Well deserved score. I'm sure that Blizzard will be adding more skins and sprays to the available loot from other games like Diablo 3, and StarCraft soon enough.
@justin12421: I think the only way AMD has a prayer with Polaris 10 challenging the GTX 1070 & 1080 is if their cards have a near universal 85-90% scaling performance with crossfire. Likely hood is that we'll need to wait for Vega to release in October.
I think the performance of this card will vary wildly between different manufactures, so the 4K benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. They already stated this card is absurdly easy to overclock, and there will be a huge difference in performance at the 1733 MHz stock speed versus a liquid cooled 2400 MHz OC'd edition.
@aiden_kasel: My thoughts exactly. I've been trying to think of an excuse to call in sick to work for two consecutive weeks once this thing is released.
@Barighm: If that's true then it doesn't bode well for AMD. They're already at 40% market-share deficit against Nvidia. They really need a homerun with Polaris, and keeping the 490 with G5 to compete with the 1070 while offering HBM2 with the 490X to compete with the 1080 would likely be the magic ticket.
AMD was first to the market with a time-exclusive deal on the HBM technology, so I imagine they're in better shape than Nvidia in terms of chip stockpiles. HBM2 is definitely more expensive than G5X, but if AMD could equip the 490X with it and position it within $50-$70 of the GTX 1080, it would be a game changer. Besides, AMD already stated they wanted to better differentiate the performance between the 490 and the 490X, since the difference was next to nothing with the 390 and 390X. That, in addition to their statements regarding Polaris' compatibility with G5X and HBM gives me reason to hope it's true.
The higher-end cards will definitely be HBM to compete with the 1080 TI and Titan, but they'll forfeit too much to Nvidia if they don't come out swinging in the next month or two.
@masscrack: Volta will be a long wait. But if the 1080 TI and Titan versions are built with the GP100 boards, then you'll get the benefit of HBM2 - and that combined with the faster memory clock should give true 4k performance on a single card.
The 1080 performed better than I expected on 4k settings and framerates. I'm curious though to see how AMD responds. They stated that the Polaris architecture is compatible with both G5 and HBM; and with Vega not slated to launch until October at the soonest, I anticipate the 490X will be shipping with HBM2 in order to counter the 1080 and 1070.
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