Would you not rather have a small SSD for the OS and a 970 than a large SSD and 280x? QOL will come from the OS and apps being on the SSD. Games don't benefit anywhere near as much from being on SSD as the OS does. They will benefit from a lot faster GPU.
How so? You said 680/770 are long dead, compared to an overclocked 280x. Then you said something about you scoring 9k graphics score in FireStrike. Dude, do you even realize that even a 7950 can achieve that score in FireStrike? Also, saying the 780 isn't that much faster, do you even know that a 780 easily beats 12k graphics score in FireStrike? That's a massive difference compared to your 9k. You keep posting these ridiculous claims that are just too easy to debunk. I'm sorry, but if you claim something next time, make sure you know what you're talking about.
Not to mention GCN generally scores better in firestrike compared to Kepler. eclap's scores with 7950CF used to burn my 670's in 3D Mark but for the most part we got the same performance in game.
7900/280's still perform very well, better than most 'mid range' offerings available. The same can be said of The 680/770's, which are in the same tier. You're going to be running games with similar settings using any of those cards, at least outside of one or two titles which heavily bias toward one vendor.
Okay, I'll give you the memory being at 5000 thing, I never actually noticed that. That explains a lot. I still don't agree with the idea that AMD has a "lot to optimize" with DX11 when Nvidia doesn't. Even if it's technically true, there's no guarantee they'll actually do it. This argument is more supportive of Nvidia really, because according to you, they already optimized their architectures to the fullest. I'd rather have full optimization in a timely manner than waiting months for the potential to get better performance. It's a moot point anyway though, when you buy a card, you buy it for what it can do out of the box right now, not in five months. Maybe a reference 780 isn't that much faster, but a B1 revision or even an A1 at decent clocks is a different story. I ran mine at a conservative 1150Mhz on the core and stock 6000 on memory and got 10,800 graphics score. The 770/680 at 1200 is also still competitive, you just never see benches of them anymore. Cartman delivered though. For reference - http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/5201073 Also wow this got out of hand quick. Let's put the paper swords down everyone before the infractions start flying. This includes the peanut gallery.
The optimisations for DX11 are already showing, drivers like the 1065, 1055, and 1046.2 showing much greater draw call performance than earlier drivers. In a few days, we should see proper reviews of Windows 10 performance, hopefully using proper Windows 10 drivers. Existing 'reviews' are done using non-RTM release day Windows, using unfinished drivers for Windows 10.
I wound up ordering a GTX 970 (the one in my profile) for $329.99. Gonna get a SSD in a couple of weeks
Got it today. From the way people were talking, I wasn't expecting a big of a boost as I got, but it feels pretty huge. Being able to upscale past 2560x1440 is especially nice. As is being able to record gameplay without it being a gigantic hassle. Pretty much anything I got ~30-40 FPS in, I now get 60. Witcher 3 is a real treat, as I'm able to now turn up almost every setting, and still get 60 FPS most of the time. Really, though, I think I honestly would of made this purchase for the pain-free game recording alone. Not enough people critique how poor that is on AMD's side (AMD themselves seem to barely even care about the thing.). Shadowplay is awesome.