05-07-2017, 07:27 AM
Undeath: I think this is mostly covered by "Can power it?" 
Flomac: I <3 you bro, but your lack of cynicism towards AMD displeases me. Anyway, yes, pedantically speaking, there are lots of little differences, but none of them ultimately matter for compute. Are they stamping the exact same physical chip? No. But they're pretty goddamned close
Although in all fairness, GCN2 did add more ACE's and organized the MCUs into Shader Engines. That was a fairly significant change, I'll admit. But it didn't really do anything for compute performance. BUT they did cut the number of ACE's in half on Polaris, so it's a lot closer to a 7970 than a 290X. So, comparison is still valid
Flomac: I <3 you bro, but your lack of cynicism towards AMD displeases me. Anyway, yes, pedantically speaking, there are lots of little differences, but none of them ultimately matter for compute. Are they stamping the exact same physical chip? No. But they're pretty goddamned close
Although in all fairness, GCN2 did add more ACE's and organized the MCUs into Shader Engines. That was a fairly significant change, I'll admit. But it didn't really do anything for compute performance. BUT they did cut the number of ACE's in half on Polaris, so it's a lot closer to a 7970 than a 290X. So, comparison is still valid