AMD Announces Radeon VII, Its Next-Generation $699 Graphics Card (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it's primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that's competitive with Nvidia's RTX 2080. It's called the Radeon VII ("Seven"), and it uses the company's first 7nm graphics chip that we'd seen teased previously. It'll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the company. That's the same price as a standard Nvidia RTX 2080. [...] AMD says the second-gen Vega architecture offers 25 percent more performance at the same power as previous Vega graphics, and the company showed it running Devil May Cry 5 here at 4K resolution, ultra settings, and frame rates "way above 60 fps." AMD says it has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth.

Comments

Good news!

[DaMattster]

Yes, AMD is lagging behind but I will still go with AMD graphics over NVIDIA because NVIDIA has an anti-open source stance. It's good news that AMD's graphics chipsets are getting better.

Re:Good news!

[vyvepe]

NVidia is not an option if you need a longer term linux support.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ray tracing is a meme.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

The parts of the Nvidia driver that are loaded in the kernel and need to be compiled against the kernel are open source. The fact that the driver then loads a binary blob does not alter the long term support and open source nature of the part that needs to be compiled against the kernel.

In addition there are both short term and long term drivers:
https://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Re:Good news!

[jellomizer]

Lets compromise on second tear technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.

NVidia isn't Anti-Open Source if that was the case they wouldn't be giving Linux drivers at all. They are just not pro-Open Source. They are not trying to put a stop to it, they just do not want to participate.

Re:Good news!

[WaffleMonster]

Come on, don't give them a pass. It's not a very good value proposition is it. It's for the fanboys only. You can buy a 2080 for $699 and you get RT and Tensor cores (ray tracing, DLSS, etc.).

I watched the Nvidia CES and the whole presentation + RT/Tensor thing felt like one giant scam.

DLSS as near as I can tell is basically just an upscaler using substantially similar "AI" database approach as Sony's x-reality asic. This technology has been around for years. While it's nice it sure as heck doesn't produce magical outcomes that are anywhere near rendering native resolution.

Then there was gratuitous use of TAA throughout the demos as a reference which would be hilarious if they were not serious. TAA is only state of the art in blurry mess technology... using that as basis for comparisons especially given the effective resolution of the window as it was viewable in the CES demo... was basically a scam.

Personally if 2080 can't deliver high frame rate ray tracing at 4k what does it matter? Modern shader hacks for dynamic lighting are quite realistic.. so is it really worth cranking resolution down so much .. just for slightly more realistic lighting? Would that really produce a better overall quality image? Personally I'm more impressed by 1TB/s memory bandwidth than I am with ray tracing at this point.

No doubt in the future RT will win out but right now to make buying decision based on it ... I personally don't see the value.

Re: Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am still waiting for an answer to my question about the bigendian ALU (I know it isnt important to most people but it provides a stat on performance bottlenecks in unique situations)

Re:Good news!

[sexconker]

TAA is only state of the art in blurry mess technology

Yup! It fucking appalls me that this is seen as a good standard to measure up against and, worse, that people prefer it!

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets compromise on second tear technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.

I know. The whole thing makes me weep.

Re:Good news!

[swillden]

Lets compromise on second tier technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.

I agree completely, though I don't care about a specific license agreement, just that it be OSI compliant.

Re:Good news!

[squiggleslash]

If you can only use a product by agreeing to shitty terms and conditions that prevent you from using it the way you wanted to, it's a second tier technology. No ifs, buts, or anything else.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia's drivers are only supported as long as Nvidia thinks they should be. When they think your card should be dead, things gets difficult in a hurry.

I still have old AMD AGP cards which runs with absolutely zero problems out of the box.

Re:Good news!

[Narcocide]

The part that needs to be compiled against the kernel isn't the part Steam checks for. Fuck your astroturfing.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia's drivers are only supported as long as Nvidia thinks they should be. When they think your card should be dead, things gets difficult in a hurry.

I still have old AMD AGP cards which runs with absolutely zero problems out of the box.

At some point you need to start throwing old shit away.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

does the old proprietary binary blob self destruct? or are you just an idiot that cant download the latest old one that still supports your physical card's arcitecture and use it?

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw an argument that it will be good at 120 images per second. I'm ready to believe that although I have no hardware to check this.

Re:Good news!

[Luckyo]

I play warframe at 120fps lock. TAA is fucking awful. It's like vaseline smeared all over your screen. I suspect the only people who like it are the people who really like motion blur. It produces a sorta kinda similar look.

Re:Good news!

[epine]

Lets compromise on second tear technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.

Let's compromise on second-tier literacy while we're at it.

Here's a better metaphor: both Nvidia and AMD are fancy hotels, but for the last five or ten years, Nvidia has a posh penthouse bridal suite, and AMD doesn't. For a good while, concerning posh penthouse bridal suites, there was only one game in town.

Frasier: Why would I stay across the street in a shitty hotel that doesn't even have a posh penthouse bridal suite?

Niles: Do you actually need a penthouse bridal suite?

Frasier: No, but it just feels cheap when the elevator ends at 69, instead of P.

Re:Good news!

[WorBlux]

AMD had traditionally excelled on compute. I don't expect RT acceleration on Vega 7nm, but INT8 performance is 58.9 FlOPs on the M160 could be competitive with tensor. Especially with a PCI-e 4.0 option available combined with the HBM2. (At least on the data-center side of things). Gaming performance (Radeon cards) probably isn't going to be outstanding, but it should still be pretty good. I don't thing-k the lack of accelerated RT is going to hurt them as NVidia can't make it perform adequately even with the acceleration to support from game developers/engines is going to be hit and miss at best, just like PhysX. Some people will swear by it, but many won't care until it's actually good and widely supported.

Re:Good news!

[WorBlux]

No it doesn't self-destruct, but it does bitrot. You'll never get wayland running on the depreciated cards,

Re:Good news!

[Kjella]

Personally if 2080 can't deliver high frame rate ray tracing at 4k what does it matter? Modern shader hacks for dynamic lighting are quite realistic.. so is it really worth cranking resolution down so much .. just for slightly more realistic lighting? Would that really produce a better overall quality image?

