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    • 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.

  • We've come a long, long way, baby.

    • 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.

    • I’m confused, was there a time when i3 cores were better than i5?

      • 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 get it, however when I'm paying $1000+ for a GPU, I want the best for my money now. Not take part in some bigger than me ploy to even out companies.

    Government regulations > a few people buying a worse GPU

  • My problem when buying my last GPU is that AMD's answer to CUDA, ROCm, was just miles behind and not really supported on their consumer GPUs. From what I se now that has changed for the better, but it's still hard to trust when CUDA is so dominant and mature. I don't want to reward NVIDIA, but I want to use my GPU for some deep learning projects too and don't really have a choice at the moment.

    • I've become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don't rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia's market share. It makes sense.

      The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it's just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don't seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they're doing. Thus, the constant idea that people "buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing".

      But if AMD cards can't really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn't certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven't thought of yet. I guess they're right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that's all they ever do.

      If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren't that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they're worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven't bought, yet. I've heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I've never heard the reverse. I've never heard somebody say they'd like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.

      The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that's the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.

      I've also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.

      No, dummy, AMD can't run a lot of important shit that you don't care about. There's more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

      • Well the counterpoint is that NVIDIA's Linux drivers are famously garbage, which also pisses off professionals. From what I see from AMD now with ROCm, it seems like they've gone the right way. Maybe they can convince me next time I'm on the lookout for a GPU.

        But overall you're right yeah. My feeling is that AMD is competitive with NVIDIA regarding price/performance, but NVIDIA has broader feature support. This is both in games and in professional use cases. I do feel like AMD is steadily improving in the past years though. In the gaming world FSR seems almost as ubiquitous (or maybe even more ) as DLSS, and ROCm support seems to have grown rapidly as well. Hopefully they keep going, so I'll have a choice for my next GPU.

    • It's a shame there's not really an equivalent comparison to the CUDA cores on AMD cards, being able to offload rendering to the GPU and getting instant feedback is so important when sculpting (without having to fall back to using eevee)

  • The current gen consoles having pretty weak raytracing will play for AMD quite a bit here. It means that games can't demand anything higher than a PS5 can do, and since AMD provide that then their stuff will still do for modern PC games.

    The frame generation is a red herring in my book. A quick look at a few videos shows similar artifacts to what my 4K TV made if you leave the awful motion smoothing settings on. 40-50fps with VRR is a much better "make the poorly optimised game playable" goal.

189 comments