AMD is positioning them as rivals to the GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060, respectively. So is Navi going to crater prices? Nope--or at least not initially. I suspect that AMD is afraid of a fab capacity shortage from producing a ton of CPUs and doesn't want to burn their allocation at TSMC by producing lower margin GPUs instead, nor do they want to offer GPUs at compelling prices and then have them mostly unavailable for months.
AMD did have some new GPU features to talk about. They have CAS, or Contrast Adaptive Shading, basically as their answer to Nvidia's DLSS. It looks fine in their sample pictures, but I expect that in more general gameplay, it will work about as well as DLSS. Which is to say, badly.
They also announced FidelityFX, which is a post-processing operation to increase contrast. It does avoid (or perhaps even fix) the DLSS problem of upscaling looking blurry. But I suspect that instead of restoring details, it will tend to fill in the wrong details, and then you get static or flicker as the image moves.
More interesting is Radeon Anti-Lag. AMD is claiming that in their examples, it can reduce the latency from input to images on screen by 15 ms. If it can do that across the board, then that absolutely is a killer feature that is worth paying extra for. Once you get frame rates high enough to look like smooth motion, reduced latency is the real benefit of going higher yet.
Color me skeptical that it will just flawlessly work with everything, though. My best guess is that it's a matter of game-specific driver optimizations, much like CrossFire/SLI. They didn't really have a lot of details of what it did.
In all, I came away thinking that the Radeon RX 5700 XT looks like an overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 in a lot of ways. And that's not entirely a bad thing if it means that AMD's schedulers have finally caught up to Nvidia's. But it sure doesn't look like a world-beater card that will tip the GPU market decisively in AMD's favor. If that's all that AMD got out of a move to 7 nm, then it makes me wonder if TSMC 7 nm is simply a mediocre process node for GPUs (which would explain why Nvidia seems to be ignoring it), if RDNA is a mediocre architecture that AMD is going to be stuck with for years (akin to Bulldozer), or if there's something simply broken about the early Navi parts that AMD can fix later.
I expect AMD to make a ton of money in the next few years, but it's going to be the CPU division carrying the company, with the GPU division just along for the ride. Intel absolutely should be shaking in their boots at the thread that AMD poses. Nvidia, not so much.
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At $450 - compared to a $500 2070 yeah its... nice, but not earth shattering.
And nVidia still has “Super” in the wings, whatever that amounts to.
I think AMD priced it right to begin with. You want as high a margin as you can get early on, when most of the early adopters hit.
But you price that same hardware at <$400, and you do start to point to something world-beating. You don’t do that out the gate but if they have room to react to nVidia, they could have something on their hands.
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also, I can’t believe I’m talking about a mid-range card at a $400 price point being a great deal.
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AMD didn't smash Intel with first gen Ryzen. Intel was still better across the board when it came to performance. AMD just had very good pricing for the performance they were delivering. Only now does it look like AMD has truly surpassed Intel, but that's also because Intel is still struggling with their 10nm. So why did you think AMD was going to be able to beat Nvidia with the new Navi architecture?
Also any 2000 or 1600 Nvidia series owners aren't going to upgrade just because there is something faster less than a year later from when they got their current card. A very small portion might, but the vast majority really isn't considering upgrading until at least 2020/2021.
Navi is for those on older cards still and for those Navi is a good option compared to the RTX 2060 and 2070.
As for pricing why would AMD not price accordingly? I certainly wasn't expecting RTX 2080 performance for RX 580 pricing that is just being stupid.
- supplying gpus and cpus for PS5 and next-gen XBox (and whatever Stadia ends up being);
- in a very strong position when it comes to cpus for both desktops and servers - servers being a big market.
Also, you should never, ever buy into AMD hype. They always get totally overhyped, and when reality hits, your always in for a letdown. If you thought AMD was after people who already bought 2070's... yeah, no. The market for AMD are people still sitting on 970's, or running RX550s, or still sitting on R9 290's... who haven't upgraded to a current generation yet or are bumping up beyond 1080 and need more performance than what they have. Never get on the AMD hype train - it usually isn't directed by AMD and I have my tin-foil-hat suspicions that it's fueled by folks wearing green hats.
If you think about it objectively... sure, everyone wants vastly superior performance for vastly less cost and lower power: who doesn't? But in this case, it doesn't make sense to go back to the default status quo (especially since they are the single point reason why prices have been hiked up so much recently), when AMD is doing everything you have said you wanted, they just haven't gone as far as you would have liked.
I'm not saying you should go out and buy AMD, or that there are no good reasons to continue to look at nVidia... because that isn't true. Just saying AMD is definitely going in the direction it seems like your asking for. Maybe it isn't enough yet, but that doesn't mean they haven't made a lot of progress.
The question for AMD is... Sure, you price it right under the current performance level of your competition. Then they lower their price, then you lower yours. How far can either of them go before they just can't go any lower.
AMD has had great success with this, look at the RX570/580 - those have been phenomenal values, especially at some recent prices. Just because the 5700 has a high MSRP doesn't really concern me. What does is both camp's ability to lower the price later on to keep up with whatever the throws out: the lower they both can afford to go, the better off for all of us, no matter what color card you want to buy.
The nVidia GTX1060 price drops I used in my first example were in direct response to AMD showing up with the RX580 at $229, and then going on sale (often) for <$200. Same exact strategy AMD is employing here with RDNA cards. If we can get lower prices later on on both 5700 and 2070 cards - we all win.
RDNA is far from DOA based on nVidia Super - nVIdia hasn't even disclosed Super officially (that I'm aware of). What would make RDNA DOA would be if AMD can't afford to pivot to react to whatever Super may bring. That can't be known until Super actually comes out to play, though. You can't be killed by something that isn't out and available.
--John Ruskin
i don’t disagree with the second: I honestly have no idea how far either company can or is willing to drop. That is the million dollar question.
If Nvidia was stuck using the same process nodes that they had available in 2015, AMD would be totally smashing them, too. But that is unlikely to happen, as Nvidia and AMD have access to the same process nodes.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.