Gam3r01 :
I am mostly interested to see how it would stack up against an MSI Lightning or the ASUS Strix cards.
The Strix isn't in the same category, the equivalent Asus card would be the Matrix
Lol at the R9 295x2 winning most of the benchmarks handily.
Why wouldn't you expect 2 top of the line GPUs to beat a 1 GPU ? Two 970 GPUs and two 780s beat it too.
As far as Pascal, remember nVidias strategy....with the 7xx and 9xx series we saw the 780 and 980 come out and then the Ti versions much later....
780 - 23rd May, 2013
780 Ti - 7th November, 2013
980 - 19th September, 2014
980 Ti - 1st June, 2015
so whatever the next line is called, lets call it the 10xx series for the purposes of this discussion.... we will see the 1070 which will be about as fast as today's 980 ... the 1080 will be in the replacement for the 980 Ti (not as the top tier card of course but, based upon past series, roughly equivalent performance) .... the 1080 Ti won't be out for a 6 - 9 months after the 1080 ... and the extreme cards won't be out for 3 - 6 months after that. So if Pascal drops in 6 months.... we won't see a Ti version for at least a year and the extreme performance version is at least 15 months off.
The thing is ... the article reported that the Extreme card here goes OCs 33% ... the Gigabyte G1 already, when overclocked, gives 31% more fps over reference. Due to nVidia's lock downs on voltage, both legal and physical, the extreme cards (Matrix, Classified, Lightning, Amp Extreme, Windforce Extreme) just aren't delivering what they used to with regard to increased fps over the cheaper ... and oft much cheaper ... "Gaming" versions. So, the question is ... is waiting and paying for these extreme cards worth the costs ? And also, due to them being released within say 6 months of the next series being released, will water block manufacturers invest in making WB's for them ? The lightning came out so late that EK decided no WB this time around.
Maybe you have never owned a dual gpu setup then? Sure it may bench well on the few tests in tom's suite, but there will be one or two games that you really want to enjoy, only to find out they either scale poorly with dual gpu, have stuttering or fps dips to lower lows than an adequate single card, late dual gpu support with patches or it never gets dual gpu support and the game only plays well with one gpu disabled
Owned many and built dozens more. Tom's Suite may be a little on the short side, but TPU uses 19 games in their test suite and typically, you will find 1 card with an issue with SLI among the group... AMD will usually have more, sometimes with even just 1 card) to the extent that when they do the summary the graphs will show the average, then average w/o game A, and average w/ games A & B. I would say that more than 80% of the builds we did thru the 7xx and 9xx series were SLI, either from the getgo or w/ MoBo and PSU selected so as to allow the upgrade 6-12 months down the line.
The games that don't scale well generally fall into 3 categories.
a) Profile not available on release date .... usually available within 1-2 weeks
b) Game already gets like 80 - 150 fps w/ 1 card
c) Game not or not anticipated to be a big seller and vendor didn't want to invest in T & E
You don't buy two 970s in SLI for your 1440p monitor to go from ....
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls goes from 157.0 to 220.8 (40.64% scaling)
WoW: Mists of Pandaria goes from 110.8 to 174.8 (57.76%)
COD Advanced Warfare* goes from 100.9 to 154.5 (53.12%)
You get SLI to make games playable at your chosen resolution
Tomb Raider goes from 29.8 to 58.7; scaling = 96.98%
Far Cry 3 goes from 35.6 to 68.8; scaling = 93.26%
Crysis 3 goes from 22.5 to 43.3; scaling = 92.44%
Bioshock Infinite goes from 76.7 to 143.9; scaling = 87.61%
Splinter Cell: Blacklist goes from 49.5 to 92.2; scaling = 86.26%
Battlefield 4 goes from 45.0 to 83.2; scaling =84.89%
Metro LL goes from 40.7 to 74.6; scaling =83.29%
Still nVidia has been working hard to make SLI a little less popular with their mid tier cards by adjusting the pricing structure so that two x60Tis or x70's aren't killing the x80 / x80 Ti performance wise while being significantly cheaper.
The 560 Ti heavily cut into the 580s ales as the 2 cards were $100 cheaper and 40% faster than the 580 .... then again, two 650 Ti Boosts were even cheaper and they still topped the 680 / 7970 Ghz. The 970 was the worst tho. The 970 is the most popular card hitting Steam servers, 1st time that something has topped an Intel IGP since they dropped. There's about five 970s in use for every 980 and the 980 Ti hasn't even broken into the top 85 as yet.
nVidia is battling itself here as they took most of their income in the last 18 months from 970s by a huge margin; while the 970 outsold all 23 R7 and R9 series AMD cards combined by a factor of > 2:1, can they produce a replacement and sell the new silicon for the close to the same price point and therefore not have folks feeling like pascal's performance bump isn't worth the price increase ? Hopefully AMD will focus on this price / performance niche and give nVidia a run for its money at 1440p. Given current performance, I don't see 4k builds as driving card sales this coming generation. Right now 4k accounts for just 0.07% of gamers.
-1920 x 1080 / 1200 is still the leader at 36.59%
-2560 x 1080 / 1440 / 1600 is surprisingly low still at 1.60%
-But what drops my jaw is that 1366 x 768 is the 2nd post popular at 26.47% ... and ... showed the largest growth over the past month.
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