LastDudeALiveWell, to be fair, that's because Nvidia puts new hardware in their new cards.

Absolutely, that wasn't me taking a shot at Nvidia, just explaining the differences in perception. I think it's fair to say that the Nvidia consumer experience is a lot more consistent than AMD. They have operated mostly the same for years.

tpa-prI suspect it's a matter of AMD's GPU-agnostic technology coming back to bite them. "FSR can run on any GPU...except our own older ones, sorry". AMD creates the perception of their feature stack being able to run on any hardware, so why not their older hardware? And then the waters are further muddied when AMD says "FSR4 can't/won't run on the older hardware" only for the community to get it working under something like Linux.

With Nvidia if they say "our new tech won't run on older cards", people expect that and accept that. It's been Nvidia's modus operandi for the longest time, you know the deal as an Nvidia consumer, you must upgrade to get the shiny new features. With AMD it's a bit more messy.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's not the matter here. We're talking about driver updates, not new features for old GPUs.

LastDudeALiveWell, to be fair, that's because Nvidia puts new hardware in their new cards.

And AMD doesn't? Also, what new hardware?

tpa-prAbsolutely, that wasn't me taking a shot at Nvidia, just explaining the differences in perception. I think it's fair to say that the Nvidia consumer experience is a lot more consistent than AMD. They have operated mostly the same for years.

I've been (back) on AMD since RDNA 2, and my experience has been pretty consistent, too.

AusWolfI'm not saying you're wrong, but that's not the matter here. We're talking about driver updates, not new features for old GPUs.

For the driver updates specifically I think it's because (and someone will need to correct me here, I don't buy Nvidia) Nvidia has the perception of supporting their older hardware for longer with driver updates.

AusWolfI've been (back) on AMD since RDNA 2, and my experience has been pretty consistent, too.

Same! But AMD has a lot of past baggage to shake ("AMD drivers are bad" meme), they have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot (promising stock that doesn't exist, their naming convention changing, their open feature stack arbitrarily not running on older hardware etc etc) and sometimes they have to contend with being the smaller fish (games optimized for Nvidia hardware). All of this can make the AMD consumer experience (not the technology specifically, the whole encompassing experience) less consistent.

Some of it is their fault, some of it isn't.

tpa-prFor the driver updates specifically I think it's because (and someone will need to correct me here, I don't buy Nvidia) Nvidia has the perception of supporting their older hardware for longer with driver updates.

Nvidia also has the perception that you need a new driver and at least 3 hotfixes every time a new game comes out. AMD doesn't share that attitude. AMD releases updates less regularly, but with a lot more things fixed. That's why you only see Nvidia people crying about this "driver issue".

tpa-prSame! But AMD has a lot of past baggage to shake ("AMD drivers are bad" meme), they have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot (promising stock that doesn't exist, their naming convention changing, their open feature stack arbitrarily not running on older hardware etc etc) and sometimes they have to contend with being the smaller fish (games optimized for Nvidia hardware). All of this can make the AMD consumer experience (not the technology specifically, the whole encompassing experience) less consistent.

Some of it is their fault, some of it isn't.

Most of it is consumer ignorance, imo. I haven't had major driver-related issues with AMD since my 5700 XT, which was what... 7 years ago? But with my Nvidia cards, yes, still have problems now on new drivers that I didn't with old ones. Funny that no one talks about that. Also, "games optimised for Nvidia"? Oh please, that's just lame! :laugh:

R-T-BRDNA2 products weree still being launched May of 2022. Why are you having a hard time with this? A new product generally means new potential for support optimizations.

In fact, RDNA2 was in products literally launched this very year, 2025. I don't care what the release date of the architecture itself was, they launched products now less than 12 months ago that are getting this kicked to the curb treatment. I do look forward to testing the double standards claims of people here, if and when Nvidia do something they don't like, despite not currently running that GPU in their rig (not that it matters of course, they're not mutually exclusive or strictly speaking necessary or even relevant to holding an opinion on a companies actions at all)

I still plan to purchase a rog strix ally in the 16th of this month. Will get it for roughly 480 cad. I'll be just installing cachyOS Linux handheld edition

wolfIn fact, RDNA2 was in products literally launched this very year, 2025. I don't care what the release date of the architecture itself was, they launched products now less than 12 months ago that are getting this kicked to the curb treatment. I do look forward to testing the double standards claims of people here, if and when Nvidia do something they don't like, despite not currently running that GPU in their rig (not that it matters of course, they're not mutually exclusive or strictly speaking necessary or even relevant to holding an opinion on a companies actions at all)

I still run a Pascal card on Windows in one of my systems, and I'm not worried about the coming end of driver support at all. As long as it works, I'm fine.

