8800GTX - November 2006
GTX280 - June, 2008
GTX480 - Fermi - March, 2010
GTX680 - Kepler - March, 2012
Next gen ~ March 2014
Fixed. 8800GT (G92) is not a new generation. That's a mid-range refresh of 8800GTS 640MB SKU which came out along 8800GTX. As has been mentioned by others, new NV generations come out roughly every 2 years. Everything we are seeing is the usual course of business (other than NV launching mid-range Kepler first, following up with flagship 1 year later). On the architecture side, NV is moving along no differently than before. We shouldn't expect any major NV GPU on 20nm until March 2014 at the earliest.
We should expect slight delays though as moving down to lower nodes is becoming harder and more expensive. I think GPU landscape will be a lot more exciting once 20nm GPUs arrive and we have next gen console ports being developed on the PC from the ground-up. Based on developer feedback for next gen console title development, most developers are starting to make games on a high-end PC first and then scale them down to PS4/XB1. This is not at all how PS360 games were developed. Hopefully this means the PC gaming platform won't be as held back as before during PS360 gen.
I think because GTX780/GK110 came out about 1 year after GTX680, it doesn't seem as impressive. Yet, if we compare GTX580 vs. 780, the performance increase is 80%, or nearly 100% from GTX480. That's the most impressive increase in performance from 1 node to another NV has produced since they moved from 7800GTX to 8800GTX. The performance increase from 8800GTX to 280/285 or from 280/285 to 480/580 was nowhere near 80-100%. But because NV executed so spectacularly with Kepler this generation we ended up with a situation where AMD is far behind in performance and NV waited 1 full year to launch GTX780. Although I don't foresee the same 80-100% increase in performance from Kepler single-GPU flagship to Maxwell single-GPU flagship though, as games like Witcher 3 come out, we'll have a lot more reason to upgrade from HD7970/GTX680 level of GPUs.
Low cost 4k displays can't come soon enough, especially in laptops for god's sake.
What? The last thing laptops need right now are 4K displays. If you have 20/20 vision and you take a 15.6 inch laptop and you are working under normal conditions (not sitting 10 cms away from from the screen), you cannot notice the pixels with a resolution of 1080P. Go ahead and try it. The downside to 4K displays on laptops are skyrocketing prices and need of a GPU many times more powerful to drive graphics on such a screen. What we need for laptops are 24 hour battery life and use of more exotic lightweight materials like magnesium, carbon fiber, etc. I would buy a 1080P 15.6 inch laptop with 3.5 weight with 24 hour battery and 0.5" thickness over a 4K laptop that's 0.8" thick and only has 8 hour of battery life any day.
On the desktop, 4K is also questionable. Heck, you can put 8K on a desktop screen but the problem is LCD/LED technology itself has inferior image quality. If you compare image quality of say a plasma to LCD/LED, plasma destroys it in almost all relevant metrics from response time, black levels, viewing angles, accuracy of colours. The reason the industry wants to push 4K is because it's very easy to market a spec/number to the average person. How about they focus on producing an actual next generation display technology that supersedes Plasma/LED and make it affordable?
Additionally, you can significantly improve graphics in games without moving beyond 1080P. Current physics effects, level of textures and shaders is still very primitive. Characters models are still very low polygon count relatively speaking. The last thing we want right now is to waste GPU resources on a trivial move from 1080P/1600P to 4K when that GPU horsepower is FAR better used on more sophisticated character models, global illumination/lighting/physics/particle and other shader effects, etc. The number of NPCs/objects on screen can also increase. If you look at a game like the
Division, despite running at 1080P, it looks very good. We need next generation PC game engines
before 4K. Throwing 4K rez at primitive level of graphics is like throwing lipstick on a pig.
When 4k gaming monitors become more affordable, all this may well change.
Is performance starting to stagnate? I don't think so.
I still think people are downplaying the increases we've had with GPUs this generation. This is likely because prices have increased overall which has overshadowed the impressive gains NV and AMD produced on 28nm. Strictly from a performance point of view, this has been one very impressive generation despite what people keep repeating for the last 1.5 years that they are disappointed.
Some newer games show this:
Arma 3 GTX780 is
76% faster than GTX580. HD7970GE is
85% faster than HD6970!
Castlevania GTX780 is
112% faster than GTX580. HD7970GE is
70% faster than HD6970
Dark. GTX780 is
77% faster than GTX580. HD7970GE is
73% faster than HD6970.
Crysis 3:LI. Titan (780 not in the chart) is
89% faster than GTX580. HD7970GE is
68% faster than HD6970.
I know if I backed out of the game a little, others have as well.
Anecdotal evidence is not representative of the market as a whole.
"The effect that key titles have on hardware sales is phenomenal. Enthusiast PC Gamers embrace content creation and modding, so when titles like Bohemia Interactive's ARMA 3 are in the pipeline, we start to see anticipatory hardware sales. In fact, we are estimating over $800 million of PC builds influenced primarily by this title. A major component of this situation is that many games are placing increasing demands on the CPU. The result is that swapping out the graphics add-in board is not enough this time around and gamers are building (and ordering) overclocked PC's from the ground up." ~ Source
PC Gaming Hardware market is expect to grow, not decline. Gamers are expected to spend more than ever on premium GPUs:
"Jon Peddie, President of JPR said, "Not only is gaming becoming an even more important purchasing influence of PC sales due to the offloading of more basic functionality to smart devices, but we are forecasting growth in the most expensive discrete graphics products."
Also, let's look at what level of performance we can have in GPUs now. GTX580 cost $499. You can now get that level of performance for
$170 in HD7870. GTX760 delivers 95% of the performance of GTX670 for just $250. GPU landscape is not slowing down at all. Prices are dropping and performance is increasing. The problem is a gap between $350 price level of HD7970 1Ghz cards and $650 GTX780. There is no card in between realistically worth buying which shows an imbalance in the marketplace. To move up from HD7970 level of performance you now have to spend almost double. Perhaps because of this some enthusiasts are very unhappy about the current state of things. We are already seeing price movements as 7990 can be had for $670-700. The GPU landscape is far more exciting than the joke Intel gave us with Haswell on the desktop.
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