GeForce 700 series is seemingly coming in 2014

Most people were hoping to see the next generation of graphics cards from both AMD and NVidia within this year because it has already been more than a year since both companies released their current generation cards. Even if they launched the new cards towards the end of this year, it would still conform to the usual 18 month product cycle. But few weeks ago AMD said that they are not going to release the 8000 series this year because they are in the opinion that if they did a rush up job, people would crucify them for releasing a new product without a significant increase in performance over the current generation. Things would get even worse because NVidia's next generation architecture seems to bump up the performance significantly - at least performance to watt ratio wise.

Today Tom's Hardware reports that NVidia is also delaying their next generation to next year for some unknown reason. Both of these companies don't really need to release new cards because the current generation is more than competent enough to tackle the games available today. Unless 2560x1440 resolution becomes mainstream - which is unlikely to happen anytime soon - there is no need for more power in the "sanity circle" (i.e. mainstream segment) But there are people with 2560x1440 screens and triple display setups and they really need the future horse power today. But for those people, there's something called SLI and Crossfire, if you haven't already heard.

Even though you can combine multiple graphics cards and make then work together to gain a boost over a single card, AMD has a problem with their design. Ryan Shrout at PCPer.com has recently found out that AMD's multi GPU solution does not deliver better performance than a single card in many of the games out there. The cards do their work but the frames are not properly spread out to give the fluidity and that 2nd card's work is not perceived by human eye. The fix is not a simple driver fix but they'll probably find a temporary solution for this problem in the coming days. NVidia has a mechanism in hardware to tackle this problem so NVidia does not have this problem. I'm sure the HD8000 series is already past its design phase and they cannot use the same trick as what NVidia is doing in the HD8000 series. AMD will have to find a way to fix this probe in the driver or they would lose performance in the enthusiast segment who uses multiple high-end cards in their rigs.

Back on to the topic. Are you really mad that the next generation cards are delayed? If you are building a new PC, maybe you are. But if you already own a high-end card like the GTX670/680/690/Titan or HD7950/7970, you should be happy that $400~$1000 card won't be outdated for another year, right? I am glad that mine isn't getting outdated soon. It's not that I have to upgrade even if they released the new generation. I don't play a lot of games. Right now I only play Crysis 3 and nothing else. If I disable AA, I can get 60fps in it, so there isn't really a need to get a newer card. But there is the upgrade itch. When that happens, there is no going back.

So all in all, I'm glad that newer cards aren't right around the corner. I probably can spend that money on the Haswell upgrade if my wife doesn't have any fancy plans.