Wanted to give a brief overview of my experience with AMD graphic cards, my upgrade path over the last 4 years and getting back into PC gaming:
(2019) NVIDIA 1650 Super - (1080p TV)
(2022) AMD 6600XT (4K TV)
(2023) AMD 7900XTX (4K TV)
I've always had low/mid range NVIDIA GPUs along side consoles for gaming, going way back my last AMD was the high end (at the time) ATI Radeon X700 XT in 2004. I was not happy with how NVIDIA has been treating its customers as of late so made the switch last year to a 6600XT and was pleasantly surprised. I do a ton of emulation and have pretty much every emulator created running on my system and I've had very few driver issues running multiple generations of games on windows with the 6600XT. I want to have a history of gaming available to my kids so wide driver compatibility is important to me. The 6600XT was very price competitive and ran games at 4K with FSR/RSR decently if I dropped the resolution to 3200x1800 and tweaked some settings, looked better or equal to native in many games at 4K (I use an 85" 4K TV from the couch).
I've experienced no down sides to the 6600XT vs NVIDIA at the price point, ray tracing was a non factor but I wanted something that could run native 4K Ultra so upgraded to the 7900XTX. The 4090 is almost $1K more in Canada and with overclocking the 7900XTX comes pretty close and beats the 4090 in some games without RT. Got a 7900XTX MERC on sale for $975 usd and really that my absolute top end price for my budget.
I'm generally pretty happy with the purchase in terms of raw power when overclocked its more then enough for 4K/120HZ/Ultra settings and with FSR and should be good for years to come. I have a few issues though which I want to share below:
1. I didn't do a driver cleanup with DDU before the upgrade from 6600XT to 7900XTX, conflicting info online about if this is required with same brand. It caused issues with the card detecting my TV, receiver and monitor which was super annoying to troubleshoot but doing a clean install of the drivers fixed the issue.
2. HDR not working properly with Gamemode / freesync on my Samsung TV, brightness cut in half and colors washed out. seems like TV is still in SDR mode. There was a workaround with the 6600XT and CRU adding a freesync block would force the TV into HDR in gamemode, this is not an option as the 7900XTX does not yet support EDID overrides using CRU. This is the most annoying issue with the card.
3. VR performance is decent and a big improvement coming from the 6600XT but I can see the drivers still need work to be competitive for the price point. (I use a Quest 2 through Virtual Desktop).
4. No DLSS 3.0 equivalent yet. Obviously FSR 3 is being worked on and if competitive with DLSS 3.0 this will be a nice feature. With the 7900XTX its not currently an issue for me as it has enough power to max out my 4K/120hz TV in most games, could be useful in some Raytracing scenarios though.
5. Raytracing is pretty good and I'll take raw raster performance any day considering all the games that don't support RT and ones that do so far not really worth the performance hit. This could change in the next few years though which is my only concern with investing in the 7900XTX.
6. AMD settings dashboard much better then NVIDIA, for some reason my custom tuning settings aren't automatically loading with the game. Some games are very sensitive to undervolting so I've created custom profiles, not a big deal just small annoyance. Can we get an option to apply frame limits per game?
I believe that all of these issues can be solved or improved on with driver updates and if that happens the 7900XTX will be extremely competitive with NVIDIA, at this point in time I can pay an extra 1K CDN and have basically all of those issues solved and some extra performance in some games on the 4090 NVIDIA side but hopefully in the next few months I won't need to. I think solving these issues goes a long way to gaining gamer mind share that we won't have to compromise by going with AMD.
