Worth waiting for the next generation of video cards or buy now?

Tanon

I'm planing on buying an R9 390 to upgrade from my 670, but with AMD having just revealed their new Polaris architecture that basically doubles performance per watt, would it be a good idea to wait for that? It'd certainly be a big boon compared to how much power the 390 eats, but would there be a high-end card available early on in the releases or would it be later in the year?

SEANMCAD

Tanon said:

I'm planing on buying an R9 390 to upgrade from my 670, but with AMD having just revealed their new Polaris architecture that basically doubles performance per watt, would it be a good idea to wait for that? It'd certainly be a big boon compared to how much power the 390 eats, but would there be a high-end card available early on in the releases or would it be later in the year?

I would wait until CES is over.

Not sure how connected CES is with video cards but a lot of other information comes out that might reveal what you need video card wise.

Quizzical

Historically, AMD has nearly always released their top end single-GPU card of a generation first.  The only exception since the ATI acquisition was that the 6800 series launched about a month before the 6900 series even though the 6900 series was intended to be first because the latter was hit by delays that didn't affect the former.

There's also a question of double performance per watt as compared to what?  Going from 28 nm to 14/16 nm, you'd expect nearly double energy efficiency from the process node alone.  Doubling Fiji efficiency would be much more impressive than doubling Tahiti efficiency, though.  Indeed, Fiji isn't really that far shy of doubling Tahiti's efficiency, especially if you're willing to count the R9 Nano.

A lot depends on how long you're willing to wait.  If your GTX 670 is on its last legs, you want something new now.  If the GTX 670 is still working fine and you're in no rush, I'd wait until you do have some reason why you need to upgrade.  Sometimes that takes a few years longer than you expect and maybe you end up finally buying a Radeon R9 600 series or GeForce 3000 series (I have no idea what comes after the 900 series) card on a 10 nm process node.

AMD announced Polaris today, but Nvidia Pascal is also due sometime in 2016.

Cleffy

I think its a better idea to wait. Most likely we will see new GPUs in June 2016. Both companies have been stuck at 28nm for 3 years. Both NVidia and AMD are going to 16nm come mid next year which will have a sizable performance jump simply die shrinking the current architectures.

Righteous_Rock

Do you have the power you need and do you care about your efficiency? That's the question for you at this point. Depending on how much you play and your current power supply it might not matter.

Tanon

Quizzical said:

Historically, AMD has nearly always released their top end single-GPU card of a generation first.  The only exception since the ATI acquisition was that the 6800 series launched about a month before the 6900 series even though the 6900 series was intended to be first because the latter was hit by delays that didn't affect the former.

There's also a question of double performance per watt as compared to what?  Going from 28 nm to 14/16 nm, you'd expect nearly double energy efficiency from the process node alone.  Doubling Fiji efficiency would be much more impressive than doubling Tahiti efficiency, though.  Indeed, Fiji isn't really that far shy of doubling Tahiti's efficiency, especially if you're willing to count the R9 Nano.

A lot depends on how long you're willing to wait.  If your GTX 670 is on its last legs, you want something new now.  If the GTX 670 is still working fine and you're in no rush, I'd wait until you do have some reason why you need to upgrade.  Sometimes that takes a few years longer than you expect and maybe you end up finally buying a Radeon R9 600 series or GeForce 3000 series (I have no idea what comes after the 900 series) card on a 10 nm process node.

AMD announced Polaris today, but Nvidia Pascal is also due sometime in 2016.

My 670 still works fine for most games, but some of the newer titles (i.e. Witcher 3) I've had to turn down more settings than I would've liked. My CPU is definitely overdue for an upgrade as it's a Pentium G850, so I figured I'd just build a brand new computer and turn my current one into a HTPC. I'm just trying to figure out if the next generation of cards is going to be a huge increase in performance due to being a new architecture. Though, high end cards also tend to have low supply when first released, so I'm not sure that I'll even be able to snag one until later.

Gaming.Rocks2

NVidia is working on making affordable VR friendly GPUs. I suggest you should wait to see the results. 

Colt47

Got a 390x recently and it's a pretty  good upgrade over a 7970 oc.  Really, don't bother chasing after what hasn't been released yet.  We are probably six months out from a cold release of new hardware and at least a year out from having solid, reliable drivers to run the said hardware.

Basically, you might have a better GPU in six months of waiting, but it may be a buggy, unoptimized, crashing monstrosity for all we know right now.

Rzep

For 1080p gaming buy now, for 1440p gaming wait for the new cards unless you have money for the most expensive cards or want to go the multiple card route.

Wylf

Also depends on how much money you want to spend.

