The triple whammy of semiconductor shortage, pandemic and cryptocunts has really fucked PC gaming for a generation. The price is way out of line with the capabilities compared to a PS5.
I’m still on a 1060 for my PC, and it’s only my GSync monitor that saves it. Variable frame rates really is great for all PC games tbh. You don’t have to frig about with settings as much because Opening Bare Area runs at 60fps, but the later Hall of a Million Alpha Effects runs at 30. You just let it rip between 40 and 80, no tearing, and fairly even frame pacing. The old “is this game looking as good as it can on my hardware while still playing smoothly?” question goes away, because you just get extra frames instead, and just knock the whole thing down one notch when it gets too bad. I’m spending more time playing and less time tweaking and that can only be a good thing.
I’m just clutching my pre-covid, pre-shortage GTX 1080ti. Hoping it’ll keep powering through a little longer. Honestly, it’s an amazing card. If it ever dies on me or becomes too obsolete, I’ll frame it and hang it on my wall.
I just wish AMD cards were better at ray tracing and “work” than Nvidia cards. Otherwise I’d have already splurged on an AMD if I could.
GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.
Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.
something many people overlook is how intertwined nvidia, intel and amd are. not only does the personnel routinely switch between those companies but they also have the same top share holders. there’s no natural competition between them. it’s like a choreograhped light saber fight where all of them are swinging but none seem to have any intention to hit flesh. a show to make sure nobody says the m word.
I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…
100%. Outside of brand loyalty, I just simply don’t see any reason to buy AMD’s higher tier GPUs over Nvidia right now. And that’s coming from a long, long time AMD fan.
Sure, their raster performance is comparable at times, but almost never actually beats out similar tiers from Nvidia. And regardless, DLSS virtually nullifies that, especially since the vast majority of games for the last 4 years or so now support it. So I genuinely don’t understand AMD trying to price similarly to Nvidia. Their high end cards are inferior in almost every objective metric that matters to the majority of users, yet still ask for $1k for their flagship GPU.
Sorry for the tangent, I just wish AMD would focus on their core demographic of users. They have phenomenal CPUs and middling GPUs, so target your demographics accordingly, i.e. good value budget and mid-tier GPUs. They had that market segment on complete lockdown during the RX 580 era, I wish they’d return to that. Hell, they figured it out with their console APUs. PS5/XSX are crazy good value. Maybe their next generation will shift that way in their PC segment.
It’s especially egregious with high end GPUs. Anyone paying >$500 for a GPU is someone that wants to enable ray tracing, let alone at a $1000. I don’t get what AMD is thinking at these price points.
FSR being an open feature is great in many ways but long-term its hardware agnostic approach is harming AMD. They need hardware accelerated upscaling like Nvidia and even Intel. Give it some stupid name similar name (Enhanced FSR or whatever) and make it use the same software hooks so that both versions can run off the same game functions (similar to what Intel did with XeSS).
AMD’s your friend now, but they’re only undercutting NVIDIA like this to get on top of the market. Once they’ve done that, it will be NVIDIA doing the undercutting, and AMD will be the one clamping down and exploiting their position.
It has happened time and time again.
Don’t simp for corporations. They’ll never return the favour.
Generally agree, but when one of the two participants in a market is actively hostile to users and the other is actually competing for market share, seems like that’s worth acknowledging. Especially when we so many examples of either outright collusion or as soon as one corporation introduces a new hostile feature all the others in the market follow.
On that note, I’m waiting for the day Nvidia announces a subscription service for unlocking cores or clock speeds.
Yeah, don’t be loyal is exactly what this post is about imo. Switch to whoever is treating you better. Every company eventually gets so big they can bully from the top. As soon as they do that you just go to the scrappy competitor that’s actually providing higher value.
Nvidia used to have the better price to performance and compatibility so I was ‘team’ Nvidia for a long time and just didn’t consider AMD, even after they became more viable. Now I’ll consider switching to AMD. Open source especially gets my attention
There is no doubt that AMD is a better company than NVIDIA in OSS terms.
But don’t simp for a company, vote with your wallet and always look for the best and consumer friendly product.
For now, not gonna lie AMD is pretty rad, but I hope next generation Intel GPUs are competitive.
I think AMD is a great competitor and we need more competition to lay it to NVIDIA and AMD as well, BUT HOLY FUCK. I can’t stand AMD’s software/control panel vs NVIDIA’s.
I just switched from nvidia to and and I have the exact opposite feeling lol
Aye. The Nvidia control center was cool when I installed it for my Ti 4600 in 2002 and not much has changed. I’m not particularly fond but the aesthetics of the Radeon software, but it beats the heck out of the semi-useless GeForce experience. I have to make an account just to see if there’s a driver update available? I can’t even control fan speeds in Windows without third party software?
They’re both bad but in comparison Nvidia’s offering is garbage.
Care to explain your gripes?
At least with NVIDIA’s control panel I can find what I am looking for but my god AMD’s software feels so damn unorganized.
I thought the current gen Intel ones are actually pretty decent. Solid budget choice for modern games.
If it can run them… I sold mine because they never actually fixed the drivers. Out of hundreds of games on my PC, it was able to run 3-4. This isn’t before their updates either. This happened 2 weeks ago. It can’t run davinci resolve despite having good encoders, it couldn’t even fucking run valorant Also they are only good in benchmarks, I found that my old 3050 was outperforming it in terms of fps.
AMD’s had some buggy drivers and misleading graphs, but they’re overall infinitely more consumer-friendly than Nvidia
