I'm sure I'm missing something here, but what possible use could a card like this have for a 4GB framebuffer?
Maybe you wanted extreme next-gen textures @720p? Or more likely, 4K movies? (Pretty sure it's not THAT taxing on a GPU..) But what I want to know is.. What's this based on? Because i'm pretty sure it's not Maxwell!
AFAIK it's based on Kepler. Would have liked to see some partners come out with passive and single slot solutions.
For the user none, but for the card manufacturer it's a great marketing headliner. Even so, this is roughly equal in power to my old Radeon 4870 (but with the nice DX11 feature set), so would be more than powerful enough to play just about anything at 1080p & minimum 2AA from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of gaming at 40-60fps. Put inside a small HTPC, it would make a cracking little gaming box.
That's what happens when i read an article when it was posted, then answer in the forums hours later, without bothering to re-read it
I would imagine that these are about the same or slightly higher than the higher end AMD APUs... Not sure I see much of a point for these or a real situation where someone would buy them.
Card makers, those who make enough money to be able to say they know the market, disagree with you. For starters, EVGA have a total of 9 GT 740 models available. If there was no market for entry level cards they wouldn't provide so many options.
It is only the single biggest market there is for GPUs, those cards will end up in a large number of pre built budget PCs. Those cheap PCs sell in far higher numbers than any PC anyone on bit-tech would be interested in ever will. That doesn't make them good cards for the Consumer by any stretch of the imagination though, just for the Manufacturers.