And we're not even talking about the end of (RDNA 1/2) driver support here.

sepheronxrog strix ally

That's a good point, actually. It's highly doubtful that AMD will let all the RDNA 2 handhelds rot without important updates, especially with no replacement on the horizon.

AusWolfI just don't know what else people are expecting here. What else is a driver supposed to contain than "the bare minimum to make games run"? AMD already said RDNA 1/2/3 won't get FSR 4, so what else is there?

AusWolfWhich part of "first day game support remains" isn't clear?

Which part of 'we announce a change, but the fans say nothing changes' is not completely pulled out your ass?

My god. If it was all the same, why isn't RDNA4 in 'maintenance mode' already? Seems like a great mode to be in if I have to follow the discourse around it from the fanbase here. You're saying there is no real change to be felt, so then, why on earth would AMD even push this release strategy? Much easier just releasing once right? Oh yeah... they need 'focus'... on three branches.

If you work in IT you know all of this is just a lame excuse to delay or indefinitely postpone feature releases because none of your code is truly unified and you really do need those separate releases because there is huge technical debt. OR there is a commercial/money reason on the profit side to adhere to. It is most certainly NOT good customer care, or an improvement in any way or form - its always the opposite. In AMD's case, its crystal clear its a wild mix of lack of priority, lack of strategic insight and complete lack of competence in continuous releases. AMD keeps digging technical debt-holes in their GPU line up and they keep having to tell us a shit story as a result of it. Delays, feature deficits, etc.

That's the real story here and it would do people well to get real. Before this clusterfuck we had AMD saying they could take their sweet time on RT, then taking their sweet time on deploying and improving FSR... and now actually just not delivering said improvements to all their GPUs as they promised. The reality is, AMD is breaking expectations and brand image with this, the damage is done, once again, and it will serve as yet another argument to buy Nvidia going forward. A good argument, at that, because the proof is now in the pudding.

Its going to be a very hard call buying an RDNA GPU again.

AusWolfI've been (back) on AMD since RDNA 2, and my experience has been pretty consistent, too.

Yeah, they're consistently behind the music and the GPU you bought, just works but never really improves. They just sprinted to get RDNA to a good state for their console business. This is also the reason they pushed on FSR4. Without it, they might have lost a console deal with MS and Sony. And then, when they sprinted to a 'good enough', the sprinting stops and they go back to laid-back mode until they are once again surprised by a competitor and we see a string of PR-panic failures such as the article right here.

And...consistent since RDNA2. That's four years, two generations, and already in RDNA4 they have lost consistency because there is just half a GPU stack, and even that is optimistically stated. That is not the definition of consistency mate. It is instead called 'rose colored glasses'.

Vayra86Which part of 'we announce a change, but the fans say nothing changes' is not completely pulled out your ass?

My god. If it was all the same, why isn't RDNA4 in 'maintenance mode' already? Seems like a great mode to be in if I have to follow the discourse around it from the fanbase here. You're saying there is no real change to be felt, so then, why on earth would AMD even push this release strategy? Much easier just releasing once right? Oh yeah... they need 'focus'... on three branches.

Perhaps there's much fewer bug reports on RDNA 1/2 because most of them have been fixed already. Perhaps there isn't much optimisation left to do on them. I don't know the technicalities. All I know is that drivers have been fine, my cards have been running great, and I don't know what else I should want, or why I should feel that I'm missing out. Missing out on what exactly? Having every single new driver for my old cards instead of every 2nd or 3rd one? What a shame, really...

Vayra86If you work in IT you know all of this is just a lame excuse to delay or indefinitely postpone feature releases because none of your code is truly unified and you really do need those separate releases because there is huge technical debt. OR there is a commercial/money reason on the profit side to adhere to. It is most certainly NOT good customer care, or an improvement in any way or form - its always the opposite. In AMD's case, its crystal clear its a wild mix of lack of priority, lack of strategic insight and complete lack of competence in continuous releases. AMD keeps digging technical debt-holes in their GPU line up and they keep having to tell us a shit story as a result of it. Delays, feature deficits, etc.

