Which GPU(s) have aged the BEST in the last 3 years?

[MagickMan]

Well that makes one of you then. Total gibberish.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

If they last over the warranty when you OC the shit out of them, then what more can you expect? This is hardly an objective test...

Does make one wonder why AMD GPUs tend to have lesser warranties than nV in the first place, though.

 

[thesmokingman]

The OG Titan was a compute card packaged for gamers. I don't know why gamers bought it. The Titan X on the hand is a gaming card to the core.

Having been on the nVidia train these past years has been terrible in terms of longevity. They are the worst. They make you buy a new card almost every 6 months. The current Titan X is the only possible exception in that if you bought it at launch you will get a full year out of it. In that sense it is far better value than if you bought a 680 and replaced it with a 780 and that with a 780ti and that with a 980.

The 7970 is the winner for a 3 year card.

Eh the 7970 is a compute card as well. And on that point, ppl often forget how competitive the 7970 was vs a Titan in the gpgpu arena.


http://www.geeks3d.com/20140305/ope...n-hd-7970-surpasses-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review,3442-10.html

 

[Madpacket]

7970 by a long shot because...Bitcoins. My dual 7970's paid for themselves just mining coins when I wasn't using them for gaming. They also paid for my replacement 290's among many other things. The 290's almost paid for themselves before the difficulty skyrocketed.

7970's (the reference cards with Volterra VRM's were the best, even with blowers, ran them for 2 years 24/7/365) undervolted two of them mining together consumed under 500W. Sold them after 2 years for a good price to friends and they still have them working just fine.

The reference cards got crapped on due to the loudness and throttling but but the blower style coolers AMD used last forever and are great for not collecting a ton of dust, and when they did they were easy to clean out. It's just too bad they were loud and weren't very good at cooling unless the RPM's were cranked up

 

[RussianSensation]

New TPU charts with the latest drivers, new Skylake CPU platform. Will put even more perspective for this thread.

280X (basically an overclocked 7970) is beating 960 by 27% at 1080P, beating 770 by 17.5% at 1080P. This means HD7950 OC to 1.15-1.2Ghz is unbeatable value of last generation or 7970 depending at which cost you purchased it.

For 290 level class at 1440P, 290X beats 780Ti while a $400 R9 290 is just 3.5% behind the $699 780Ti. R9 290 is also aging very well, easily beating its 780 competitor that cost $100 more.

 

[crisium]

Those 1440p results. Amazing what happens when you remove Project Nvidia and the odd Wolfenstein results that were a TPU exclusive. And using a modern CPU @ 4.5GHz gives AMD GPUs the chance to shine.

The 770 looks like gutter trash.

 

[Silverforce11]

Wow, interesting results with more modern games.

At the start of this year I had said that the R290 would end up matching the 970 by this year's end, and it just happened! That was when people were deciding to buy $220 R290s (custom models, not even the reference crap that TPU uses for their charts) or $330 970 as a frequent question on the forum here.

My next predictions, in about 6 months time when the first wave of DX12 games have passed, the R290 will end up faster than 970. The R290X will = 980 or slightly ahead. 390/X will edge out more (because they represent custom R290/X models that do not throttle).

Fury X will go from being 10% slower than 980Ti to matching it at 1440p and slightly faster at 4K, a lot faster in CF vs SLI.

Also, the reason why some of AMD's stack have aged well is because we're stuck on 28nm for longer than usual. With the move to 14/16nm, pretty much all 28nm stuff will be obsolete.

 

[poofyhairguy]

At the start of this year I had said that the R290 would end up matching the 970 by this year's end, and it just happened!

At the more popular resolution of 1080p the 970 is closer to the 290x and 780 Ti than the 290. Maxwell 2 is so weird, both the 980 and 970 kick butt at 1080p but the GTX 960 doesn't really get the same boost. On the flipside Fury does worse than Hawaii at 1080p, it almost needs a higher resolution to justify its existence.

 

[thilanliyan]

Does make one wonder why AMD GPUs tend to have lesser warranties than nV in the first place, though.

Didn't notice that...XFX had a really good warranty but they are standard 3 yrs like everyone else now aren't they? I used to buy only XFX because of their double lifetime warranty but they scrapped that. They have been AMD exclusive for several yrs now so AMD does/did have great warranty. AFAIK, most vendors are down to 3 yrs now? Is evga any better?

