No way in hell 980 will be worth $250. I expect when 16nm hits, we will have GTX980 performance in the lower mid range GPU for $250 or less. All new, with new features, with better power consumption.
980 will drop along with 970 and r9 290 to below $200. Every $ spent above 290/390 price will be totally lost as their resale value will be the same when much better 16nm products hit the market.
If you want to buy now, get the cheapest 290/390 and change it later to 16nm card, or go full out for 980ti and keep it longer.
Well I am not a rocket scientist so I cannot predict the exact resale value on a 980 in 2016 but just looking at NV's pricing model, it took them almost 3 years to match 680's level of performance in a
$199 960. 680 came out March 2012 and 960 came out January 2015.
Since 980 came out September 2014, I think my estimate of $250 by September 2016 is fairly reasonable, if not too aggressive given recent times. If you think the depreciation will be a lot more aggressive, I cannot really argue against your point since I cannot exactly predict the future
, but I am just using historical info as some gauge.
Also, look at AMD's position -- they can hardly compete on price/performance and they actually raised market prices of 290/290X when they introduced 390/390X. I am going to assume that AMD will still re-use Fiji in much the same way they reused Hawaii. That means Nano/Fury would move into the $329-429 price bracket. 980 isn't that far off that level of performance so why would we have a card way faster than a 980 for $249 next year?
I have my doubts.
Let me use another viewpoint. NV took more than 1.5 years to go from GTX760 to GTX960 and that added just 14-16% more performance (!).
Right now, 980 is an astounding
100% faster than a 960.
So what do you think are the chances NV will serve us a $199-249 Pascal x60 card that matches 980's level of performance in 2016? Have you NOT seen NV's GPU strategy since 2012? This isn't the good old days where you get 80-100% more performance every 2 years at the same price.
NV is going to milk it for as long as it takes before Volta comes out.
Why would NV release a card for $249 that matches 980's performance in 2016 when they can release cards 30-40% faster than the current line-up and then in 2017 another set of cards 30-40% faster than those? That's
exactly what they did with Kepler and Maxwell. This way NV would have 2 flagship, one in 2016 and a new one in 2017, maximize profits by again selling a mid-range x60 card as an x80 card, and maximize revenue by getting gamers to upgrade twice (680->780/780Ti or 980->980Ti). And AMD? They are not in a position to dictate much so they would MUCH prefer NV to slowly trickle down newer cards rather than release a card 80-100% faster than a 980Ti and wipe the floor with AMD.