I don't work in IT. I'm a home user with a whole bunch of GPUs from various vendors and architectures that all work great. And since they do, I don't know why I should see it from any other way.

Vayra86That's the real story here and it would do people well to get real. Before this clusterfuck we had AMD saying they could take their sweet time on RT, then taking their sweet time on deploying and improving FSR... and now actually just not delivering said improvements to all their GPUs as they promised. The reality is, AMD is breaking expectations and brand image with this, the damage is done, once again, and it will serve as yet another argument to buy Nvidia going forward. A good argument, at that, because the proof is now in the pudding.

AMD is breaking brand image with lousy PR in general, not with the drivers.

Vayra86Its going to be a very hard call buying an RDNA GPU again.

As long as it's much cheaper than the Nvidia alternative, I kindly disagree.

Vayra86Yeah, they're consistently behind the music and the GPU you bought, just works but never really improves.

What needs to improve? Do Nvidia cards gain 5% performance with every new driver release?

Vayra86They just sprinted to get RDNA to a good state for their console business. This is also the reason they pushed on FSR4. Without it, they might have lost a console deal with MS and Sony. And then, when they sprinted to a 'good enough', the sprinting stops and they go back to laid-back mode until they are once again surprised by a competitor and we see a string of PR-panic failures such as the article right here.

Do you blame them? Console is their bread and butter.

Vayra86And...consistent since RDNA2. That's four years, two generations, and already in RDNA4 they have lost consistency because there is just half a GPU stack, and even that is optimistically stated. That is not the definition of consistency mate. It is instead called 'rose colored glasses'.

I buy products, not product stacks. The only part of the industry that I'm a fan of is my wallet. As long as I can pay less for the same or more, I'm cool. And don't turn this back on the driver branches. I've had just enough of trouble with Nvidia drivers, too. More than with AMD in recent years, I might add. And that's not even a driver branch thing. So from that regard, AMD has been more consistent with their drivers recently.

AusWolfPerhaps there's much fewer bug reports on RDNA 1/2 because most of them have been fixed already. Perhaps there isn't much optimisation left to do on them. I don't know the technicalities. All I know is that drivers have been fine, my cards have been running great, and I don't know what else I should want, or why I should feel that I'm missing out. Missing out on what exactly? Having every single new driver for my old cards instead of every 2nd or 3rd one? What a shame, really...


I don't work in IT. I'm a home user with a whole bunch of GPUs from various vendors and architectures that all work great. And since they do, I don't know why I should see it from any other way.


AMD is breaking brand image with lousy PR in general, not with the drivers.


As long as it's much cheaper than the Nvidia alternative, I kindly disagree.


What needs to improve? Do Nvidia cards gain 5% performance with every new driver release?


Do you blame them? Console is their bread and butter.


I buy products, not product stacks. The only part of the industry that I'm a fan of is my wallet. As long as I can pay less for the same or more, I'm cool. And don't turn this back on the driver branches. I've had just enough of trouble with Nvidia drivers, too. More than with AMD in recent years, I might add. And that's not even a driver branch thing. So from that regard, AMD has been more consistent with their drivers recently.

Yes, in your N=1 situation, AMD is still doing great. In the marketplace however on GPUs, they are losing consistently.
But this trajectory won't last and the cracks are clearly showing.

Vayra86Yes, in your N=1 situation, AMD is still doing great. In the marketplace however on GPUs, they are losing consistently.
But this trajectory won't last and the cracks are clearly showing.

I know that AMD isn't doing great on the dGPU market. I just disagree with the reasons people put behind it.

AusWolfI know that AMD isn't doing great on the dGPU market. I just disagree with the reasons people put behind it.

Sure, and everyone else is trying to educate that you're seeing it wrong ;)
These are precisely the reasons AMD's brand trust and their PR is always eroding.

Good products sell themselves, really. Nvidia wouldn't even have to do its marketing if we're fair, they can just point at how poorly AMD manages theirs.

Vayra86Sure, and everyone else is trying to educate that you're seeing it wrong ;)
These are precisely the reasons AMD's brand trust and their PR is always eroding.

This is a PR blunder in my eyes. The drivers are fine. So are the products. And PR doesn't interest me, so... :)

Vayra86Good products sell themselves, really. Nvidia wouldn't even have to do its marketing if we're fair, they can just point at how poorly AMD manages theirs.