Well... it's 50% shader hacks and 50% avoiding the situations where the flaws are obvious. There's a reason most games avoid shiny reflective surfaces, mirrors, translucent materials and that you don't get proper shadows from dynamic elements like leaves blowing in the wind or the right reflections from a muzzle fire or explosion. But that also means that until it's a commodity you'll continue to avoid the situations where ray tracing makes the most sense. And with the current performance drop I'd probably just leave it disabled anyway. I guess it's great if you're doing rendering for a movie or something though.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

TAA? Tits And Ass?

Yes. That's been popular on the internetz over the past few years.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That sorts it out.
I did like Nvidia's special blurry AA called 2x Quincunx, in one specific instance : playing Doom 3

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, obsolete computer stuff is marked as "deprecated" - note that there's no 'i' - when its use is no longer supported. It is financial assets which "depreciate".

Re:Good news!

[drinkypoo]

NVidia is not an option if you need a longer term linux support.

If you buy a modern and mainstream nvidia card, you can be fairly sure that it will be supported on linux from a time near its release (maybe on time, maybe not) to a time some years later. However, some features supported on other platforms will not be supported, and the open source driver will not support all of the functionality and/or performance of the proprietary driver for a long period, if ever. It used to be the obvious choice, but now it's an obviously flawed one. If the AMD platform OSS drivers are as good now as people are claiming they are, it really makes no sense for Linux users to buy anything else. And unless they're getting an amazing deal, it doesn't seem like it makes much sense for most Windows users to buy nvidia any more, either.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern shader hacks for dynamic lighting are quite realistic.. so is it really worth cranking resolution down so much .. just for slightly more realistic lighting? Would that really produce a better overall quality image?

It is mainly aimed at gamers.
In modern computer games the lighting and reflections have a function since they can be used to detect objects that aren't directly visible.
Since many of those "shader hacks" uses data from the culled frustum the generated lighting/reflections doesn't provide the desired functionality.

Problem is that first generation RT cards are still too slow to be usable.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the point.

The point is that those are very old cards, and they still work. I've had to trash considerably newer Nvidia cards which were technically perfectly fit for purpose, but I couldn't find a working combination of newer hardware/OS/driver for, thanks to Nvidia's proprietary crap.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, obsolete computer stuff is marked as "deprecated" - note that there's no 'i' - when its use is no longer supported. It is financial assets which "depreciate".

Would you just STFU already? Handful of rules a lot of people get wrong because the rules are fucking ridiculous and unnecessarily confusing like this.

So queue grammar Nazi who looks for these things and pounce whenever they see them. Do you feel doing this somehow makes you better or smarter? Do you think you're doing anyone a favor? Is anyone being helped to communicate more effectively? Don't be an annoying dipshit.

Re:Good news!

[Tough Love]

Yes, AMD is lagging behind

So why is it that bitcoin miners universally voted Vega the most profitable mining GPU? Maybe because they have actual money riding on the results, as opposed to GPU review sites, which reportedly get considerable pressure from Nvidia to pick and choose benchmarks and engage in even slimier manipulation?

AMD lagging is an Nvidia-created myth. AMD not owning the high space, that's true. But AMD not delivering the best performance/value equation, that's Nvidia's FUD.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia is not an option if you need a longer term linux support.

Longer than what? Ubuntu LTS releases are 3-5 years of support, I have a 7800GTX in my Linux box that is still supported and that is now coming up to 14 years old and still going fine with the latest Ubuntu release. How long are you needing the support to be? Beyond that there's the nouveau driver.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD lagging is an Nvidia-created myth.

It's not a myth, it's a fact that PC gamers overwhelmingly prefer nvidia. AMD has only ~5% more of that market than Intel does with its embedded GPUs!

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

For fuck's sake... It's not a rule. It's also not grammar. Deprecate and depreciate are different words. We call that vocabulary...distinct from grammar. The only "rule" is to use a word that matches your intended meaning.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think you're doing anyone a favor? Is anyone being helped to communicate more effectively?

Yes, they are helping you to not sound like a total idiot. You should be grateful.

Re:Good news!

[Tough Love]

AMD is not lagging in performance/value, I thought I made that clear. Whether steam gamers realize that or not is a different question. Obviously, 15% of them do.

Re:Good news!

[Tough Love]

Watched a bunch of RTX demos. I like it and appreciate the big step up from screen space hacks, but I suspect I'm in the minority. Scenes have to be pretty contrived before you really notice, like explosions reflected in shiny car paint in Battlefield V. Like, who polished the wrecked car to a mirror finish in the middle of a war? I appreciate the more subtle global lighting in Metro Exodus much more, but again I'm in the minority. Most gamers won't know or care that it lights up the dark corners of a room that aren't directly in the path of a light. The standard hack has always been to put an arbitrary ambient light in the scene, most viewers won't notice the difference.

I don't think the hardware is up to the task yet. Maybe needs another factor of 5 or 10 to be able to cast enough rays to eliminate the ball peen hammer effect on reflective surfaces and other glitches that show up as a result of cleverly smoothing the scene with as few as one ray per pixel. Ultimately, ray tracing is going to take over the world but we need a few more Moore's law steps before high end hardware is really ready for it. Like VR, it's cool but is it cool enough to spend a grand on it in its infancy?

Re:Good news!

[Kjella]

The standard hack has always been to put an arbitrary ambient light in the scene, most viewers won't notice the difference.

I think it's absolutely noticeable... but so are a lot of other obvious clues that you're running around in a game world, you wouldn't exactly confuse it with a live video stream. Heck they're still struggling with that in all-CGI movies though I must admit they're getting pretty good at it.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

That was probably not addressed because it's your strawman.
Does nVidia really claim to have the best value?
As far as I can see they only claim to have the best performance. And that is technically true.
They rather evade the topics of how reasonable their price points are.

Also, AMD is preferred for mining because they excel at OpenCL, making them very efficient at performance/power usage.
If you're a savvy miner you would also underclock them a bit to make them more energy efficient, because raw computational performance is not what you're looking for here.
That is also why miners used to use power efficient ASIC farms before POW providers made their algorithms ASIC resistant by upping memory requirements.