Malabooga

Id say in your case, since youre aiming to buy whole package (cpu+gpu+all else that is needed) it would be preferable to wait for new stuff from all 3 (AMD/intel/NVidia). Though youll have to wait 8+ months.

When new stuff is out, you can look at the tests and make informed decision, you can still end up with 390 ;P

OTOH, it never hurts to look for great deals for upgrade. 390 is great GPU, and FX 8300 is so cheap that its a no brainer and great mid step until you wait for new cpus as your CPU will be bottleneck in most games, so buying just GPU will be pointless.

You can look at this video (most interesting 3:25 onward) to see how dual cores perform (very) badly G3258 OCed to 4,5 GHz and i3.

Quesa

DMKano said:

Wait for Nvidia Pascal - it's not that far away.

Even if you dont want Pascal and are going AMD it's worth waiting because of price shakedown after pascal launch.

This is the right answer.

Rusque

Are the games you're playing running at 15fps? If yes, buy now cause that would make my eyes bleed. If no, then wait.

breadm1x

Well i just "upgraded" my Game pc number 2.
Had a GTX570 in it but having (finaly) loads of problems with 1440p content with just 1.2Gm mem
Was thinking about a gtx970 but i ended up with a verry CHEAP GTX780ti verry happy wih it.
Other pc has a 4970k and a R9 290x.
Hovered over the Fury X Fury Nano "buy" button alot but decided to wait until the HBM version 2
And see what nvidia come up with

Quizzical

DMKano said:

Wait for Nvidia Pascal - it's not that far away.

Even if you dont want Pascal and are going AMD it's worth waiting because of price shakedown after pascal launch.

Why wait for Pascal in particular and not Polaris?  I could understand waiting for both, but it seems strange to say wait only for one and not for the other.

Historically, AMD has beaten Nvidia to every single new process node for discrete GPUs since buying ATI.  This time, there's no guarantee that they'll use the same process node, which could shake things up.  AMD has officially announced that they're fabricating something or other at Global Foundries and apparently says they're fabricating something else at TSMC, and is rumored to also be using Samsung.  If AMD and Nvidia aren't using the same foundries for their first GPUs, that could shake up the order if one foundry's process node is delayed far more than another's.

Quizzical

Tanon said:

Quizzical said:

Historically, AMD has nearly always released their top end single-GPU card of a generation first.  The only exception since the ATI acquisition was that the 6800 series launched about a month before the 6900 series even though the 6900 series was intended to be first because the latter was hit by delays that didn't affect the former.

There's also a question of double performance per watt as compared to what?  Going from 28 nm to 14/16 nm, you'd expect nearly double energy efficiency from the process node alone.  Doubling Fiji efficiency would be much more impressive than doubling Tahiti efficiency, though.  Indeed, Fiji isn't really that far shy of doubling Tahiti's efficiency, especially if you're willing to count the R9 Nano.

A lot depends on how long you're willing to wait.  If your GTX 670 is on its last legs, you want something new now.  If the GTX 670 is still working fine and you're in no rush, I'd wait until you do have some reason why you need to upgrade.  Sometimes that takes a few years longer than you expect and maybe you end up finally buying a Radeon R9 600 series or GeForce 3000 series (I have no idea what comes after the 900 series) card on a 10 nm process node.

AMD announced Polaris today, but Nvidia Pascal is also due sometime in 2016.

My 670 still works fine for most games, but some of the newer titles (i.e. Witcher 3) I've had to turn down more settings than I would've liked. My CPU is definitely overdue for an upgrade as it's a Pentium G850, so I figured I'd just build a brand new computer and turn my current one into a HTPC. I'm just trying to figure out if the next generation of cards is going to be a huge increase in performance due to being a new architecture. Though, high end cards also tend to have low supply when first released, so I'm not sure that I'll even be able to snag one until later.

In your current system, I'd see the CPU as a much bigger problem than the GPU.  You could get a faster CPU and drop it in your current rig.  Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are discontinued, but if you could find a used Core i5-3570, that's a nice upgrade.  Though it sounds like you may want an additional computer while leaving the old one functional.

rojoArcueid

DMKano said:

Wait for Nvidia Pascal - it's not that far away.

Even if you dont want Pascal and are going AMD it's worth waiting because of price shakedown after pascal launch.

I agree. Just like the OP, im also considering a 390, but i am not willing to pay over 300 bucks for a card that will probably be discontinued later this year after the new NV and AMD stuff comes out. I would suggest to the OP we wait a bit longer.

Quizzical

Actually, this might matter:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9886/amd-reveals-polaris-gpu-architecture/2

"First and foremost, Polaris will encompass both GDDR5 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) products. Where the line will be drawn has not been disclosed, but keeping in mind that HBM is still a newer technology, it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll only see HBM on higher-end parts. Meanwhile the rest of the Polaris lineup will continue to use GDDR5, something that is not surprising given the lesser bandwidth needs of lower-end parts and the greater cost sensitivity.

