Upgrade or wait?

[mondogenerator]

My system from 2011 seems to be getting a little long in the tooth these days and I'm thinking of upgrading. It's a 2700k+Nvidia 770 GTX+16GB ram+SSD and playing games generally at 1440p. I've noticed in DCS, EVE, Fallout 4 and a few other games I'm having to downgrade settings here and there to maintain frame rates.

I can get a skylake based system with a 980 however I've been reading that Nvidia will release Pascal based cards in April/May time and Nvlink. I assume Nvlink will appear in a mobo chipset sometime later this year?

Given my current system is generally running OK but i'm starting to have to compromise quality settings would it be best to wait until later in the year and get an NVlink equipped motherboard and Pascal based card? I'm not desperate to replace but I guess I need some people to tell me to be patient or not.

[kalniel]

You shouldn't be having to downgrade settings much really. Maybe just pop in a faster GPU to get back to highest settings if you have to.

Pascal cards won't come out in May though so if you're waiting for a next gen mid-high end GPU you'll be waiting a long time. Something like a 380X would give a cheap boost for now.

Do you have a specific use-case that needs NVLink?

[mondogenerator]

I assume that it would have benefits to gaming if it comes to the consumer level. I'm just not sure which is why I posted with the question. I've not looked at this sort of thing since mid 2011!

Would I not see a good jump in performance if I went with a Skylake 6700K, DDR4, swapped my normal SSD for an M2 or similar PCI-E based SSD and stuck a 980 in there?

[kalniel]

I assume that it would have benefits to gaming if it comes to the consumer level. I'm just not sure which is why I posted with the question. I've not looked at this sort of thing since mid 2011!

I see, no, no benefit to gaming that I can tell.

Would I not see a good jump in performance if I went with a Skylake 6700K, DDR4, swapped my normal SSD for an M2 or similar PCI-E based SSD and stuck a 980 in there?

Not much more than you'd get by just sticking a better GPU into your current system.

[DanceswithUnix]

Pascal cards won't come out in May though so if you're waiting for a next gen mid-high end GPU you'll be waiting a long time.

There are rumours of a release in April, though it sounds like the usual "just enough cards made to give a few to reviewers" paper launch of £1000+ cards to me:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphic...ured-for-april

[scaryjim]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphic...ured-for-april

From the above:

In fact it is likely that Huang will announce it during his April 4 keynote which is the conference's first day.

Awww, that's nice of them to save it for my birthday...

We've seen a number of nvidia "launches" and "reveals" in the past that haven't quite been what they've claimed. If nvidia have actual working pascal silicon ready for launch in April you'd expect to have seen it at CES. But as has already been discussed on hexus, that apparently didn't happen. In the meantime, AMD were showing 2 different Polaris GPUs to the press.

I find the idea that nvidia have not only working silicon, but shipping retail products, 9 weeks away rather far-fetched...

[kalniel]

Ah these probably aren't the mass availability HBM2 cards then. If Kotataku is correct they're $1000 cards that are few and far between.

[scaryjim]

OMG this is like the worst case of Chinese whispers I've seen.

Fudzilla reference Kotaku but actually link to a story on ecumenical news (what?!). That story references and links to a Kotaku Australia story, but that isn't even the source of the rumours: they come from techfrag.

Techfrag have "recently" spotted GP104 on Zauba shipping manifests. That's interesting, sure, but given we had stories about Zauba manifests that seem to show Polaris being shipped to test facilities almost a year ago, I'm not sure that's good news for nvidia. I tend to take extrapolations from Zauba shipping manifests with a grain of salt anyway.

Let's see what techfrag say about "Titan grade products"

Titan grade products based on the GP100 are expected to be announced in April

Note, announced, not launched. Do we remember what happened last time nvidia did a big-die-first GPU launch on a new process? Fermi. Their last 2 arch iterations have launched with the smaller die first: GTX 680 (GK104) followed by GTX 780/Ti/Titan (GK110), and GTX 980 (GM204) followed by Titan X/980 Ti (GM200). With a shift to a new process, the CES hardware display shennanigans, this being their first HBM family, and their recent release pattern, I simply can't see nvidia going GP100 first, and I can't see them being ready for an April "launch". Shipping GP104 products around June/July I can believe.