Nemesis-301 wroteDie_Kapitan wroteballad wrote4K won't be usable in movies or in games till at least 3 years.
PC: for 4k gaming you need now 2x gtx980ti to achieve a 60fps, and playing on 1920x1080 on a 4k tv, you will feel the downscaled picture since you are not playing on the screen's native resolution.
Depends on the games you play and if you're willing to lower some settings, if you play games like CS:GO, DOTA 2, TF2 and LoL you only need an R9 380 or 380X, if you play AAA titles and don't mind playing on medium to high-ish settings you only need a Fury or a Fury X, if you want to max out The Witcher III on the other hand you'll need 4 Fury X's in CrossFire.
Pascal is just around the corner (2016) and its aiming for 4k gaming:
Nvidia Pascal Launching in 2016 With 10X Of Maxwell’s Performance – Features 16nm, 3D Memory, NV-Link and Mixed Precision
NVIDIA Pascal GPU To Feature 17 Billion Transistors and 32 GB HBM2 VRAM – Full CUDA Compute Architecture Arrives in 2016
Nvidia's next-gen Pascal GPU will offer 10x the performance of Titan X, 8-way SLI
Time for some mythbusting to clear some misconceptions about Pascal:
10x of Maxwell's performance:
This is a complete myth from start to finish. The belief here is that Pascal will have ten times the general computational power and so 10x the gaming performance of Maxwell. That is specifically NOT what NVIDIA said:
Nvidia wroteMixed-Precision Computing – for Greater Accuracy
Mixed-precision computing enables Pascal architecture-based GPUs to compute at 16-bit floating point accuracy at twice the rate of 32-bit floating point accuracy.
Increased floating point performance particularly benefits classification and convolution – two key activities in deep learning – while achieving needed accuracy.
What NVIDIA said was that Pascal would have ten times the throughput in deep learning compute workloads utilizing mixed precision compared to Maxwell, which sounds impressive until you’re made aware that Maxwell is (by design) completely horrible for many compute tasks to begin with, in some cases actually many times slower than Kepler. In double-precision compute workloads for example, Maxwell GM200’s performance in FLOPs is about 1/32 of its single-precision (normal workload) performance, while Kepler GK110 puts out 1/3 of its normal performance. So ten times the performance of Maxwell in compute tasks is not necessarily as earth-shattering as it sounds.
It’s also important to keep in mind that NVIDIA didn't say the GPU would be 10x as powerful. They said it would have 10x the mixed precision throughput. Gaming workloads and compute workloads are very different, and stress different parts of the GPU system. Compute, for example, is much heavier on memory bandwidth, memory capacity, and communication with the CPU compared to gaming. These aspects of the GPU can be a major bottleneck in compute applications, but not in gaming. This means that a 10x increase in mixed precision throughput doesn't really tell us anything about the power of the GPU itself, as a lot of that can come from improvements to the memory and system interconnects and not from the GPU itself, which would improve compute performance without improving gaming performance.
NV-Link:
NVLink is an interface for connecting multiple GPUs and/or the CPU. NVLink can be used in place of PCI Express, with about 5x the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 x16. The full implementation of NVLink, where it entirely replaces PCIe, is only for supercomputers and servers, where they will require purpose-built motherboards and CPUs with NVLink controllers instead of PCIe controllers. So far the only CPUs we know of that are looking to fully implement NVLink in the near future are custom IBM POWER processors to be used as part of the Summit supercomputer being jointly designed and built by IBM and NVIDIA. The full NVLink implementation will not be used in the general desktop market.
In compute applications, like what supercomputers do, the connection between the GPU and the CPU (currently PCI Express) is heavily used and can be a significant bottleneck; removing that by replacing PCIe with NVLink will increase the overall throughput by quite a lot in those applications.
However, games do not need to use that connection very heavily, and so the communication bus between the GPU and CPU sees much less traffic in gaming compared to compute. PCI Express is nowhere near being a bottleneck for gaming. So even if full NVLink appeared on the desktop as a GPU-CPU interconnect, it wouldn’t provide any significant benefit to gaming performance compared to PCI Express.
8-way SLI:
This will only be possible over NVLink, meaning it will only appear in specialized systems, and unless NVLink replaces the SLI implementation we have now in consumer cards, 8-way GPUs likely won’t see usage outside of NVIDIA’s devboxes, which they announced would have up to 8 GPUs in the future with Pascal, the only mention of 8-way GPUs thus far. Various tech “news” websites as usual chose to interpret that as “8-way SLI will now be a thing!!!!!”
Even if NVLink turns out to be used in the desktop market as a multi-GPU interconnect, 8-way SLI doesn’t really have any impact on most consumers. Sure it will be fun to marvel at the one or two showcase builds that at least one or two people will surely build for conventions, but realistically hardly anyone is going to use this feature anyway even if it appears on the desktop. So it is a bit funny to see people say “You should wait for Pascal because...” and list 8-way SLI as a bullet point, as if it’s a useful consideration for regular people.
32GB of VRAM:
*UP TO 32GB of memory. The highest end Pascal-based GPU will be equipped with 32GiB of memory. This will be the highest end out of ALL Pascal cards, including Quadros and Teslas. It's extremely unlikely any gaming card will have more than 16GiB, and even that will probably only be seen on a TITAN-class card while the regular lineup will probably max out at 8GiB. Still quite a lot and unlikely to make any difference for gamers, but all the same it still isn't 32GiB, so saying “Pascal’s gonna be amazing for gaming! It’s gonna have 32GiB of memory which is way more than AMD’s next gen gaming cards will have!” is a bit misleading when 32GiB won’t be found outside of workstation cards that gamers don’t care about.
I mean, you could do the same kind of thing with generations gone by and say that AMD's Hawaii GPU was equipped with 16GiB of memory (!) or that Kepler cards had up to 12GiB of memory by including Firepros and Quadros in your tally, but pretty much anyone will agree that as far as gamers are concerned Hawaii had up to 8GiB at the very most and 4GiB normally at the high end, while Kepler had 6GiB at the very most and 3GiB normally. So once again, the 32GiB figure here is unlikely to apply to any cards gamers are interested in, just like the 16GiB Hawaii cards and 12GiB Kepler cards, these amounts will only be found in high-end Quadros and Teslas.
So, yes a Pascal card of some kind will have 32GiB of memory, but it’s probably not a good idea to get hyped about having 32GiB cards on the market if the only market you pay attention to is the gaming market, because it’s unlikely you’ll see any 32GiB cards appearing there.
HBM2:
HBM2 is an advanced type of memory which will replace GDDR5 on the new Pascal cards. It can be scaled to much higher densities and much higher bandwidth than GDDR5 while taking less space and using less power. These benefits will be seen on both compute and gaming cards alike, in the form of smaller cards and higher power efficiency. But as far as performance goes, the benefit is marginal at best for gaming since they are rarely limited by memory bandwidth.
Compute applications are a lot heavier on memory bandwidth than gaming, so they’ll benefit a lot more. Gaming performance may see some small improvements, but it’s not going to be much. We’ve already seen the impact of massive memory bandwidth increases with the AMD R9 Fury X; it does help the card pull a little bit ahead at higher resolutions, but it’s not a game changer by any means. With HBM, the R9 Fury X has certainly pushed well beyond any kind of bandwidth bottleneck at this point, so adding even more with Pascal won't really help beyond that. The diminishing returns barrier has been crossed into the no-returns zone. For gaming, anyway.
