the resources to be able to optimize drivers for 4 different architectures. AMD on the other hand just has GCN and they'll have no choice but to optimize VRAM usage on Fury since HBM is going to be the base for a lot of their future products. NV doesn't need to optimize for 970's 3.5GB of VRAM once Pascal drops since it'll actually entice users to upgrade from a 970 quicker.
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