Gaming is a different beast.
For example OpenCL isn't usually used there.
Most people want raw performance for the highest FPS.
So again a mislead in your argumentation.
In gaming with an AMD you have to pay dearly with high energy consumption.

We know that Intel and nVidia are assholes who overprice their hardware.
It does not require your fallacious fanboy/hateboy logic to realize that.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually you who are building strawmen. The topic is AMD's newly announced graphics chip, not how well various gaming companies who are taking money from Nvidia on a massive scale will hypothetically allow it to do in various pointless benchmarks. Yes, pointless: 250 fps vs 180 in $RANDOM_GAME is absolutely meaningless.

Amazing also how you can concede that AMD is preferred by people using OpenCL, and still, with a straight face say Nvidia "technically have the best performance". It's pretty clear Nvidia neither have the best value nor technically the best performance. Their cards are optimized for games, which are optimized to run on Nvidia cards.

"Best" is such an unqualified statement; the reasonable conclusion is that if you want a pointless number of fps in games at any cost, Nvidia is your choice. If you want a well rounded card that can do a bit of everything more than adequately, including superior OpenCL and pretty damned good OSS support out of the box, anywhere, anytime, AMD is your choice.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

The statement was that gaming is a different story than OpenCL computation.
The statement also was that in crypto mining raw performance isn't that important.
It's performance per watt.
There AMD is the indisputable king as far as GPU mining over OpenCL goes.
But again gaming is a different story.
The pointless FPS, as you call them, were even talked about in the AMD keynote when they said that gamers were very important to them.
There they said that 1080p gamers are moving beyond 144Hz monitors to 240Hz.
And while I agree that FPS that high are not that meaningful, they fucking talked about it as it were important to them to cater to these gamers.
Again they talked about this being important during their own freaking AMD keynote.
In their 4k benchmarks the FPS weren't that high anyway.
There they also only compared it to the RTX 2080.
Here nVidia still has their overpriced but higher performing RTX 2080ti for those with deep pockets.

So congrats on the next strawman by either purposefully misinterpreting the statements or just being stupid.

Re:Good news!

[Lonewolf666]

With the open source "shim" support might even last longer than for Windows. Because you can keep the old blob and only adapt the interface kernel-side. But obviously, you will be stuck with the functionality of the last blob that Nvidia released. Including whatever bugs it still had at that point.

Besides, with about 30% more "raw" computing power and twice the memory, the Vega VII might actually beat the RTX 2080 long-term. Short term I agree that the RTX 2080 will probably bring slightly higher FPS, but AMD has a history of gaining a few percent over the years.
What has been more critical in the past was memory requirements. Several years in the future, I guess the RTX 2080 will have real problems with its RAM size, while the Vega VII is still happily chugging along.

Re:Good news!

[Tough Love]

You must be fun at parties

Re:Good news!

[Lonewolf666]

The game shown in the keynote was a new, unreleased version of Devil May Cry (DMC 5). That makes it hard to make comparisons. I could not find any other source that shows off DMC5 performance. I guess we will know more in a month, when the Vega VII is released and testers can compare it to the RTX 2080 in existing games.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you have not arranged any special deals with a manufacturer where you get bonuses for buying their stuff, brand loyalty is a stupid thing for the consumer.
Before recommending a build to a customer I first ask questions. What do they want to do with it? What do they think they might be trying to do in the future? Do they have children? How old are they? Do they have their own gaming consoles? And if they know (they usually don't), what kind of games do they like?
And while I would recommend going AMD like something like 80% of the cases, nVidia and Intel still have their place somewhere out there where people want the best gaming performance money can buy.
Intel's days at the apex may be numbered the middle of this year though. We'll have to see.

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you even still use that card? I am pretty sure a Rasberry Pi had more GPU power than that thing. If it's a server, wouldn't you want to just use onboard graphics and save the extra power at this point?

Re:Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he paid for it, and it still does the job for which it is needed. Why would you ever want to spend more money on a new thing when you already have something which will do the job for which you need it perfectly fine?

Re:Good news!

[drinkypoo]

So why is it that bitcoin miners universally voted Vega the most profitable mining GPU?

Because it was the cheapest way to get GDDR5 in your system with good power consumption. Miners don't necessarily have the same needs as gamers.

My next GPU will probably come from AMD, anyway, since by that time I probably won't run Windows on the bare metal any more.

Re:Good news!

[WorBlux]

They improved performance by being a lot more selective where and how it was actually used. If you have to hand tune the engine and game for it, then it doesn't say a lot of good things about current state of the tech. Yes a few developers always experiment, but at this point most of them thing the effort is better spent elsewhere. 3-5 years down the line is maybe a different story but only if the hardware to do it is a lot more common.

Re: Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread sure deprecated quickly.

Okay, I may be pessimistic

[Kokuyo]

But I'd say they really have to deliver on that promise of being competitive... does that include raytracing?

Now I have no reference on the performance DMC demands but "way above 60 fps" doesn't sound THAT impressive.

Also if shadow.tech keeps its promises, I'm not sure I'm gonna build a gaming rig anytime soon anyway.

Re: Okay, I may be pessimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Dmc5 isn't even out yet. So the fact that it runs it on ultra at above 60 FPS in 4K at that. Is a good thing.

Re:Okay, I may be pessimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Raytracing is not competitive with traditional render pipelines and probably won't be for a few generations yet, so who cares?

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

700 dollary dooes for the same performance as the 1080ti

Glad they're doing good work with their CPUs at least

Re: Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed. Because AMD says it does the same as a 2080.

Re:Meh

[RickyShade]

It's almost like you haven't seen what a new 1080ti or rtx2800 costs right now

Re: Meh

[sexconker]

And the 2080 is basically the same as the 1080 Ti.

And that's if you believe AMD's benchmarks. Sure, it'll win in some Vulkan games if you compare stock clocks to stock clocks, but it'll lose or barely keep up in everything else. And if you ever overclock, the Nvidia option will pull miles ahead while still using less power. This is with AMD having a node shrink advantage! Vega is trash.

Re:Meh

[G00F]

I see the 1080 ti going from almost $800 to almost $1680 (newegg) I can find some Nvidia RTX 2080 for as cheap as 699.99 to $1,699.00.

