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.
Corporations are not our friends. 🤷♂️
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.
…mayfabe?
They’re cycling out the old curse words. The Carlin ones are now fine. The new list is:
- Monopoly
- Union
- Rights
- Child labor
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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…
Say it loud and say it proud, cooperations are no one’s friend!
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 still has better Linux support for now, which is about 90% of the reason I went with them for now.
If you’re running Linux there’s only one option
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.
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
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.
I consider it “cheering for the underdog.” When they are no longer the underdog, then the cheering ceases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It is the lesser of two evils imo. Not saying that AMD is any good, their alternatives are just that bad.
drivers have been solid for years now
Good one!
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AMD is the only real option for those of us using Linux. Nvidia’s weirdnesses regularly fill up support tickets on Linux forums it’s not even funny
I’ve been using Linux on my desktop since 1995, have used a lot of nVidia cards and have yet to experience that weirdness you speak of.
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.
Big corps are not your friend, but as a wise man once said, fuck Nvidia 🖕
Am I having a stroke, or does that actually say “here’s the our source code”?
Oops
what if this is just a pyschology test and we are expected to not notice and discuss amd or nvidia
we’ll let you peak 🗻
youre crazy
*your crazy
what about my crazy ?
That is what you have to do if you’re behind the competition. Don’t think they’ll keep this up for long if they happen to be the industry leader.
Always back the underdoge
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!
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.
if im not wrong 6800 perform way better than 3070
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.
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
the thing is since fsr is open source, that it wont really make any difference in sales because nvidia can also use it,
Keen to see fsr4 as it’ll be response to dlss3.5 upscaling for ray tracing and hardware agnostic on top of that would be great
As an AMD fanboy, I approve of this.
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.
Thanks, will take a hard look when it’s time to buy again. I forgot to specify that I was explicitly discussing Linux usage also - assume same answer?
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.
Yeah, AMD GPUs work great across the board no matter the CPU.
I should have specified “in Linux” more explicitly - same answer? :-)
Can I get back to you, say, in three weeks?
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.
No rush whatsoever, but I’d be thrilled to hear about your results when you are done.
Hey there fellow 20 year using Linux desktop Linux fanboy! Exactly the same here
I am not alone!!! Yes!
Corporations aren’t your friend.
My rig is full AMD (5800x/5700xt), but that’s purely because they happened to be the better value at the time. The second they get a lead in the consumer GPU market (which they likely will since nvidia simply doesn’t care about it vs the ML market now) prices are going to rise again.
And don’t pretend that these prices are anything resembling affordable. That would be when you could get a legitimately mid-range card for ~$150 (rx580).
Corporations aren’t your friend.
Correct. But AMD is doing things that benefit FOSS and Linux, where as nVidia is a menace. Intel is also doing pretty decent, they just need to catch up in terms of driver features.
Honey their x80 equivalent cards are over double what they used to be. Stop praising them for doing the bare fucking minimum.
Man, I could use another $200 MSRP mid-range card. I’m also running RX5700XT (for $430!) and it’s probably going to be the first card I will use until it dies, unless there’s a reasonably priced mid-range coming out soon.
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Mine was literally the last in stock before prices went wild when covid started. I was using rx480 and didn’t really need to upgrade until Gamers Nexus published a video about GPU shortage.
My hope right now is for AMD to keep improving on FSR so this card can stay viable for more years.
We’ve come a long, long way, baby.
I’m confused, was there a time when i3 cores were better than i5?
I am super happy with my 7950X3D. However, their GPU drivers still need some work for the 7900XTX.
I used to have lots of driver crashing and weirdness on my RX 580, but I’ve had mostly smooth sailing with my 6600 XT.
To be honest, I only get the driver crash at the absolute worst times now. After I did the switch to AMD from Intel and Nvidia, I did do a fresh windows install and have only had to reinstall the AMD graphics drivers about 4 times in the last couple of months. (While true, the last paragraph is not as bad as it sounds. Annoying, yes. End of the world, no.)
There is a pattern to the madness though. If I go from gaming to other GPU intensive apps used across different screens, it’s probably going to hang the driver. Not fatally, but I reboot anyway when it happens.
AMD is on the right track though. I think I have been through three different GPU drivers versions since I built the system and it is slowly getting better. I get a driver crash about once a week instead of once a day now.
I’ve never had amd drivers crash during normal usage, 6700xt water block. Microsoft sleep mode wrecks my pc and makes it instantly crash though.
Sleep mode is rough, for sure. It’s also one of the reasons why I did a completely fresh installation of Windows. (Sleep mode was suicide.) Also, I had heard an obscure rumor that AMD chipset drivers could be picky for old windows installations. (Like, not enabling the 3D cache on the CPU kind of picky.)
But yeah, you aren’t alone with the sleep mode woes.
Four times in 2 months? Hangs every time when switching from gaming to other GPU centric apps? Jeezuz, how are people finding that acceptable? You’re paying premium money for these products, demand better from these fucks. And the comment below you isn’t any better, crashing any time when waking from sleep mode is craziness.
Stop making excuses for AMD. They’re just another soulless corporation like any other, including Nvidia’s greedy asses.
Yeah, the GPU drivers haven’t been stable. Hell, one time they just stopped working completely and failed to recognize the card. Wut?
I mainly bounce between Diablo IV, War Thunder, Fusion360, PrusaSlicer and sometimes Blender. It doesn’t always hang, but when it does, it’s because I have been moving the apps back and forth between monitors. Multi-monitor support is buggy and that is absolutely a combination of the GPU drivers and the apps.
Yeah, I paid some coin, that is for sure. It is frustrating in that regard but I knew what I was getting into with AMD drivers. The first few generations of drivers are almost always garbage with new cards and they are showing improvements over the last few iterations of drivers.
Also, yes. I am tempted to give my 7900XTX to my daughter when the NVIDIA 5000 series drops. For now, I am just tolerating the issues. (I rarely had an issue with my 3070.)
No excuses here! The CPU is gold but the GPU drivers are shite. I am an extremely patient person though, so that helps.
I commend you on your zen master level of patience, haha. I’m only patient up to a degree and then it all goes out the window, heh.
I’m guessing you have the hotkey combination for rebooting the graphics drivers without having to reboot your PC? When I had a 5700 XT, that hotkey combo was a lifesaver (drivers on that would constantly hang for me as well).
I’m fairly sure the Windows drivers are still closed source and this is referring to the situation on Linux.
Some of the points in the meme do stretch across OS’s.
I switched from windows to Linux with my 7900XT and went from some GPU crashes to none