It looks like the R7 260X is dropping in price to around £73:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/amd-radeon-r7-265-launched-with-25-performance-increasepfb201
Seconded. As they said in the article we will see what the “Maxwell” powered 750 will get up to. AMD as usual needs a new architecture out quite soon rather than just a rebake.
AMD has a perfectly fine architecture for the time-being and that is why Sony and MS invested billions into using them for consoles. Moreover,Nvidia has rebranded plenty of cards including the entire GTX700 series upto now,yet you seem to be fine with that?? Funny that.
Current Kepler based cards including my GTX660 are horrible at compute in consumer applications,outside the expensive and massive GK110. Both Intel and AMD have vastly better compute performance in mainstream parts especially for OpenCL which used in Adobe CS.
But as you know 28NM Maxwell is not a fully new architecture :
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-maxwell-gm107-block-diagram-leaked-power-efficient-28nm-gpus/Its bascially Kepler with a redesigned shader block,more cache and improved sleep states,which means better power consumption and compute performance. In terms of die space the GM107 is not that much improved as it only has 640 shaders as opposed to the 960 shaders of the GK106,and it only has a 128 bit memory controller.
Its slower than a GTX660,consumes less power due to it being bus powered and has a 128 bit memory controller according to leaks.
However,it seems to be clocked quite highly too when compared to the GTX660,so I do wonder how much boost will affect the benchmark scores.
Yes,it looks like it will be a nice bus powered card,but even as this review indicated an R7 265 would run off a 300W PSU.
Hence,I expect it to suffer when AA is ramped up,or in bandwith limited situations. Even if the R7 265 consumes more power for a gaming desktop,it has decent overclockability and 256 bit memory controller which are going to be useful at 1920X1080. OTH,there were bus powered HD7850 2GB cards too:
http://www.techpowerup.com/185003/triplex-shows-off-slot-powered-radeon-hd-7850.htmlAMD made a reference design for a bus powered HD7850 but it was expensive to implement so it only had some limited availability in Asia.
The normal R7 265 and HD7850 cards consume around 85W to 95W:
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Sapphire/R7_265_Dual-X/images/power_average.gifThe PCI-E slot can supply 75W,so even if he GTX750TI has HD7850 level performance,it is not doing so at massively lower power consumption. Considering when AMD Pitcairn was launched I am so sure how impressive the lower power consumption of the GM107 will be,especially considering the HD7850 and R7 265 use a salvaged AMD Pitcairn die too.
Full fat Kepler will come when 20NM arrives and you have no clue what AMD is also up to regarding their own GPUs. The fact that Nvidia are releasing another version of the GTX780TI indicates the high end is still months away.