I fail to see what your issue is?

Disappointing

[alvinrod]

This is rather disappointing really. It's just a Vega refresh that offers ~30% improved performance in most workloads or frame rates, but only at 40% additional cost compared to Vega 64. I suppose it's nice if you need more than 8GB of memory, but this isn't anything to get excited about as far as I'm concerned.

At least the sneak peek at the new Ryzen CPUs looked promising.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ray tracing?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it perform on games with high quality ray tracing options enabled?

Re: Ray tracing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ray tracing is a scam:

Re: Ray tracing?

[supremebob]

Yeah, real time ray tracing isn't really a thing yet. They haven't really built video cards powerful enough to enable it without a huge performance hit.

Maybe the next gen cards will support it in 2020... but it's not gonna happen now.

Re: Ray tracing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, real time ray tracing isn't really a thing yet. They haven't really built video cards powerful enough to enable it without a huge performance hit.

Actually they have. Next version of UE (4.22) will support DXR.

Re: Ray tracing?

[SuperDre]

No it's not, it really adds some nice visuals.. It's more in line with bumpmapping etc in the old days.. Also due to reflections you can actually use it to your advantage.

Re: Ray tracing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't answer my question

Re: Ray tracing?

[supremebob]

Yeah, there are a few games out there that support it. Turning it on often cuts the game performance by half, though. It's basically the same impact as jumping from 1080p to 4K resolution at the moment.

What is the point of Freesync?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, the graphics card controls the monitor refresh rate, and the 'start' sync (this is before freesync existed), and even then if you've not rendered in time then you simply don't 'flip' the buffer until you're done (and the monitor displays the last rendered image until you're ready to show the new one). Freesync seems to be re-inventing something that was already there, just instead moving the job to the monitor (for no gain that the user could possibly perceive)

What on earth is the point of freesync vs traditional vsync? I've seen the thread on reddit and that's just as stupid because the graphics card is the device that controls when vsync happens (which controls the monitor sync, directly). Even the DVI/HDMI spec has this facility in digital iirc and it's been there since 'forever'.

So what the f*ck is the hype? Oh yay we have something we've already had, but now we have to buy compatible monitors for it again?

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[sexconker]

The graphics card is NOT the device that controls when the new frame starts. Not if you want anything to work, that is.
If you use a format or timing the display doesn't support, you'll get nothing or you'll get a blinking (and possibly scrolling), unusable mess.
If you just vblank/vsync/rsync/whatever willy nilly on an LCD, it will laugh at you.

Variable refresh rates have been in the standards for ages, sure. But they were not implemented in any way that someone could drive a continuous, uninterrupted video stream with. Not until AMD came along and pushed for it.

The advantage over VSYNC is clear.
With FreeSync / VRR, you eliminate tearing and minimize delay as long as you stay within the VRR range of the display.
With VSYNC, if you're at 60 Hz you're adding an unnecessary delay whenever you could render faster than that, and you're dropping down to 30 Hz whenever you dip just under 60 FPS. Or 15 Hz if you drop under 30 FPS.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Immerman]

Except that's not how it works. Screen updates are not instantaneous, and vsync originates with the monitor, not the video card - you can think of it as the monitor saying "okay, I'm drawing the next frame, start feeding me the data NOW", and the video card is expected to comply and start sending whatever is in the frame buffer, because the monitor is already busy displaying it.

What Gsync and Freesync essentially do is let the computer say back "Wait, not yet... okay now", so that if your rendering engine is only rendering at 57fps, while your monitor updates at 60fps, then every frame you get the monitor saying "Feed Me!", the computer says "wait...okay, now" and then starts sending sending that frame's image data. The result being that the monitor cleanly refreshes the full screen at 57 Hz, rather than creating a crawling horizontal "tear line", wherever it was at in the update cycle when you flipped the buffer - with the old frame being displayed above the tear line, and the new frame below.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Anonymous Coward]

VSync stops the tear line too. The difference is that with VSync the monitor is set to a set frequency and the graphics cards waits until the monitor has finished scanning before it flips the buffer, while with FreeSync and GSync the monitor isn't set to a set frequency and will scan when it gets the signal from the card. It allows slightly better tear free frame rates.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Immerman]

There's a bit of a terminology snafu here:

v(ertical)sync's original meaning is the once-per-frame signal between monitor and video card that lets them stay coordinated and display a stable image (in combination with h(orizontal)sync, which happens once per line)

Then there's the more modern usage where you "turn on vsync" in a game. But what that's actually turning on is "vsynced rendering", or perhaps better expressed "sync the framebuffer update to the monitor vsync signal"

And yes,"turning on vsync" does stop the tear line, because waiting for vsync to flip the framebuffer means the buffer doesn't change while the monitor is refreshing. But it does so at the expense of drastically reducing the frame rate, at least intermittently. Framerate can only be adjusted in integer multiples of frames, so if you're only able to render at 57Hz, then syncing the rendering engine to vsync will drop the frame rate to 60/2 = 30Hz, either permanently or as "stuttering", depending on exactly how the synchronization is implemented.

(Hmm, I'm a bit rusty, but I think you need triple-buffering to only see stuttering - pretty sure that double-buffering requires you to wait until vsync to free up the "old" framebuffer before you can start rendering the next frame, which means *every* new frame will take slightly too long to render, and thus *every* old frame will be displayed for an extra refresh while your computer sits idle, dropping you to 1/2 your montors refresh rate. Triple buffering lets you render one frame while a second waits for the monitor to finish displaying the third. Can anyone confidently confirm or correct me?)

That's actually one of the big draws for high frame rate monitors - smoother vsynced rendering. If your monitor refreshes at 120Hz instead of 60Hz, then a 57Hz rendering engine will cause the framerate to stutter between 120/2=60Hz and 120/3=40Hz. Or alternately, your game might be able to lock to a slower refresh rate - e.g. a nice stable 40 Hz in this case (which is kind of slow, and probably probably why rates like 144Hz are more popular - you can run that at 72 or 48Hz, either of which is pretty solidly above the motion perceptual threshold)

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would it drop to 30? Double buffering is a thing. If the next frame is not ready, previous frame is shown. If you have 60 Hz monitor and 57 Hz fps from card, you just show 57 unique frames and 3 doubles. It is very unlikely to create noticeable visual problems.