 

[boozzer]

New TPU charts with the latest drivers, new Skylake CPU platform. Will put even more perspective for this thread.

280X (basically an overclocked 7970) is beating 960 by 27% at 1080P, beating 770 by 17.5% at 1080P. This means HD7950 OC to 1.15-1.2Ghz is unbeatable value of last generation or 7970 depending at which cost you purchased it.

For 290 level class at 1440P, 290X beats 780Ti while a $400 R9 290 is just 3.5% behind the $699 780Ti. R9 290 is also aging very well, easily beating its 780 competitor that cost $100 more.

damn. it seems that if you want long term, amd is the way to go.

 

[dazelord]

New TPU charts with the latest drivers, new Skylake CPU platform. Will put even more perspective for this thread.

280X (basically an overclocked 7970) is beating 960 by 27% at 1080P, beating 770 by 17.5% at 1080P. This means HD7950 OC to 1.15-1.2Ghz is unbeatable value of last generation or 7970 depending at which cost you purchased it.

For 290 level class at 1440P, 290X beats 780Ti while a $400 R9 290 is just 3.5% behind the $699 780Ti. R9 290 is also aging very well, easily beating its 780 competitor that cost $100 more.

@ 1440p we have three ties

R9 270X = GTX 960 (33%) shader count ratio (1280/1024) = 1.25
R9 290 = GTX 970 (57%) (2560/1660) = 1.54
R9 Fury X = GTX 980ti (82%) (4096/2816) = 1.45

Not taking other things in account... The 960 does very poorly against the 270X considering the number of shaders. On the other hand the 970 manage to perform as well as the much stronger 290. I wonder how the 970 will perform in upcoming dx12 games if gpu hardware gets more utilized? Considering the huge shader deficiency it has compared to its Radeon peers.

 

[sxr7171]

Eh the 7970 is a compute card as well. And on that point, ppl often forget how competitive the 7970 was vs a Titan in the gpgpu arena.


http://www.geeks3d.com/20140305/ope...n-hd-7970-surpasses-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review,3442-10.html

Right the OG Titan wasn't a good card for gamers at all. I suppose it wasn't that good for compute either. It was very good for bragging rights though.

 

[Joepublic2]

How many 7950s and 7970s, that have been used heavily for gaming (like 4-6 hrs /day), are still fully functional today? I'm on board that theoretically AMD GPUs have more longevity, but mine seem to die (or degrade to the point I need to underclock them) not long after 2 years. My 7970 from Sapphire started getting flakey after 26 months and died altogether at 28, and with a 2 yr warranty I simply had to throw it in the recycle bin. That's an all-too-common thing, too. My CF 5850s died, 7970 died, one of my CF 290s died (and the other is running in my dad's PC where it flakes out after 2 hours of gaming). So now I've gone to team Green and am running SLI 980TIs, started w/ one and then bought another, and we'll see how that works out.

I've had less total AMD cards fail over the years than Nvidia, but you'd really need 1000s of samples to get a good handle on overall hardware failure rates over time for both manufacturers. As far as I know the only people that would have the requisite info would be board manufacturers and they have competitive reasons to not publish said info to the general public.

The whole bumpgate thing (probably why my 8800GT died) was the reason I got a 7950 for my next card (still going strong in my brother's computer) and AMD's drivers are the reason I moved back to Nvidia (seriously, I've tried to communicate with their engineers about reproducible driver bugs with various AMD hardware on several occasions and it was an arduous process, with extremely poor communication on AMD's part).

Their hardware is generally excellent though IME. It's a shame they don't invest the time/money/manpower into their drivers that Nvidia does. At least they don't purposely break their drivers when you're doing VGA passthrough unlike Nvidia who claims it's "not a supported configuration" as an excuse. Everybody knows they're doing it to protect their high margin workstation/enterprise sales but they need to be up front about purposeful driver breakage in their desktop cards when they detect that they're being installed/run in a VM.

 

[alexruiz]

I would say the one that has aged the best in the last 3-4 years is not the big GCN, but rather the midrange. The Pitcairn / Curacao XT in the HD7870 / R9 270X would get my vote.

At launch it was already faster than the GTX 580, and I am surprised at how they keep gaining performance with newer drivers, and how a R9 270x is still good enough for 1080p. These things launched 4 years ago as midrange parts, and they can still pull more than a few games with decent framerates at high detail. Heck, it is faster than the much newer GTX 950, and not that far off the GTX 960.

