>>347924They really are that bad. They're a three-year-old design built on a six-year-old fabrication process. The 730 has 32nm transistors; the last Intel chip to have transistors that large was Sandy Bridge in 2010.
Last year Nvidia released their very first range of chips, EVER, to be fabricated using a technology comparable to what Intel was using at the same time. This year AMD is doing the same, albeit only at the high-end*, though last year with the 4x0 they went from 3-4 years behind to 1 year behind.
This three year jump in chipmaking technology is what's shaken up the GPU market so drastically: if I make the exact same design in a 10nm feature size instead of a 32nm feature size, adding no other innovation to the design, then just by doing that my chips will run twice as fast, on half the power, and because they're a tenth of the size, every wafer I etch will give me ten times as many of them. Of course R&D at AMD and Nvidia haven't just been sitting around doing nothing, so the actual improvements are even greater.
The bottom line is that all the low-end cards before the 1030 are electronic waste, as are all the mid-range cards before the 1050 and 450. The only reason they're still selling them is that stupid people are still buying them.
