Also I feel your pain regarding the 970. I also bought one of these pieces of shit (though I bought mine well before the gimped VRAM was discovered).
Pushing a 1440p monitor on a 970 was already asking a bit much but then to find out it's only effectively 3.5GB as well? Blegh.
I'm not entirely sure what you were expecting Holla Forums of all places to say. For a lot of us the consoles may as well not even exist. I know that's how I feel at least.
As for how the consoles will fare.. I believe the PS4.5 is probably a sign of things to come. Consoles may start emulating PCs in that there will soon be multiple tiers of the same console, with higher tiers coming out as tech improves.
When industry figures say seemingly stupid shit like 'there won't be any new consoles next generation', I think this might be what they mean - the same damned consoles continuously re-released with incremental upgrades and paraded around as 'game-changers'.
Dominic Hill
It leaves consoles on top. Nobody develops high end PC games any more. There hasn't been a proper PC-focused step-up since Crysis in 2007. All the new hardware will get you is developers doing lazier ports, targeting the newest hardware to neglect optimization, and even then, all you'll be getting is multiplatform games.
The PC exlusives that are there are very low-end, either early previous gen level 3D visuals like in Mount & Blade Bannerlord, or poorly optimized, 30FPS 2D visuals like in hyperlight drifter.
Consoles have 2012 laptop tier specs that are outperforming the top PC games, simply because the developers are incentivized to get the most out of that hardware. They are budgeted to make the best looking and best playing and performing games they can for that platform, they're focused and are expecting a huge return in sales they usually get. This environment doesn't exist on the PC, so it doesn't happen there. There's no one who runs the platform saying "hey, we want you to make this game great, and make it just for us, and we'll provide technical support to make sure it happens. The marketing, the budgeting, don't worry about that. Let us know if you need more time too." That doesn't exist on the PC. At best, you have Nvidia or AMD lazily saying "oh just use our middleware to make sure it works on our wide range of hardware!" and all you get is shit like gameworks shitting itself onto your machine. For games that aren't even that good, or can be played on other platforms, making the investment pointless.
I'm planning on building a new PC, but for the first time I'm not doing it to play video games. The games I will play on it are either very old, or just low spec. I'm upgrading for general performance, faster storage, more memory, more displays, extracting and creating archives, encoding.
Mason Nelson
5X is a little behind HBM1 and most people seem to say HBM2 will have double the bandwidth. That's kinda bleak compared to the 9x or more compared to GDDR5 that was originally said (we're only at a bit more than 4x atm). I'm guessing they're sprinkling the tech out so they can get more units sold in the long run and recoup R&D costs. For reference, here are the bandwidths: Note that the Ti is a bit unfair. GDDR5 can currently do higher clocks than 5X and 5 also has a 384bit wide bus against the 256 bit bus of 5X. It's possible higher clocks and wider busses will come to 5X, same applying to HBMx.