This division by 2 is a weird idea.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hmm, I'm a bit rusty, but I think you need triple-buffering to only see stuttering - pretty sure that double-buffering requires you to wait until vsync to free up the "old" framebuffer before you can start rendering the next frame,

Why? One buffer contains complete picture used for rendering, back buffer contains work in progress, no waiting. When finished, they switch instantly. The way you describe it sounds like "no buffering" and I doubt anyone at all does it like that.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC here, my bad, your description looks correct. Still, triple-buffering is not exactly expensive memory-wise or otherwise, there seem to be no reason to drop fps from 60 to 30 if you can render 57 frames per second.

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Immerman]

Okay, so I'm specifically talking about rendering *without* tearing - which means that you can never alter the front framebuffer while it's active, only during the brief pause between when the monitor finishes displaying one frame and begins displaying the next. That includes no swapping buffers. Do so, and the screen will tear, displaying the top part of the old frame buffer, and the bottom part of the new one.

No buffering means that the only way to avoid tearing is to render the entire frame during that brief pause between refreshes, while the frame buffer is not in use. That was the standard procedure all through the pre-VGA days, and very often with VGA and early SVGA (VGA and early SVGA cards didn't have enough memory for a second buffer at higher resolutions). Obviously though that means that you can only use the small fraction of each 1/60th of a second for rendering - not ideal if rendering is a big part of the per-frame workload. There was actually a lot of effort spent on techniques to render the screen from the top down to buy more time - after all you didn't actually have to finish rendering a line until just before it was fed to the monitor. That was quite successful for most 2D games, but mostly didn't work for 3D games which required the screen to be rendered in a somewhat arbitrary order for efficiency reasons.

Double buffering was a way to address that, and means that you can render a second frame into the back buffer while the front buffer is being fed to the monitor, and can thus use the entire 1/60th of a second for rendering without any render-sequencing tricks. You can't instantly switch buffers when you're done with the next frame though, or you'll cause tearing. You have to wait until the next vsync so that the front buffer is no longer in use.

That works great so long as you can render each frame before the next vsync happens. It breaks down if you can't though. If you start rendering a frame the instant the vsynced buffer flip frees up the old front buffer, and it takes you just slightly longer than 1/60th of a second to render, then the next monitor refresh will have already begun before you're finished. That means that you can't flip buffers immediately or you'll cause tearing, so you have to wait until the NEXT vsync, halving your frame rate for that frame. And then you're stalled out - you can't start rendering a third frame during that time, because you only have two buffers - one currently being displayed, and one waiting to be. You just have to wait until the next vsync to free up a framebuffer - which means you'll start the next frame in the same situation, and continue rendering each frame just slightly too late, so that the previous frame always has to be displayed for two monitor refreshes, and your animation frame rate drops to half the monitor refresh rate. In that case it's probably better to just deal with the tearing (unless your monitor refresh rate is high enough that the animation rate can step down more gradually)

Triple buffering solves the problem by giving you a third buffer to work with, so that when you finish rendering a frame just slightly too late, you can at least immediately start rendering a third frame so that you've got a head start on the next cycle. You still drop one frame of animation, but you'll be almost done rendering frame 3 by the time frame 2 gets displayed.

Timing diagram starting at having just swapped frame zero to the front buffer and started rendering frame 1. Rendering a frame takes 6 ticks, monitor refreshes every 5 ticks

Double buffering halves frame rate since only two buffers can be in use at a time
Render-- 11111 1xxxx 22222 2xxxx 33333 3xxxx...
Display- 00000 00000 11111 11111 22222 22222 ...

Triple Buffering has stutter
Render-- 11111 12222 22333 33344 44445 55555 66666 67777 77888...
Display- 00000 00000 11111 22222 33333 44444 55555 55555 66666...

I'm fairly certain that's correct

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Immerman]

Well, time wasted on my reply then I guess.

And yes, triple buffering is no longer super memory intensive, though it used to be. 24MB for three 32-bit 1080p frames, 96MB for 3x4k... I've gone through a LOT of video cards that had far less RAM than that.

Triple buffering does though add a variable amount of lag though - which can futz with your reflexes. Just look at the time between starting to render a frame (last input actions processed), and the frame being displayed (visual feedback received)

Double buffering: 10,10,10...
Triple buffering: 10,9,8,7,6,5,10,9,8...

It also carries that extra full frame of lag when you *can* render frames fast enough, since you're rendering two frames ahead of the monitor instead of only one (at least it used to - though it seems to me that it would be easy enough to only use the third buffer when actually needed)

25 percent gains?

[Order_66]

Realistically it will be 5 to 7 percent if history is any indicator.

Re:25 percent gains?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they'd have to try pretty hard to only get 7% gains going from 14nm to 7nm.

Re:25 percent gains?

[Kartu]

Even 580 was more than 7% faster than 480 and here you have major clock bump.

What's the ETH hashrate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, tell me what's really important.

Why buy one?

[pablo_max]

I mean, if it is supposedly "competitive" with the Nvidia RTX 2080, which means.. almost as fast and the same price as the Nvidia RTX 2080, why would you not buy the Nvidia RTX 2080?

Re:Why buy one?

[greatpatton]

Because maybe you want open source drivers? or you want to be able to install it freely in a DC without stupid NVIDIA restriction, etc. Nvidia is producing good stuff, but as a company they really are behaving like MS in the bad years.

Re:Why buy one?

[TheRealQuestor]

I mean, if it is supposedly "competitive" with the Nvidia RTX 2080, which means.. almost as fast and the same price as the Nvidia RTX 2080, why would you not buy the Nvidia RTX 2080?

Easy because Nvidia. I'll take a shit onboard Intel over the best Nvidia card. There are only 3 companies that i will NEVER give one penny of my money to. Sony, Apple, and Nvidia. All 3 could and should die and the world would be a better place for it.

Re:Why buy one?

[pablo_max]

Why? What is so bad about them relative to say, Intel?

It would be hard to argue their cards are crap, considering it's not possible to buy something faster.

