I never said anything about people switching to 4K.
The Fury X loses out quite heavily based on the benchmarks I've seen run by many in the 1080P and 1440P arena and that's where it matters most currently.
Indeed, because it's a 4k card. I mean pure, 100% solely designed to be nothing but a 4k card. And I feel that's AMD for you.. Innovating as usual but making white elephant products for the minority.
If you ran a server/VMware/encoding/archiving the Bulldozer was actually about as quick as the 2600k yet far cheaper. The Visheras were quicker still. Yet the problem is not many people use those apps/proggys so they were basically measured on their single core performance and pretty much up to 4 core performance in games, where they sucked. But AMD had a vision to put in lots of cores that weren't yet supported.
They also did the same with 64 bit CPUs, when Intel balked at them. Again they didn't sell very well but look around you now, every one is 64 bit.
And I feel that sadly Fury X is more of the same. They chose a specific memory type which is only really useful at 4k, for a card designed to run at 4k, even though hardly any one is using 4k so that means hardly any one will buy Fury X.
Into the future we will all be using HBM and we will all eventually be running 4k. It's just not something the masses are going to buy right now.
1440p performance though is 7% behind the 980ti and that's only like that because of Dying Light being so poor on the AMD. HardwareCanucks reckon that it would again be less than 1% if it wasn't for Dying Light.
Drivers dude. AMD have always pulled a rabbit out of the hat with drivers. When Doom 3 first launched my FX 5900 Ultra was quicker than a 9800 Pro. But even back in those days AMD came along with a driver that made the 9800 Pro kick the Nvidia's ass, same went for HL2.
The 7970 driver thing was another classic example. AMD literally made the card beat the GTX 580 at launch, then later on actually made it beat the GTX 680 just with a driver.
Everything about Fury X screams rushed. No cards, no stock, no samples for people who make the overclocking tools.. Hell, even Tom had to send his card on to another reviewer. Rushed drivers, no overclocking.... But at 4k it's already a very, very good card. And that's good enough for me given I'm on 4k.
In all honesty if I ever decide to ditch 4k I will ditch PC gaming completely and go to a PS4. There's really no point bothering with a PC for 1080p any more IMO. The graphics boost at 1080p simply isn't worth the outlay.