 

[krumme]

Vote for pitcairn.
Look at the results again at 1080p. 270x is as fast as 960.
Where i live the 960 cost the same as the 7870 did 3 years ago. Lol.

The 970 vs. 290 development is expected. I wonder if at some time my former 7970 becomes faster than my present 970.

 

[Silverforce11]

Vote for pitcairn.
Look at the results again at 1080p. 270x is as fast as 960.
Where i live the 960 cost the same as the 7870 did 3 years ago. Lol.

The 970 vs. 290 development is expected. I wonder if at some time my former 7970 becomes faster than my present 970.

I doubt the 7970 would ever match the 970.

The 280X nearly matching 780 already is a huge growth for GCN 1.0, looking at release reviews, IIRC the 780 was 25-30% faster than 680 and 7970 Ghz (which itself is ~5% faster than 280X!).

 

[Osjur]

The 280X nearly matching 780 already is a huge growth for GCN 1.0, looking at release reviews, IIRC the 780 was 25-30% faster than 680 and 7970 Ghz (which itself is ~5% faster than 280X!).

Nitpicking here put I'd say 7970Ghz is about 3% faster vs stock 280X. 1000 / 1500 vs 1050 / 1500 makes 5% but I benched the perf. increase when I still used 7970 and it was around 0.7% per 10mhz on core

Looking at how 280X is only 12% slower vs 780 at 1080p and 8% slower at 1440p makes me want to take my old 7970 which overclocks to 1330 / 1700 and pit it against 780 and OC both cards to the max to see how those two cards fare.

 

[Silverforce11]

GTX 780 debut:

GTX 780Ti debut:

Look at the 680 vs 7970Ghz. Neck & neck!

Then compare to now:

The 770 which was 5% faster than 680 is now very behind the 280X which itself is slower than 7970Ghz.

I had to LOL @ HardwareCan when they did an editorial a few months back just after all the uproar over NV neglecting Kepler since Maxwell's launch, and they concluded that there's no difference. Such fake data. Much wow.

 

[thesmokingman]

The 770 which was 5% faster than 680 is now very behind the 280X which itself is slower than 7970Ghz.

I had to LOL @ HardwareCan when they did an editorial a few months back just after all the uproar over NV neglecting Kepler since Maxwell's launch, and they concluded that there's no difference. Such fake data. Much wow.

Truth be told, the 680 was never that close once we adjusted the benchmarks clock for clock. History also repeated with the 770.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1322119/12-11-vs-310-33

 

[Silverforce11]

@thesmokingman
I don't buy into the clock for clock argument when comparing different uarch, especially completely different brands.

The results however speak for itself, Kepler hasn't aged well at all compared to GCN. I'm expecting the same repeated once Pascal debuts, Maxwell won't age well vs GCN either.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I wonder how well Tonga will play with Directx 12? Doesn't it have 8 ACE's? Would be cool to see it pull past Tahiti.

 

[dogen1]

I wonder how well Tonga will play with Directx 12? Doesn't it have 8 ACE's? Would be cool to see it pull past Tahiti.

I wouldn't put much weight into the ACE count. Maybe it'll some difference eventually, but I'm not sure. I don't think any GPU really needs 64 work queues to keep busy. It's the same reason intel only uses 2 way hyperthreading, most of the benefit comes from 1 or 2 more sources of work. Any more than that and you just lose cache efficiency.

 

[thesmokingman]

@thesmokingman
I don't buy into the clock for clock argument when comparing different uarch, especially completely different brands.

The results however speak for itself, Kepler hasn't aged well at all compared to GCN. I'm expecting the same repeated once Pascal debuts, Maxwell won't age well vs GCN either.

The numbers speak for themselves. The 680 needed to be boosted to 1492mhz to match a 1330mhz 7970 in heaven. Read the last post. What's comical is that the prevailing thought at the time was that the 680 competed with 7970 when in reality the 7970 was closer to the OG titan, especially in multi gpu.

 

[Stuka87]

I am still running my 7950 because it just keeps going. Good over clock on it and it still runs whatever I throw at it.

AMD has done an amazing job and keep graphics drivers up to date for newer games. I see this card easily lasting me until 14/16nm cards are out.