Re:Why buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested to know more. I have a GTX1060 and it was the best option for me at performance per watt (and noise). I have a Sony TV I really like. I used to have an apple laptop I didn't hate. Please elaborate why I should avoid them. Apple is a walled garden and I no longer am interested in being in their ecosystem. Microsoft is the company I try to avoid at all costs. Google is the company I fear the most.

Re:Why buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sent from my iPhone

Re:Why buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a starter. Note that what gets mentioned is just a selection, and by no means an exhaustive review of all their shenanigans.

Also note that a) "faster" isn't necessarily equal to "better", and b) Nvidia is paying a lot of money to make sure that their cards are the "fastest". Speed isn't all about hardware and drivers, software is a significant part of it too, one faaaar too often neglected by armchair "experts".

Re:Why buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

probably for you but not for others. Playstation for Sony, iPhone, iPad and MacBook* for Apple and graphics cards for Nvidia.. they are and must be here to live.

Re:Why buy one?

[AHuxley]

More memory can be of use.
For games get the RTX 2080.

Re:Why buy one?

[Kuruk]

For professional work this will kick nvidia in the pants. 16G HBM2. Just look at the openCL graph.

Re:Why buy one?

[Tough Love]

Isn't it strange when you explain that to somebody in words of one syllable and they still don't get it.

Re:Why buy one?

[Tough Love]

For games, get the RX 580 if you want best value, or Vega VII if you want prosumer and regard NVidia as too disgusting to give your money to.

Re:Why buy one?

[Tough Love]

Also get the Vega VII if you want your rig to run cool and quiet.

Re:Why buy one?

[Tough Love]

1 TB of memory bandwidth is legendary

$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

16GB @ 1TB/sec is sexy, no doubt, but for $700, and 7nm, it should be fighting the 2080ti and winning.

Plus no DLSS equivalent or ray tracing (even considering how much the latter gimps performance)... and AMD still doesnt release drivers as frequently as nvidia.

Why buy this?

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[sexconker]

AMD still doesnt release drivers as frequently as nvidia

That should be a positive. Frequent driver updates are indicative of shitty quality and a broken system where hardware manufacturers bend over backwards to add in game-specific hacks to deal with shitty code put out by developers / engines. Yes, occasionally the games are running into flaws in the driver (or hardware) and the updated drivers fix / work around that. For those instances, see the prior point regarding shitty quality.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

People used to pay top dollar to get these driver fixes in professional applications like CAD and 3D editing : FirePro and Quadro graphics cards. Some still do, although consumer graphics drivers have become so much better that most 3D software is run on consumer gaming cards and CAD is too, even on Intel graphics. "Pro" graphics card then differentiate on not crippling certain features (double precision i.e. FP64, virtualization) or higher memory capacity, or running the card slower so that it's not noisy and requires less power and cooling.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD still doesnt release drivers as frequently as nvidia

That should be a positive. Frequent driver updates are indicative of shitty quality and a broken system where hardware manufacturers bend over backwards to add in game-specific hacks to deal with shitty code put out by developers / engines. Yes, occasionally the games are running into flaws in the driver (or hardware) and the updated drivers fix / work around that. For those instances, see the prior point regarding shitty quality.

On the other hand when there is a problem Nvidia quickly fixes it while AMD (and ATI back in the day) just lets it fester.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Luckyo]

"No marketing gimmicks, and drivers that are released when updates are relevant".

Where's the downside?

(Before you pretend that releasing drivers often lets them fix problems, tell us, how many driver releases did they kick the the firefox browser corruption bug down the road again?)

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Luckyo]

That's straight up marketing BS. Reality is, unfixed bugs stay across multiple driver releases with remarkable consistency. In some cases, they persist for many months, even when they're so well documented that nvidia has to literally copy/paste it in documentation errata in each release for months, like the firefox cursor corruption issue.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[drinkypoo]

That's straight up marketing BS. Reality is, unfixed bugs stay across multiple driver releases with remarkable consistency.

I think you're both right, or at least, in my experience both things are true. nvidia does have more releases that fix my problems, and also in the past I have needed DnA (patched) drivers to get my ATI/AMD GPUs to work correctly.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Luckyo]

I completely agree that in the past, some games required patches from AMD to run properly. Same is true in reverse, where they needed patches from nvidia to run properly. This is mainly linked to each manufacturers "best played on our cards" campaigns, which tend to block the other GPU manufacturer access from the title to make relevant driver adjustments ahead of time.

As AMD's program is notably smaller than nvidia's, it tends to run into this problem more than nvidia.

Re: $700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you seriously instigating that nvidia drivers are better than AMD?

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Lonewolf666]

The 2080 costs around $800. If you compare based on price/performance, the Vega VII is more attractive if it can match the performance of the 2080. The 16 GB might also be more future-proof with constantly increasing memory requirements in gaming.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[drinkypoo]

"I completely agree that in the past, some games required patches from AMD to run properly."

Lets be clear here, DnA drivers were third party patched. The fact is that amd was so bad at writing working drivers that they literally could not do it, and it was necessary to get drivers which had been modified by someone else to get the GPU working correctly. Meanwhile Nvidia was putting out fairly regular releases with their own fixes.

Everyone says that amd is much better now, but most of their customers claimed that their drivers worked when they clearly didn't, so now I remain hesitant. Nobody I trust has yet told me that the problems are truly over.

Re:$700 for a 2080 competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur. Finally switched out my aging AMD card for Nvidia but now I get constant nagging to update right after update I did not too long ago. I check the release note nothing major was fixed only new profile for a new game that was released.

I don't mind if download and install driver that improve performance overall games, but I do have problem wasting my time to download driver that has to personally customized each game that I don't even own.

apple mac pro price $999

[Joe_Dragon]

apple mac pro price $999

Re:apple mac pro price $999

[Anonymous Coward]

more. given the rx 580 was as low as 200$ and sells for 600 :-p. I wonder if apple would even give you the option lol.

New stuff's always expensive at launch

[rsilvergun]

Vega was a bit cheaper because of stiff competition from Nvidia, but Nvidia isn't all that competitive right now except in power utilization.