Erm... "good" is subjective. I kind of see Nvidia as overpriced garbage starting from the 30-series, and the problem is only escalating. God, I miss Maxwell and Pascal! :(

And as I said, I'm not entirely happy with Nvidia drivers, either. I'm not the kind of person to come online and bust people's brains with my complaints, but I've had issues. Only people blinded by PR think it's all sweet.

Edit: Let's not forget about the issues Blackwell has faced. Missing ROPs, lacking 32-bit CUDA support that Nvidia conveniently forgot to mention, the still melting connector, driver problems, zero performance / power / price uplift from last gen... yeah, "good products" through and through. ;)

tpa-prWith Nvidia if they say "our new tech won't run on older cards", people expect that and accept that. It's been Nvidia's modus operandi for the longest time, you know the deal as an Nvidia consumer, you must upgrade to get the shiny new features. With AMD it's a bit more messy.

And I never understood why it's the standard MO for Nvidia, some of the things they do should be a PR disaster, but it's just "oh well Nvidia are assholes, I'll still buy that 5080 thank you Jensen".

AusWolfErm... "good" is subjective. I kind of see Nvidia as overpriced garbage starting from the 30-series, and the problem is only escalating. God, I miss Maxwell and Pascal! :(

And as I said, I'm not entirely happy with Nvidia drivers, either. I'm not the kind of person to come online and bust people's brains with my complaints, but I've had issues. Only people blinded by PR think it's all sweet.

Edit: Let's not forget about the issues Blackwell has faced. Missing ROPs, lacking 32-bit CUDA support that Nvidia conveniently forgot to mention, the still melting connector, driver problems, zero performance / power / price uplift from last gen... yeah, "good products" through and through. ;)

I suppose the perception is supposed to be Nvidia=perfect. Even though Nvidia has been having driver issues for some time though, and various hardware issues with their cards since the RTX 20 series.

Things like missing ROPs or CUDA support should've been a PR disaster but fans were quick to shield for the company with "just submit an RMA" or "My card has all the ROPs" or "32 bit CUDA is ancient who would care about that" or my favorite "my card works fine just plug in the power connector correctly it's hardly an issue or else more would be complaining".
Neither brand is perfect, but it's been extremely annoying how Nvidia gets covered for anything they do, but oh no drivers for 5 year old cards are supposed to have constant performance uplifts, this is supposed to be a massive PR disaster never mind the ongoing issues from Nvidia.

Vayra86Which part of 'we announce a change, but the fans say nothing changes' is not completely pulled out your ass?

My god. If it was all the same, why isn't RDNA4 in 'maintenance mode' already? Seems like a great mode to be in if I have to follow the discourse around it from the fanbase here. You're saying there is no real change to be felt, so then, why on earth would AMD even push this release strategy? Much easier just releasing once right? Oh yeah... they need 'focus'... on three branches.

What exactly changed then? Different driver branches doesn't mean the cards stop getting updates, AMD clarified this and people still say the statement wasn't good enough, and it's not like RDNA2 has been getting massive performance improvements through driver updates anyway.

Vayra86If you work in IT you know all of this is just a lame excuse to delay or indefinitely postpone feature releases because none of your code is truly unified and you really do need those separate releases because there is huge technical debt. OR there is a commercial/money reason on the profit side to adhere to. It is most certainly NOT good customer care, or an improvement in any way or form - its always the opposite. In AMD's case, its crystal clear its a wild mix of lack of priority, lack of strategic insight and complete lack of competence in continuous releases. AMD keeps digging technical debt-holes in their GPU line up and they keep having to tell us a shit story as a result of it. Delays, feature deficits, etc.

And if you work in IT you'd appreciate having driver stability over caring about getting a new driver every week.
Maybe it's a lack of resources to work on 4 versions of RDNA in addition to developing for UDNA, I don't know how driver development works but I'll assume it's quite a bit more difficult than people want to believe when the multi-trillon dollar company had awful drivers, or just didn't care about drivers but either one the difference is they were mostly excused for it.

Vayra86That's the real story here and it would do people well to get real. Before this clusterfuck we had AMD saying they could take their sweet time on RT, then taking their sweet time on deploying and improving FSR... and now actually just not delivering said improvements to all their GPUs as they promised. The reality is, AMD is breaking expectations and brand image with this, the damage is done, once again, and it will serve as yet another argument to buy Nvidia going forward. A good argument, at that, because the proof is now in the pudding.

