Any PC Builders Out There?

I'm definitely not arguing with that lol. I will say though that for the 6000 and 7000 series drivers have been great, I haven't had any issues where I've had tons of conflicts with nVidia and Steel series software. I have small, but not realistic, hope that AMD will see that they have a chance to go on the attack because the techtuber space is turning on nVidia. If they can bring a card to compete with the 5070, and it has a lot more VRAM, with a reasonable price they could move the needle.

 

Did the 6000/7000 drivers launch well? or at least well enough? I honestly don't know.

I think AMD doesn't have many issues competing with nvidia mid series cards and vram typically isn't an issue from a gaming standpoint anyway, especially on mid cards (at least I think) and with this dawn of framerate generation it will be even less so, at least I think, maybe not, I dunno framerate does use AI tech which uses vram so maybe it will start playing a larger role.

In all honesty, if AMD is going to go on the attack they need to go for the top tier card performance level and scale backward otherwise they'll always just be playing mid-tier card exchange.

 

Yes, drivers at launch were good. There's still been some AMD fine wine happening, but there also hasn't been the conflicts and crashing of past generations at launch. AMD owns the console market and Xbox has become so close to Windows that it gives them a huge boost to their driver support.

VRAM is becoming a big problem. Lots of games at 2K are trying to load 8-10GB of textures and shaders into the video memory when ultra settings are turned on. nVidia is getting around it by upselling DLSS which allows games to run at 720P or 1080P which decreases that demand on VRAM. However, without it, it's just a way to create planned obsolescence when more games can't run decently without DLSS, which doesn't work at lower frame rates. In other words, DLSS sounds great but it has a performance floor, and low VRAM will limit it's abilities over time. AMD going with often double the memory on their cards that nVidia does is future proofing the disaster that has become shader and texture optimization. Watch, within this generation the 11 GB 3080Ti won't be able to run the top tier games. nVidia going with 8GB on the 5070 is a joke.

I disagree on the top tier stuff. The best AMD generations for sales, like the Polaris cards, were when they stopped chasing nVidia at the top. AMD owns the console market and supposedly has the contracts for the next PS too, they can fund development using those console contracts and then make the profits on the mid teir cards. Only 2% of gamers on steam have a 90 series cards. Their halo products that we hear a lot about don't sell well and even if they did the profitability isn't great since they could be sold for 2-3x more in the data center for AI. In particular nVidia uses the 90 series to create a false generational uplift by making the largest uplift on the 90 series while keeping the rest of the series jumps under 20%.

 

I forgot that AMD has the console market on lock (lowest bidder and all) but they are doing the same, developing FSR tech to upscale console resolutions [in turn this gets pushed to PC]. This tech isn't bad, it's just new. Obviously, there's the "I paid 2k for this card I want the raw performance" but in the end it's going to be all about adoption and that may be an old way of thinking soon. Although I'll admit I don't rightly understand this tech, I just click buttons make game work, i found the chase for framerates is just really expensive. Basically, if you can run a 5070 at 1440p upscaled from 1080p or 720p than it doesn't makes sense for them to increase the vram, that would just increase the cost of the card anyway. I disagree about the 3080ti [Im biased here, my card] I'm sure it'll run fine for another 2 maybe 3 years at 1440p, might be hit and miss on high frames but that's okay. A lot of the time the difference between medium and ultra level textures is nil, at least for me. Ngl, I would like to play more ray tracing or path tracing someday, that's cool stuff.

I would imagine 90 series pull a 70ish % gross on their cards, they aren't going to make something that loses them money, so net profit would probably be somewhere in the 15-20% neighborhood (I'm speculating but that's relatively normal) This is probably the same for all the cards short of their workstation cards, those are ridiculous margins I bet. I can't imagine AMD is gonna be any different.

My only point about top tier is, it's easier from an engineering standpoint to make something really fucking awesome than scale down than it is to try and make something okay and try to make it really fucking awesome later. I'm not saying they should do it for sales purposes but for R&D. The entire PC market itself is still hanging on to the tried-and-true 1080p anyway, mostly just due to cost and most gamers are kids. It just allows them to actually be competitive as a company and not just 1-3% less I guess lol, but hell that's probably okay for them.

although none of that changes the fact the market needs competition, cause that only helps us.

 

I forgot to mention that AMD did make a 9090XT (just guessing on what they would of called it) on paper. There was lots of leaks a couple of years ago about it. AMD is working on tile based GPUs, so is nVidia, and I expect they'll come back to the market when they feel they can deliver something premier in the market. The 7900XTX was tile based, for example, but it sounds like AMD chose not to bring RDNA 4 to a tile architecture. I've read lots of theories why, but the biggest one I believe is that AMD limited the development budget for RDNA4 cards since they'll be swapping back to a unified architecture for their next cards. A unified graphics architecture in the future will make low volume cards like the top end cards worth manufacturing since they can spread their risk over the data center like nVidia does. That is also a reason why nVidia has slowed their gains, they aren't designing anything for gaming. They're making data center cards work as GPUs, and sadly that's going to be AMD too.