That's what's got me interested. There's reviews of the 590 where folks found it was throttling on a 500 watt power supply and they had to put a 600 watt in to fix it. As an adult I pay for all that power and it does add up. So for me the question is are the competitive with Nvidia on power consumption now?

Oh, and DMC at 4k/60fps? It's a beat'em'up/spectacle brawler ala God of War I/II. How badly have PC game port optimizations gotten that running that kind of game at max settings is a big deal? I'd be more impressed to see Fallout 4 or even The Division 2 pushing those kinds of frame rates.

Re:New stuff's always expensive at launch

[Immerman]

I'm all for efficiency, but if money is your concern, lets look at the numbers... 100W difference * 365 days/year * what, an average of 5 hours per day of use? = ~183kWh/year difference. Times the U.S. average of $0.12/kWh = $22/year.

Yes, it does add up - but it's going to have to add up for a long time before it's more than a minor factor in the total cost of ownership. And if you're buying a cutting-edge video card today, you're probably going to buy a replacement long before the difference in power costs add up to a substantial total difference.

Re:New stuff's always expensive at launch

[Anonymous Coward]

RX590 is bad on power indeed but the way it works, you have to buy a graphics card and then undervolt it, underclock it slightly. The last 100MHz or 200MHz put a huge toll on power use. Voltage is slightly higher than necessary too so that all cards can qualify. All so that the product may win in bar graph length against a competitor.

Re:New stuff's always expensive at launch

[Anonymous Coward]

My bar graph length is bigger than yours, and mine actually works!

Re:New stuff's always expensive at launch

[Lonewolf666]

Slightly OT:
If power efficiency is important to you, then a Vega 56 might be a better choice than the RX590. Slightly lower TBP and slightly better performance at the same time. It is more expensive though.

How about mid range vega!?

[Anonymous Coward]

God damn why is there no mid-range vega?? I don't want to spend a mortgage payment on a graphics card thank you. Please give us NEW mid-range cards instead of the continuous stream of slight improvements of a rebadge of a rebadge of a rebadge.

Some of us would like to boycott nvidia for their god damn monopolistic, greedy-ass ways and you're not making it easy guys!

Re:How about mid range vega!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The HBM2 memory is just too expensive / in high demand for high end applications. 7nm process is too expensive as well for low margin products.
They released an RX590 instead, which is rather the same thing as RX480 but on 12nm, although the RX590 is clocked a bit too high so that it wins against the GTX 1060. (you can make it slower to realize the slightly better performance per watt of 14nm vs 12nm)

"Navi" should be the new one, presumably on 7nm and GDDR6. Why not now? 7nm is expensive, expensive and expensive and also late and expensive. This is a new normal for the industry. Car analogy, want a Tesla Model 3? It takes years to get available.

Re:How about mid range vega!?

[Tyger-ZA]

"Navi" should be the new one, presumably on 7nm and GDDR6. Why not now?

Because the Navi team is working on PS5. When that's done, they'll work on the PC Navi hardware.

Also related: Everyone talking about Ray tracing are playing right into NVidia's hands; they would want any talking points regarding AMD to include "but where's the ray tracing?" even though it's a vendor specific thing that not everyone will use, even if they have the hardware, because using it drops your frame rate.

Meanwhile, the game developers are going to primarily target AMD based GPUs for most of their work, because Playstation and XBox contain AMD chips.

Adding RTX support to their games as well will incur more development and maintenance cost, to support a subset of the PC gaming market that's going RTX off anyway due to frame rates. Why bother doing that extra work for nothing?

Re:How about mid range vega!?

[mentil]

The raytracing Nvidia is touting is DXR, or DirectX Raytracing. It's a standard AMD can support, rather than a proprietary Nvidia-only thing. Honestly I don't care about the raytracing that much (in this gen of video cards) because it's too slow and poorly-supported. However, if I were dropping $700 on a new top-end video card, I'd question paying the same money for fewer features. If the Radeon 7 were a couple hundred cheaper, I might decide to skip DXR for a few years.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the second AMD cards DO support DXR, Nvidia will stop giving money to devs to implement DXR support... meaning that DXR support will likely be worse afterward.

Re:How about mid range vega!?

[GNious]

Argument: AMD wouldn't want to support DXR right now because they have no properly DXR compliant HW, and their next targets are PS5 and Apple (Navi) where they will focusing on Vulcan and Metal

Will they have coupons?

[EzInKy]

I'm all for dedicated graphic chips as long as they cost less than $100.

Re:Will they have coupons?

[Luckyo]

That's probably about what mid range costs. Just the dedicated chip of course. The board is extra.

Re:Will they have coupons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly speaking, I wonder what a $100 dedicated card would give you over a decently built 2400G system. I think the cheap/low midrange dedicated chips might finally have gone the way of the dodo. I mean, I suppose you could get a few frames more, but would it really be worth it? Doubtful.

One reason to buy a high end card

[rsilvergun]

is so you don't have to upgrade. There's videos on youtube of folks benchmarking 7 year old flagships and still hitting 60fps. So spend $700 now and pay $100/yr for a card or $300 every 2-3 years and hit somewhere around $800-$900. Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better, so you'll probably get $200 for it in 7 years when you sell it.

Also if you replace it with something just as power hungry that kinda defeats the point...

Thing is, if I keep a card 4 years (which I usually do) and save $15/yr on power (little less since I buy lower mid-range, $180-$230) that's $60 bucks gone. If I take that $60 and put it into a GPU it gets me into the upper mid range ($290-$300). That means anything AMD puts out has to outperform Nvidia by a big margin or it has to offer some other advantage (better image quality, better features, etc).

I think AMD was starting to kill it with cheap Freesync monitors, but as usual Nvidia noticed and responded, making their cards work with Freesync.

Re:One reason to buy a high end card

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better

Only recently has this even been partly true. The cryptocurrency bubble created insane demand which artificially inflated video card prices. Case in point: I bought an RX580 almost two years ago for about $250. Less than a year ago that same card was going for almost $350 on Amazon. Only recently has it finally fallen back to what I originally paid for it.

