Maxwell Moved to Legacy

[pezz]

This is the actual legacy cards listed in the link I'll post below:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

If my 970 start feel gimpish I'll be sure to post here and let ya'll know. If I don;t post then it means all is well. In other news, all who own a 970 can get back $30 from Nvidia because of their 3.5 gigs false advertising ting . So I got a free $60 game with my card and now I can get back an additional $30. Not a bad deal if I do say so myself .

I don't think the 970 can be gimped. it was made gimped... 224bit bus and advertised as 256bit bus. 3.5Gb ram when advertised as 4GB.
No this is the link https://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.h...1dlqdzgneqggyg

Nvidia changes the title on the page since that screenshot was taken LOL. But legacy still in the link legacy.html

Just about 2 months ago, Nvidia launched their new GTX 1080 flagship graphics card. With the release of the Pascal-based GPUs, the older generation cards must inevitably receive reduced levels of support. The reduced level of support has now been made official with Nvidia declaring the older Maxwell based GTX 900 series legacy products on their website. As such, the Maxwell-based GPUs will now be using the legacy driver.

However, things aren’t quite that bad yet for those with older Nvidia GPUs. The latest 368.81 WHQL drivers continue to support cards like the GTX 980 and 970 with fixes and profiles for the latest games. Even though Maxwell might be legacy, even legacy cards get updates with even the GTX 400 series being able to use the latest driver. The key difference is that you’re more likely to just get fixes and likely fewer optimizations than the new Pascal based GPUs. Nvidia has tended to drop optimizations more quickly than AMD which has seen the once equal match between 680 and 7970 end in a victory for AMD.

This time around, things might go a bit better for Maxwell users. The main reason AMD cards have continued to see such gains is due to the shared GCN architecture that AMD is continuing to use, with optimizations for newer cards also benefitting older ones. The architectural changes between Kepler and Maxwell led to Kepler being unable to reap gains from Maxwell focused optimizations. With Pascal, the architecture is largely the same as Maxwell, so it shouldn’t take too much effort for Nvidia to port those optimizations to their older cards.

Honestly, with some Maxwell owners having owned their cards for less than a couple months, Nvidia should continue to optimize those cards for at least a decent while. Hopefully, that will be the case. What do you think about Nvidia moving their Maxwell based cards to legacy?

http://www.eteknix.com/nvidia-moves-...l-gpus-legacy/

[cushman]

The reason AMD GPUs "age better" is because AMD almost always re-uses/rebrands etc.. (whatever you wanna call it) their old cards into the new series.

For example, you don't really think that the R9 280X is a brand new card with a new generation architecture do you? Because it isn't. It's just an HD 7970 that came out ~2 years before the 280X came out. They just took a 7970 and gave it a slightly higher clock speed and perhaps a little more RAM, and give it a new name.

Now this is often criticized; ESPECIALLY on their R9 300 series cards which literally did NOTHING to increase performance (at least before when they rebranded cards they would offer the same performance for less. For example, the 7970 was a ~$500 card; but when they took the 7970 and renamed it as 280X it was only selling for ~$225 or so. But these new cards don't give ANY performance increase for the price. The R9 390X sells for ~$350 and is literally just an R9 290X, and the 290X ALSO sold for ~$350 when it came out 2 years before the 390X came out....with basically NO difference. If you go look at reviews the 390X is like ~2% faster maybe, which is probably just due to driver updates over time. Same with the 290 and 390, the 280 and 380 etc.. they are the same cards basically; sometimes with more RAM but that's it; and are the same price too.)

Basically. Imagine how FURIOUS people would be if Nvidia, instead of making the GTX 1080 and 1070 way faster to where the 1070 is as fast as a 980 TI and the 1080 is as fast as two 980s put together; imagine if Nvidia instead just took the 980 TI and made that the GTX 1080. That's what AMD does; the one catch is that AMD USUALLY will take that 980 TI that they rename to a 1080 and sell it for ~$350-400 instead of the $650 it used to sell for.

Now, the one nice thing about all this, is that due to AMD not actually making new cards half the time and just recycling old ones by giving them new names; they end up having to give full driver support to those cards. Get what i mean? Like that old AMD HD 7970 that came out in 2012. It normally would be considered a "legacy" card and not get as much driver support by around 2014 or so, but since the 7970 is actually just re-used and put in the 280X they still support it as the 280X "IS" a 7970! Then AMD also took the 280X and then renamed it to 380X, so FOUR years later, the 7970 is STILL being re-used and re-named. Which is kinda ****ty, but at the same time it means that the 7970 has gotten full driver support this whole time which keeps it performing well in new games. That's the reason AMD cards "age better", or in other words, they don't actually age better, they just get re-used.

And yeah the smart people were definitely angry about it. I mean yeah they added more RAM etc.. but they were just the same cards. The 380X was just a 280X which was just a 7970; and the 380 was just a 285. The 370 is just a 270 which is just an HD 7790 etc..etc..etc..

The only cards that AMD doesn't rename are the very highest ones. For example, the 7970 was the "flagship" top tier card of the HD 7000 series. But that became the 280X, so the 290 and 290X needed brand new architecture, which is how we got "Hawaii". And then in the 300 series we got even worse re-branding, with even the 390 and 390X just being Hawaii cards; although in exchange we DID also get the "Fiji" based Fury-X cards.

So quick recap, AMD is re-branding old cards and giving them resent driver updates, Because if they didn't re-brand cards like 7000,200,300 and fury/fury-X series of cards would be legacy too.