My comment on nVidia profitability wasn't that the 90 series isn't profitable. It is, but it's not even close to the data center. I'm not sure what they're going for now, but nVidia HX1000 cards have been rumored in the 100K range for a single GPU die that could be cut down slightly to become a 5090. If it wasn't for defects, the 5090 wouldn't exist. The data center is nVidia's real focus.

I think you may want to look up GPU memory pricing. Cost on 1 GB memory chips was around $13 when the 40 series launched, and fell to 30 cents by this year. Quick source: GDDR6 VRAM Prices Plummet: 8GB of Memory Now Costs $27 | Tom's Hardware

It's also worth mentioning that the 3070 and 4070 also had 8 GB. If price was a real factor, wouldn't the 3070 of had 4 or 6 GB? There's no real reason to hold down the cards at 8 GB unless you factor in that nVidia has other plans.

Even if we assume the 2 GB GDDR7 modules nVidia is using are at $20 a piece, to go from 8 GB to 16 GB is $80. Not much difference on a card that's MSRP will be $550 with most AIB partners selling for over $600. They're absolutely holding down the VRAM to force people to upgrade if they want the most out of their cards. Keep in mind I doubt those memory chips cost nVidia more than $20 total for all four, they're the only ones using them and the $13 cited above was cost for buying one chip at MSRP. nVidia and AIBs gets massive bulk discounts. I mean, watch some HW unboxed videos. I don't personally like their channel, but the fact that they are seeing massive hits to frame rates in several games on 8 GB cards, and hits to cards with less that 12 GB in Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones, suggests nVidia would of noticed this in their testing of the 5070 and just decided to work around it with DLSS instead of releasing a card with more memory.

 

I forget what game, maybe the new indiana jones one? but it's maxing out 8 and 12gb vram cards. You need at least 16 if you don't want to take a load time and frame rate hit on high and ultra settings, even at 1080p I believe. LTT talks about it fairly often over the last few months since it released.

 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle! lol, that's what started my venture into a new build. I bought it for xbox series x and wasn't able to find a series x console in stock.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2677660/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Great_Circle/

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• 
  MINIMUM:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel Core i7-10700K @ 3.8 GHz or better or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 3.6 GHz or better
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6600 8 GB or Intel Arc A580
  • Storage: 120 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: SSD required; GPU Hardware Ray Tracing Required; Graphic Preset: Low / Resolution: 1080p (Native) / Target FPS: 60

• 
  RECOMMENDED:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel Core i7-12700K @ 3.6 GHz or better or AMD Ryzen 7 7700 @ 3.8 GHz or better
  • Memory: 32 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080Ti 12 GB or AMD Radeon RX 7700XT 12 GB
  • Storage: 120 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: SSD required; GPU Hardware Ray Tracing Required; Graphic Preset: High / Resolution: 1440p (Native) / Target FPS: 60

 

I'll sell you my 3080 when 5080 comes out.

 

My bad, I was off a bit I guess. But to get 60fps at 4k it calls out 16/20gb cards. You left out the “ultra” requirements.



Edit: my point, to be clear, is 12gb is going to be the new minimum in the next year or two, and 16gb soon after to get decent frame rates at higher detail settings or with ray tracing. Its wild to me there are still modern new cards with 6gb vram.

 

What are you talking about, with 20x frame generation the future is now! You only need 1 GB of VRAM for this glory!

https://x.com/DEGMods/status/1878111541821645263?s=19

 

Man, I barely meet the minimum. Glad I stick to consoles these days.

 

Yeah, I meet minimums, but technically not recommended. I have a 5600x with a 7800xt. I picked up the 7800xt last year for $519 and traded in a 3060ti that was starting to have thermal issues (even after a re-pad) for about $250 and thought I made out pretty well.

 

I'm a small step down from that, 5600X with a 6650XT. It's not really built for gaming, just decent performance for the money. I would likely not be happy with the experience if I tried to run that game.

 

Wouldn't rely on Indiana Jones as being the 'standard' for gaming by any means.

 

Forreal, thats insane! My wife and I are happy playing pretty much every game we've tried with our 6700xt/6650xt cards. We both run 1440p/165-170fps in just about everything we play, usually on High-Ultra settings, depending on game. Whenever the time comes to upgrade, it'll be entirely because I want to run triple screens on my drift sim.

 

Been doing the whole PC gaming thing for going on two decades and never felt the need to game on a console cause of 'requirements' (nothing against console gamers).

One poorly-optimized game isn't going to change that for me now.

 

It's a AAA game that released less than a month ago, I think it's a fair example of what games could expect moving forward. Definitely the most extreme requirements I've ever seen though.

 

That's your keyword there.

Have you seen the last Steam survey?

Just from the discussions here in the last 3-4 pages, many of us are above the average setup.

If we continue with games like IJ, developers are going to lose a big piece of the pie with many gamers not being able to play games in general.

 

I'm just happy to have experienced gaming on console from youth-adulthood and truly appreciating the change in experience after switching to PC. I really thought I'd build a machine and continue to use controller, but making the switch to mouse/keyboard was a stupidly insane difference (ultimately for the better). I'm still so green in all this, but the experience gaming on PC has truly changed my entire mindset about what a "gaming experience" should be like. Sucks I was missing out for so long!

 

Welcome to the dark side

I still gamed on console while gaming on PC - sometimes you had to because some friends only had console while others only had PC.