What *used* to happen was cards were rapidly made obsolete by advances in video card tech. A $1000 card would be worth half that in a year and be worth less than an entry-level card two years later. Advances in DirectX tech also made cards obsolete that might otherwise have been mildly competitive since the older cards didn't support the latest DX version.

Video card tech has, IMO, stagnated over the last couple of years. Instead of getting 50% performance increases with each new generation, advances are now more like 10%-25% and shrinking. DX versioning also slowed. I think we're reaching a point of diminishing returns. nVidia hopes to bypass this with the "killer new feature" angle in the form of RTX. However, RTX suffers from the classic "chicken and egg" problem: there aren't many games that will take advantage of it, so there's little incentive to buy the card; meanwhile game developers won't implement the features until there's a large base of cards that will take advantage of it.

If RTX (or some AMD equivalent) can be shifted down in price to the midrange market *then* people might adopt it en masse because it's a no-brainer. But wide adoption of real-time raytracing tech ain't gonna happen so long as it's exclusive to cards hovering around -- or in some cases above -- the $1000 price point.

Ray tracing isn't really ready for prime time

[rsilvergun]

it's currently killing frame rates. Like in half. Cards that can do ray tracing at 60 fps are $1000+. The $700 Nvidia cards that can do ray tracing are hitting 35-50 depending on workload. If I drop a grand on a video card I want 60 fps...

Re:Ray tracing isn't really ready for prime time

[Anonymous Coward]

Right but you have to start somewhere, sure it might not be performant on a wide range of hardware today but that is the case with any new technology. Support is coming in the next release of Unreal Engine and the results on the highend cards are pretty impressive. If there was no hardware that supported it then no software vendors would implement it, it will gradually become pervasive over time.

Should AMD get in early or late? Well that's really up to them.

Re:Ray tracing isn't really ready for prime time

[Anonymous Coward]

What was impressive about it? It is a shiny car with some lights flying around. If it was a part of game, reflections would be the least interesting part of it.

Why would it be pervasive? I am walking around town, there are weak reflections in some large glass surfaces sometimes. It doesn't quite blow my mind. At home pretty much mirrors are the only surfaces with reflection worth noticing. And these reflections are geometrically simple, no ray tracing necessary.

I think it is about as important as fur or hair emulation. Which most people can't care less about.

What I'd like to see is tech

[rsilvergun]

that made the programming easier. Right now AAA games cost a fortune and they're kind of simplistic. Compare any modern game to Deus Ex. The stupid complexity of modern graphics are a big part of that. Having to hand code shaders for every little look and effect gets really pricey really fast....

Re:What I'd like to see is tech

[TechyImmigrant]

Far Cry 5 dropped from $60 to $25 on steam. You just have to wait.

Re:What I'd like to see is tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Far Cry 5 dropped from $60 to $25 on steam.

Lol. Get woke, go broke.

Re:What I'd like to see is tech

[Tyger-ZA]

that made the programming easier. Right now AAA games cost a fortune and they're kind of simplistic. Compare any modern game to Deus Ex. The stupid complexity of modern graphics are a big part of that. Having to hand code shaders for every little look and effect gets really pricey really fast....

These days, it's more likely that they're not spending as much time on game design / gameplay to rival Deus Ex, because they've spent that time on microtransaction systems instead. For example, why should Bungle go through all of that effort to make a good game when they can just put in bullet sponge enemies into Destiny 2 that force you to go grinding for better loot to kill them. Max out your character with the loot and they just need to raise the enemy health count so you can repeat the grind for new loot to kill stronger enemies.

Repeat forever, or until the community gets bored.

One could argue that a good game like God of War has the same bullet sponge enemy design (without the bullets) but there, even with the best equipment you're still going to die if you don't know what you're doing.

TL;DR: games are less interesting because the big devs are all making some form of open world grind with microtransactions

Re:What I'd like to see is tech

[Lonewolf666]

Max out your character with the loot and they just need to raise the enemy health count so you can repeat the grind for new loot to kill stronger enemies.

Repeat forever, or until the community gets bored.

Slightly OT, but you can kill a game that way. Skyforge for instance. It is nicely made and even gets new content from time to time, but every two months there is a new invasion where the level cap is increased by 10, while the mobs gain proportionally in health. Then it is grinding time again just to keep your effective power level.

By now Skyforge is down in the Steam charts to around 170 average players and 300 peak players. I wonder if MyCom still make any profit from this. I stopped playing myself last August, because I was fed up with the same content going up in level again and again.

Re:What I'd like to see is tech

[TechyImmigrant]

Far Cry 5 dropped from $60 to $25 on steam.

Lol. Get woke, go broke.

Less broke, by $35.

Sticker shock

[argStyopa]

....I guess I'm still waiting for the "glut" of Nvidia top end cards to hit the market, somehow I can't comprehend how Nvidia sitting on thousands and thousands of cards in inventory and that hasn't impacted their prices.

Re:Sticker shock

[Luthair]

If they flood the market with old stock at a discount, that doesn't perform much worse than the new cards, who is going to buy the new expensive ones.

Re:Sticker shock

[Tough Love]

Right. NVidia might end up stuck with a bunch of 1080 overstock that is only good for scrap

Re:Sticker shock

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than flooding the market with last generation 'good enough'. Short term loss = long term gain in their playbook.

Why do you think you don't see 2-3 generation old laptops still flooding the market? Those chips are ground up and recycled...

Re:Sticker shock

[drinkypoo]

They should let at least a portion of those cards out just to keep stringing people along. Odds are they can't produce the new cards rapidly enough to meet demand even at their ridiculous prices.

Wrong community pal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we don't take kindly to nVidia and Intel and Microsoft.

You better go back the way you came. If you know what's good for your karma.

The only metric that counts

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many MH/S can i get???

Video card

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when I could buy a brand new video card at Frys for 59.00 and get windows cheap with the hardware purchase.
And they wonder why my newest machine is a 2010 mac pro I bought used for 100.00 said main board bad was power supply.
My lappy is a 2nd gen i3.

I use phone more now because a 1000.00 dollar phone is cheaper.

16Gb, 3 games, not nVidia

[Kartu]

Because:
16G vs 8G
3 games
not nVidia

er, not gddr5

[drinkypoo]

But anyway, not about gaming performance, but about bandwidth.

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