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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't. AMD only has low & mid-range cards ATM. Vega is supposed to be released in the first half of 2017, and working silicon has already been demoed, so it does look likely. Rumours have it at 12TFlops, so should be comparable to this card.

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> Rumours have it at 12TFlops, so should be comparable to this card.

Comparable on paper perhaps, but Nvidia architectures tend to get more actual gaming performance per FLOP than AMD architectures do.

i.e. the AMD RX480 (5.8 TFLOPS) is 30% faster than the NV GTX1060 (4.4 TFLOPS) on paper, but in practice they perform more or less the same.

Even in titles where AMD performs especially well the advantage is around 10-15% in favor of the RX480 - still less than the specs would suggest.

Still the 480 is cheaper than the 1060.

Not true. Lowest price for 1060, 180$, lowest for 480, 185$. Granted, that's a 3gb model vs 4gb, but the prices are basically identical.

Newegg has a 4GB RX 480 for $179.99 right now:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681412...

The 3GB 1060 is a cut down version (what the 470 is to 480).

It has nothing to do with that. It's about driver cpu overhead, game optimization and specific driver shader optimization.

It always been about what you stated. Christ, when me and my buddy ran the intel gaming DRG lab in 1997 we were testing all games (this is when SIMD came out, and we proposed stacking cores... but thats a different story) against optimizing (specifically Intel wanted to pay game companies to optimize against SIMD, and would give them $1MM for marketing if it could be proven the game (subjectivly) ran better on their Celeron processors vs AMDs anything... so they were paying devs to opt for the SIMD instructions and then using that as marketing material... it was a fun job.

aside: That was my personal golden age of gaming... Intel had an OC-48 to SC-5 building... so playing UO on 6 machines simultaneously when everyone else was modeming at 56K made us like gods against lag in that game... I still think fondly of that time.

Hmm, that's interesting. I've noticed that with the new 1000 line, NVIDIA has been giving away some games as an incentive. Every single time I've seen it, it's been a ubisoft game. There was probably a similar deal with Ubisoft this gen. Otherwise why would they be promoting those games so much?

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