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.
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…
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.
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).
not to mention except north america, in almost all countries amd gpu is always $100 more expensive than nvidia counterpart making it just non sense to buy any amd card unless you are just a fanboy
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.
Exactly, loyalty to a corporation is so stupid. Buy what works best for you in the moment.
If the company is still doing that when you need your next item, great. But if there is something better with a competitor and it’s not difficult to replace, it’s time to move on.
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
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.
Well I guess there’s two parts of the nvidia software experience, geforce and the control panel. The control panel is functionally fine, but the ui is very dated and the available features are a bit limited. Geforce is pretty widely reviled as far as I can tell so I won’t go into it.
I just find the amd ui nice, and I like how you get quite simple and direct control over your video card, eg you can do some simple oc/undervolting, choose which software special sauce you want at a glance, and so on.
My first-ever Nvidia card was a 3080Ti. After installation I was genuinely confused and kept clicking around everywhere looking for the real settings panel.
Actually I remember, my older laptop had a MX150 (lol) so I did know all about GeForce Control Panel and Experience—I just thought they were the outdated bargain-basement solution assigned to POS hardware like mine, not worth (understandably) slapping shiny new chrome on.
Subsequently I had automatically assumed without a doubt in my mind that the pandemic card I had paid for in tainted blood would have some uber slick new interface that I couldn’t wait to play around with.
Needless to say, my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined.
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.
You don’t need an account for drivers. You can still get those for free off their website just like you could in 1999. You only need an account for their experience app.
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.
Can’t speak for Microsoft users (except - abandon all hope), but since Kernel 5.4 I’ve been on 2 different Radeons and a vega. Zero drivers. Just latest STABLE Mesa. If the game worked on Protondb, it worked for me.
I’ve been using Nvidia with Linux for a VERY long time. Currently I have computers running:
GT1030 - two older PC
GTX2060 Ti
GTX 3050 Ti - laptop
They are all working fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. I install openSUSE, add the Nvidia community repo (a couple of clicks), run updates once, and reboot. Everything just works after that. I can count maybe 3 times in the past 6 years that there was any issue at all.
Now Ubuntu and derivative… I’ve had a LOT of issues and weirdness… drivers failing, doing weird things etc.
And now, for a serious note: been running linux daily for almost 20 years and AMD machines are, per my personal experience, always smoother to install, run and maintain.
I've been intel w/ nvidia since 2007 on Linux. Recent trends have me thinking AMD is the way to go for my next one though. I think I've got so used to the rough edges of Nvidia that they stopped bothering me.
As someone who has been ignoring AMD for most of this time, (my last AMD product was something in the Athlon XP line), can I do Intel CPU w/ AMD discrete GPU?
Yeah, this is what my wife was doing. I’m also doing the reverse: AMD CPU, NVidia GPU. I considered AMD but went NVidia mostly for the PPW on an undervolted 4070. It results in a cool, quiet, low-wattage machine that can handle anything that matters to me, which AMD GPUs still can’t match this gen even with the upcoming 7800XT they’re trying to compare against the 4070. I’d wait for some PPW analysis before making a choice depending on your needs. There’s way more to the analysis than GPU source code or even raw performance that is often overlooked.
Oh,and don’t sleep on AMD. Though I don’t feel like the AM5 platform is fully baked, Ryzen architecture is rock-solid and I fully recommend using it if your history with Athlon is what’s keeping you away. I actively avoided them for the same reason until a friend convinced me otherwise, and I’m so glad I did.
Can’t speak to that, unfortunately. But I assume there would be no issues. The devices themselves are system agnostic; Windows isn’t doing anything special to make them play nice with each other.
I’m about to put together a machine based on a AB350 chipset, with a Ryzen 5 (g series, for graphics from the start) and after that I intend to install on it a budget RX580.
If the thing doesn’t ignite or explode, I’ll gladly share the end result.
I just bought my first Nvidia card since the TNT2. Up to today I always looked for the most FPS for the money.
This time my focus was on energy efficiency, and the AMD cards suck at the moment. 4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
Regarding DLSS: I activated it in control, and it looks… off? Edges seem unsharp, not all the time, but often, sometimes only for a second, sometimes longer. I believe it is the only game I have that has support for it, but I’m not impressed.
At OP: Brand loyality is the worst. Neither Nvidia nor AMD like you. Get the best value for your money.
Btw, Nvidia needed an account to let me use their driver. Holy shit, that’s fucked up!
When you install the drivers there is a checkbox for geforce experience. I think you need to do “custom installation” or advanced or whatever they call it instead of just clicking the install button they show.
4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
But if you compare cards from the same generation, like the 3070 and 6800, they’re much closer. Nvidia still has the edge, but the 3070 TGP is 220W vs the 6800 at 250W.
You don’t necessarily need an account to use the Nvidia drivers, just if you want automatic updates through GeForce Experience. Not saying that’s any better, in fact it’s almost as shitty, just wanted to clarify.
I just used a junk email to make an account for the auto updates.
Not OC, but per my last experience with it NVENC was way easier to work with.
You install the NVIDIA drivers, you install CUDA libs (in Fedora that’s separate, at least) and it works.
For AMD, you need to figure out that you need the proprietary driver for AMF (which didn’t have a proper installer for anything that wasn’t Ubuntu the last time I tried it) or be stuck with the unfortunately not as good VAAPI. After that you usually had to hunt for guides on how to use the encoder in the program you want (OBS used to be a particular nightmare for it, hopefully it got better with time).
I hope things got and continue to get better, specially since I’m 100% going to get an AMD setup after my laptop eventually dies.
Keen to see how FSR3 ends up looking, if it comes within decent parity to DLSS3 it’s going to be amazing, considering it’s hardware agnostic so theoretically console devs can use it to boost framerates.
AMD confirmed works on console. First impressions by Digital Foundry etc said it exceeded expectations, however they weren’t allowed to play it. Hopefully lag isn’t terrible
Amd’s epyc server cpus would be like 64 Machamp. Mf is huge and requires a hell of a cooler. See them at the datacenter I work at and when I opened the server up I thought I was looking at a turbocharged car engine or something.
That’s very true, but perhaps I should have specified this is a very, very old meme (thus why we have come a long way). Probably 10-15 years old? Back when AMD really was struggling with performance issues, before they came back with the Ryzen series. Epyc servers are only like six years old, IIRC.
It used to be for a while that i3 was dual core with hyper threading, where the i5 was quad core with no hyper threading, and the i7 was quad core with HT.
I’ve had a Nvidia card for a long time (just built my new pc 2 months ago) Wayland worked mostly ok for me the last year. But I’ve used x11 until 2023, so I can’t really sayhow it was.
nvidia just works better on linux. Well… I heard that’s changed so this may no longer be relevant
This isn’t and has never been the case. Nvidia and AMD are comparable performance-wise on Linux these days, but since the Nvidia drivers are proprietary, they’re automatically harder to deal with than the open-source AMD drivers. For that reason alone, AMD is easier to use with Linux out of the box, because the Linux kernel has AMD drivers built in. You still have to install userspace drivers in either case, but the open-source AMD userspace drivers have outperformed Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for a long time. It’s only been within the last couple years that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers have reached parity with AMD’s open-source ones.
For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.
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