... And honestly I'm not impressed. Sure they keep up and even beat nVidia, but what's the point if the 3070 is beaten by the 6800 if the 3070 costs $500 and the 6800 $580? Techspot doesn't have the 6800 on their chart yet, but other reviews show it is slightly better than the 3070, but significantly more expensive. Plus heck, if you're already paying $650 for a 6800XT, what's the incentive for the >75% of the userbase which is nVidia to switch to AMD, especially when you figure lower ray tracing performance, no DLSS or other nVidia exclusive feature support, and, especially, the driver track record?
Looks like another year or two where AMD's and nVidia's bank books win, and we all lose...
For me
@black_zion wrote:... And honestly I'm not impressed. Sure they keep up and even beat nVidia, but what's the point if the 3070 is beaten by the 6800 if the 3070 costs $500 and the 6800 $580? Techspot doesn't have the 6800 on their chart yet, but other reviews show it is slightly better than the 3070, but significantly more expensive. Plus heck, if you're already paying $650 for a 6800XT, what's the incentive for the >75% of the userbase which is nVidia to switch to AMD, especially when you figure lower ray tracing performance, no DLSS or other nVidia exclusive feature support, and, especially, the driver track record?
Looks like another year or two where AMD's and nVidia's bank books win, and we all lose...
For me as a person who really does want ray tracing and dlss I get the point of why pay the extra for a 6800 for many users they may not need the few extra frames or that deficit is completely gone once you enable ray tracing.
For me though it isn't just the extra cost of the card either. Compared to the 3070 a 6800 also may require an end user to buy a new power supply at 100-150 bucks. So it can be a pretty big jump in price overall.
I however hate to that Nvidia also makes it a tough choice by not competing on the ram. Their choice of less ram most the time I think will really be a big deal in a year or two. Most of us not buying top of the line don't buy a new card more than once every 4-6 years and need for that card to last that time span. I have serious doubts that many current AMPERE cards will do that without lowering settings. I already went through this on my RTX 2060 which is powerful enough to run Doom Eternal at the highest settings at 1440p except you have to crank down the textures because of Nvidia's 6gb choice.
"or me though it isn't just the extra cost of the card either. Compared to the 3070 a 6800 also may require an end user to buy a new power supply at 100-150 bucks."
The 6800 only uses 19W more than the RTX 3700, so you likely wouldn't need a different power supply. I think the biggest problem is, as we pointed out during the original Navi launch, is that the vendors don't seem like they are "competing". AMD allows NVidia to dictate the price/performance tier, and then slots its own GPUs into that same curve based on their rasterization performance. Not something AMD used to do (see HD 4870 and HD 5870 launches).
In some ways, that is okay, as a customer can buy the best GPU they can afford from either company and get similar performance/$. With some caveats of course. AMD has an advantage at 1080p and even 1440p for the high frame rate e-sports crowd. While the extra VRAM does seem like something that will become more of an issue for NVidia down the line. NVidia has better Ray-tracing performance, and if a particular title supports DLSS, the difference becomes quite stark. NVidia Ampere cards are also much stronger in pro apps this time around. So while there are some differentiating factors, it seems for most users it won't matter which you buy. And that's good, except it keeps those prices high. So it is a bit of a disturbing trend.
