Why? If you sell the Titan Xs for $650-700 each, 4x1080 cards will cost $0 to upgrade. If you bought your 5960X at MicroCenter, if you sell it for $700, that's what $200-250 loss in resale value. Overall, this upgrade will cost you very little in the grand scheme of your system cost. :thumbsup:
In modern games, which is what I presume gamers who use cutting edge GPUs play, 980 destroys the OG Titan. It's not even close.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38195631&postcount=2
Once NV launches Pascal, it will refocus its drivers on that architecture. Add to that improved tessellation performance of the new architecture, and most likely superior DX12 performance, it shouldn't be out of the question that 1080 OC will outperform 980Ti OC by 25-30% at 1440p/4K. I think for Titan X/980Ti owners, it's going to be a very safe way to reinvest the resale value even if GP104 is a stop-gap solution. It's better than holding on to Maxwell that will continue depreciating, using more power and getting worse drivers (most likely).
Even if NV/AMD supported older cards just as well as newer cards, the depreciation on flagship cards alone almost always makes it worthwhile to dump them before new cards launch, regardless if the newer cards are upper-mid-range or flagship. It's far worse holding on to a $650-700 card that could plummet to $400-450 in resale value the week 1080 launches.
Amazon already has after-market 980Ti for
$540, new. The longer 980Ti/Titan X owners wait to sell their cards, the less resale value they'll get. That's why NV's new strategy of bifurcating a generation is so brilliant. Even if we hate the idea of paying $550-600 for mid-range sub-330mm2 die GP104, it still makes sense to sell last gen's flagship due to Total Cost of Ownership. NV knows this.
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Without Vega competition, NV can easily raise the price of 1070 to $399-449 and 1080 to $599-649 and get favourable reviews because each respective card will offer superior price/performance and perf/watt against ALL $400-650 cards currently on the market.