The perpetual "Kepler lost performance" myth regurgitates endlessly in every form.
There was no loss in performance.
With GCN, AMD had more performance left on the table to extract. Then considering the next gen consoles both sport GCN, game engines catering the GCN design, this becomes another factor.
Then nvidia moved on to maxwell and dx12, a whole new world.
There are many factors at play but the truth is.....
Kepler did not loose performance over time.
This. GCN had more raw compute than comparably priced Nvidia offerings, but were hamstrung by crappy drivers for much too long, much to our (both AMD and Nvidia owners) loss.
Had the drivers actually done a decent job of extracting GCN's performance from the beginning, we'd probably have GTX 970+ performance at sub-$200 prices instead. Not to say Nvidia shouldn't take some of the blame here for abusing the situation as they're equally at fault for doing so.
This is unqualified nonsense. Excuses made for NV. The reason why older GCN cards are doing better today is because AMD invested significant amount of time in raising their performance while NV simply didn't. There's no inherent "magic" involved in the older GCN cards which had mountains of "untapped performance" but I'm laughing at you if you think there was.
Also, please stop talking about GCN as if it is one big grey goo. There are different versions of GCN and they are
not the same.
AMD's DX11 drivers are even to this day worse than NV's, so NV has no excuse. It purposefully abandoned Kepler so as to force people to get to Maxwell. It has since boosted Kepler to levels which are the minimum necessary.
The true "untapped advantage" of GCN 1.0 and 1.1 isn't in DX11 games - it's in DX12. But all of the performance advantage we've seen so far has been in DX11. So what does that tell us? Magic? No, purposeful investment. Once DX12 becomes mainstream, the Hawaii GPUs in particular will look even better, but this time you can actually talk about untapped potential with a straight face without making yourself look like a fool.
I'm amazed how far some people are willing to slobber for NV, anything to excuse their behaviour. I'm sure we'll get long "explanations" from the same people how gameworks is really about bringing innovation to gaming and any suggestion otherwise is just anti-NV smears.
:biggrin:
Warning issued for inflammatory language.
-- stahlhart