[Rant] Maxwell to be introduced as GTX750 Ti

Sad news for all the enthusiasts who wanted to see a GTX 880 soon. Well, this isn't completely news because in a previous post I mentioned that the first GPU core they are coming out with, is the GM117. It's not GM100 or GM110 which would normally be the top of the line GPU core. So it should be low end, but how low end is it?

It seems the grpahics card model that houses this chip would be called the GTX 750 Ti. Now we can assume the performance numbers and pricing. It is definitely slower than GTX 760, which sells for $249. It would probably be as fast as a GTX 660 Ti. Or it can probably only be as fast as a GTX 660. Who knows? We don't have any GeForce 700 cards below the GTX 760 to get an idea about the floor of the performance. But it would hopefully be faster than a GTX650 Ti Boost. That would be good enough for gaming at 1080p using high medium to high settings. Probably not ultra settings. Still, you can tweak the setting to strike a balance between quality and performance.

The let down for the people would want to buy this graphics card would be the fact that it carries the same GeForce 700 series moniker. You won't feel that it is a new GPU architecture, right? But I'm sure NVidia has their own reasons for placing it in the existing series.

The big question is, when will we see the big brothers? And for me personally, how long will it take for them to show up in the Japanese market? I doubt we will see them within the next 6 months though. Nvidia doesn't need to release a new family of graphics cards anytime soon. Their current generation graphics card are competitive with AMD's recently released R series graphics cards. They'll probably try to milk more money out of the current gen graphics cards while they can. We all know that the development is going to eventually slow down when we hit the physical barriers of the process technology. 

[Rant] NVidia GM117 - Looks like the early Maxwell samples would be low end SKUs

About a month ago when I reanalyzed the situation about my GPU upgrade dilemma, I came to the conclusion that the real upgrade would be a next generation GPU from either team. NVidia would be coming out with the Maxwell architecture this year and the rumors were that we would see them as early as March. Heck, that's only couple months from now. I can wait for them. I don't have to get a new card from the current generation. A Maxwell card, something like the GTX 870 would be a huge upgrade over my GTX 670.

 

Today I learned that this was not going to go well for me. Yes, Maxwell cards are coming out in March, but no, they won't be anything close to what a gamer would want. These would replace the cards like GTX 640 and the lower end. The GPU core they are going to release in March is called GM117 core. What a gamer would need is the GM100 or GM110 cores. These are the big guns. The GM100 would power the GTX 870/880 and the GM110 would power the GTX 970/980.

 

 It is a bit weird that NVidia is releasing the low end models earlier than the high-end models. Last time, they released the GTX 680 first, then GTX 670 and gradually unveiled the rest of the family. I wonder why they are going this the opposite way this time around. It could be perhaps Kepler in the high-end is very competitive with AMD's high-end solutions. Or it could be because AMD doesn't have anything big coming out anytime soon. Or it could be because NVidia wants to extract more money out of the current gen cards. Or it could be all of the above.

 

What I know is I am hugely disappointed. The GM100 cards might come out this year still. But we don't have a time frame. Or GM100 could never see the light. Remember how they couldn't make the GK100 chips and they release the mid-range GK104 as the highend GTX 670/680 SKUs. It might happen again.

 

So that means, I still have to look at the current gen cards. I still want to see AMD's Mantle APIs in action before making a decision. It's a shame that EA had to put off the Mantle update for Battlefield 4. It could have been the revelation that I needed. On the market side of the things, the GTX 780's price in the Japanese market hasn't changed in the last couple of months. The cheapest GTX 780 still stands tall at $550. But the cheapest R9 290 is going for $420 currently. (It even went down to $399 once!) We have seen a couple of custom cooled R9 290 cards show up on Kakaku.com's radar, but still they are massively overpriced. Currently you can only find the Gigabyte R9 290-OC in the market, but XFX's Black Edition Double Dissipation card also was available a little while back. But the best cooler for these AMD chips is made by Sapphire in their Tri-X line up of cards, and they are nowhere to be found in the Japanese market. Bummer!

 

Well, I guess that I can wait a couple of more weeks. My birthday is coming up on the 31st, and I would be happy if I could get a new graphics card by then. If not, hey, it's not the end of the world. I can still play a lot of games at 1440p with the GTX670, although I cannot play all of them at max details. I think I can live with that. The only issue with be knowing that my PC is not living up to my expectations.