"Meanwhile RTG has also disclosed that the first Polaris parts are GDDR5 based. Going hand-in-hand with what I mentioned earlier about RTG’s Polaris demonstration, it seems likely that this means we’ll see the lower-end Polaris parts first, with high-end parts to follow."

There's no guarantee that the first Polaris part will be faster than the R9 390 that you're looking at or even the GTX 670 you already have.  Nor, for that matter, that the first Pascal part will be faster.  Both vendors traditionally launched the top end card first.  With Kepler, Nvidia moved to an upper midrange card first.  With Maxwell, Nvidia actually launched the low end card first and worked up from there.

If AMD and Nvidia launch some really nifty $100 or $150 cards in several months, that doesn't necessarily shake up the prices on $300 parts.  That could still be a big deal if your main complaint about the GTX 670 is dumping heat into your room, but that doesn't sound like it's the case.

Tanon

Quizzical said:

Actually, this might matter:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9886/amd-reveals-polaris-gpu-architecture/2

"First and foremost, Polaris will encompass both GDDR5 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) products. Where the line will be drawn has not been disclosed, but keeping in mind that HBM is still a newer technology, it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll only see HBM on higher-end parts. Meanwhile the rest of the Polaris lineup will continue to use GDDR5, something that is not surprising given the lesser bandwidth needs of lower-end parts and the greater cost sensitivity.

"Meanwhile RTG has also disclosed that the first Polaris parts are GDDR5 based. Going hand-in-hand with what I mentioned earlier about RTG’s Polaris demonstration, it seems likely that this means we’ll see the lower-end Polaris parts first, with high-end parts to follow."

There's no guarantee that the first Polaris part will be faster than the R9 390 that you're looking at or even the GTX 670 you already have.  Nor, for that matter, that the first Pascal part will be faster.  Both vendors traditionally launched the top end card first.  With Kepler, Nvidia moved to an upper midrange card first.  With Maxwell, Nvidia actually launched the low end card first and worked up from there.

If AMD and Nvidia launch some really nifty $100 or $150 cards in several months, that doesn't necessarily shake up the prices on $300 parts.  That could still be a big deal if your main complaint about the GTX 670 is dumping heat into your room, but that doesn't sound like it's the case.

Ah, that helps my decision then. My biggest concern was that they'd release a new card that would drop prices as early as March or April, and then I'd be faced with some serious buyer's remorse. If it's likely to be more than half a year before prices will likely drop (and potentially even longer before the new cards have stable drivers/all the issues worked out/etc.) then it's not such a terrible idea to buy a high end card now.

Quizzical

Another thing to consider is whether a Radeon R9 390 is faster than a GeForce GTX 670 by enough to justify the upgrade.  My rule of thumb is, don't upgrade until you can double the performance.  The 390 doesn't get you there unless your problem is running out of video memory, which it probably isn't.  The 390 might be 50% faster, but it's nowhere near double.

To double your performance, you'd need to look at something more like a GeForce GTX 980 Ti or Radeon R9 Fury.  That's a different price range entirely.

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Heretique

I'm still running a nvidia 680. Haven't had the need to upgrade yet.

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Loke666

Gaming.Rocks said:

NVidia is working on making affordable VR friendly GPUs. I suggest you should wait to see the results. 

Yeah, I am considering either replacing my GTX 780 with a 980 Ti or waiting myself but I have zero clue when the next gen of cards actually will turn up. I certainly need something more VR friendly pretty soon.

Loke666

Quizzical said:

Another thing to consider is whether a Radeon R9 390 is faster than a GeForce GTX 670 by enough to justify the upgrade.  My rule of thumb is, don't upgrade until you can double the performance.  The 390 doesn't get you there unless your problem is running out of video memory, which it probably isn't.  The 390 might be 50% faster, but it's nowhere near double.

To double your performance, you'd need to look at something more like a GeForce GTX 980 Ti or Radeon R9 Fury.  That's a different price range entirely.

This chart is somewhat helpful for anyone considering it: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html Not perfect but gives people the general idea at least.

Elevenb4

I was asking something very similar this part summer, on another tech forum I frequent. Most of the answers were to wait a few months for some of the prices to drop a little and other sales. So I waited for Thanksgiving/Christmas, asked the same question again and they convinced me to wait until Nvidia's new stuff comes out.....

I say just get something. I had planned on having a new rig last summer, but now it looks like i"ll be waiting till Spring. I'm not asking anyone again since i dont' want to be convinced to wait until Summer again for the new hardware lol. 

My 2 cents