According to the Steam Hardware Survey for October 2015, less than one tenth of one percent of users are running 4K monitors: There are 18 times as many people running QHD displays as there are people running 4K. This idea that 4k is relevant to the actual market, rather than just the marketing, is a myth. The 900 series has sold well for Nvidia because it's a good product. They went up in VRAM which everyone wants more of, the cards run quiet and cool, they get great fps-per-dollar, the power consumption is a bonus, and there's very little competition from AMD. If they just improve performance and VRAM again, then Pascal will sell well regardless of 4K performance. Obviously 4K will be better than Maxwell, but how much better is all but irrelevant to their sales figures.

Moore's law (if you can even call it a law) is about transistor count, not performance. It's also been adjusted from a year to 18 months since it's inception.

That may be so, but the hardware performance has dramatically increased too. IGPs in modern PCs and tablets (if you include Tegra) can outperform some of the best GPUs back when 1080p went mainstream.

On thech forums there is to much "hype" for 4k and 1440k, while there are less than 2% of people using 1440p and less than 0.3% using 4K. HD and Full HD is dominant, HD because of laptops still using 1366x768 and most desktops are 1080p.

I game at 1440p and have to say I much prefer the 27" screen size and the higher res, have no interest in going back to 1080p. No doubt I'll feel the same if I go 4K why would i want to go back! Or the same as 120Hz, 144Hz and 165Hz once you go higher dam near no one wants to go back, its just better lol

To much hype!? Not sure what your talking about here.

Transistor count is often (not always) directly correlated to performance. If you can fit more transistors into a smaller package under the same architecture, you will (generally speaking) get more performance. But suppose we were to reach the physical limitation of silicon transistors: an architecture will have then reached it's maximum speed. If you want more performance out of the same design, you'll have to either: * Increase the frequency (which draws more power) * Add more cores (which also draws more power) * Add more cores but lower the frequency (which won't always help performance) * Or optimize the software (very undependable) Otherwise, you'll have to design a new architecture. But honestly, there's only so much you can do to get the perfect ratio of performance, TDP, and cost. There's still a long way until we reach that limit, but performance improvements have been noticeably slowing down. We're going to have to move on from silicon eventually. I think there's plenty of room for silicon to get us decent performance at 4K resolutions, but I personally think it's going to require some re-thinking of GPU architectures; I don't think smaller fabrication nodes, tri-gate transistors, or HBM2 memory are enough.

16 gigs smaller card and less power usage with more performance very nice but how much will it cost and will game developers use the power because the consoles now are struggle to do 1080p and 30 fps in new titles , with pascal the gap will be massive if they dont bring out a ps5 and xbox two

So...? There's always something to look forward to. Volta will be old news by the time it is available and people have started looking forward to the next big thing.

Well one would assume that by the time pascal comes out it would have inherent support for DX12 and most other features that have been available for some time now. Not sure about that "single card" situation, or solution......let us hope so. If we are still talking about hitting that 60fps mark under 4K come 2017 (Volta) then I would say something is definitely wrong with either ones setup, or an upgrade has been needed. I play 4K at 60+FPS right now with %99 of the bells and whistles turned on. And it is amazing with a monitor supporting more than a meazily 60hz whilst using DSR @ 100hz with 4K enabled. Main reason I have not stepped up to a 4K monitor as of yet.......60hz feels like garbage after anything 100hz+ for the last couple of years.

You're absolutely right. Why should people on an enthusiast forum for hardware get excited over new hardware?

You're gaming with quad TXs, aren't you? Definately one of the most powerful setups even available, let alone any cost. So of course you're running great 😀 But yeah, 4K with all the eye candy on a single card at 60Hz... not so sure about it. Might even turn out that at the time that's reality, 8K is going to be what 4K is now, and everybody will have switched to 1440p. Still some time ahead I'd say. Especially not what follows too soon after a major upgrade. Still was excited going from X58 to X99 😉

I'm also planning on upgrading to x99 from my x58 setup but I'm seriously considering waiting for X199/x109 (whatever they choose to call it), I'm undecided because on one hand I can buy a cheap 6-core xeon and some ddr3 as a stopgap, on the other hand it seems silly buying new ram and cpu to keep for around a year.