It really feels like computer advancement has stalled out when you bought a 290 in 2014 for $250 and a 580 in 2017 for $200. There is about a 10% performance difference there. I remember going from a 2007 8800 GT to a 2009 GTX 285 and quadrupling performance at the same price point.
Its like the trends flipped themselves on their head. CPUs were barely improving from 2011 to 2016 but now Ryzen has forced Intels hand and suddenly in a year the jump is substantial (20% per thread, with 50-100% more cores). That being said, now that we have the "new normal" besides the 7nm jump in late 2019 - 2020 I don't anticipate substantial gains in CPUs going forward. 6-8 core should become the average high end but business as usual continues, hopefully with Spectre and Meltdown mitigation.
Likewise, GPUs had explosive performance gains from 2012 to 2015, but now the 1000 series from Nvidia has been out for almost 3 years with no new high end GPUs, and AMDs last full suite of GPUs was the 300 series 3 years ago as well. My understanding is the Vega cards are barely a sidegrade to Fiji, which were the last substantial improvement over the previous 290x series (and those were a substantial improvement over the 7900 series).
Its like the trends flipped themselves on their head. CPUs were barely improving from 2011 to 2016 but now Ryzen has forced Intels hand and suddenly in a year the jump is substantial (20% per thread, with 50-100% more cores). That being said, now that we have the "new normal" besides the 7nm jump in late 2019 - 2020 I don't anticipate substantial gains in CPUs going forward. 6-8 core should become the average high end but business as usual continues, hopefully with Spectre and Meltdown mitigation.
Likewise, GPUs had explosive performance gains from 2012 to 2015, but now the 1000 series from Nvidia has been out for almost 3 years with no new high end GPUs, and AMDs last full suite of GPUs was the 300 series 3 years ago as well. My understanding is the Vega cards are barely a sidegrade to Fiji, which were the last substantial improvement over the previous 290x series (and those were a substantial improvement over the 7900 series).