Yet no one gave a crap about RT before the jacket man said everyone needs RT, RT just isn't there yet despite if you drop 3 grand on a 5090, there are still AAA titles that cause a flagship card to barely achieve triple digit FPS, expecting AMD to magically have RT parity with a multi-trillion dollar company controlling the entire game industry is wishful thinking.
It's clear that FSR takes time to develop for, it took AMD partnering up with Sony in order to deliver enough of a visual improvement with FSR4. RDNA3 has a performance decrease to run FSR4 so I don't expect RDNA2 to get the feature, I'm biased on upscaling because I'd rather play at native resolution however I still want to see AMD have an "FSR lite" going all the way back to RDNA1.
Although people will still come up with all kinds of arguments to buy another Nvidia GPU, I see it all time time here, even before this PR fiasco.

Vayra86Its going to be a very hard call buying an RDNA GPU again.

So if the separate GPU branches still get driver updates you're still going to buy Nvidia?
All I can say is enjoy the monopoly growing larger, but because of Nvidia's tactics which are much worse, and prices increase while the GPU you get is less and less, I'd rather buy from AMD or Intel.

Vayra86And...consistent since RDNA2. That's four years, two generations, and already in RDNA4 they have lost consistency because there is just half a GPU stack, and even that is optimistically stated. That is not the definition of consistency mate. It is instead called 'rose colored glasses'.

Four years is quite a long time in the tech space, after 4 years Nvidia has gotten more greedy, prices have gotten out of control, and they have a melting power connector.

I cant understand why you people keep bringing nvidia up

Nvidia being a shitty company doesn't make AMD less of a shitty company and viceversa

the fact they tried to get away with lessening the support for RDNA2 and then backtracked when they got caught and got too much shit thrown at them, as an actual RDNA2 owner, kinda piss me off even if they'll end up supporting 6xxx cards until 2047, and makes me question whether I should buy any radeon product in the future.

just as a remainder , here's the actual first statement that started it all

"RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes. To focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 is placing Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode. Future driver updates with targeted game optimizations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs. "

seems clear enough to me, but feel free to keep saying it was miscommunication all along.

Then there's the FSR4 situation which is a whole other can of worms. But I guess we'll see when Redstone comes out.

Just the fact it took AMD the entire lifetime of Pascal and Polaris/Vega GPUs to fix their performance for Minecraft and OpenGL on Windows as a whole for all their GPUs released since then tells a lot about their priorities. And to this day, Minecraft is still in a weird boat for AMD, as some driver versions still refuse to launch the game under certain circumstances. They also seem to no longer care about that, since no other mention of Minecraft or OpenGL appeared in the changelogs after 22.7.1, until 24.8.1.

Hecate91Things like missing ROPs or CUDA support should've been a PR disaster but fans were quick to shield for the company with "just submit an RMA" or "My card has all the ROPs" or "32 bit CUDA is ancient who would care about that" or my favorite "my card works fine just plug in the power connector correctly it's hardly an issue or else more would be complaining".

There we go again.

Hecate91but oh no drivers for 5 year old cards are supposed to have constant performance uplifts, this is supposed to be a massive PR disaster never mind the ongoing issues from Nvidia.

No. If a driver update brings performance uplifts, it means the previous version was broken. End of story.

Hecate91Yet no one gave a crap about RT before the jacket man said everyone needs RT, RT just isn't there yet despite if you drop 3 grand on a 5090, there are still AAA titles that cause a flagship card to barely achieve triple digit FPS, expecting AMD to magically have RT parity with a multi-trillion dollar company controlling the entire game industry is wishful thinking.

You people are so stubborn to get your 4K 240Hz+ Max settings experience, it's actually crazy. Next step, people will complain they can't render a movie such as Cars or Monsters Academy with full RT in real-time when back then it took weeks or even months to render.

Hecate91So if the separate GPU branches still get driver updates you're still going to buy Nvidia?

Yes, because so far no major game support happened to Vega/Polaris branch. 25.8.1 for Polaris/Vega only fixes bugs. This is already a proof this "Legacy" branch gets no game support after 2 years in. Vega 64 is still supposed to be at the same level as a GTX 1080.

Hecate91All I can say is enjoy the monopoly growing larger, but because of Nvidia's tactics which are much worse, and prices increase while the GPU you get is less and less, I'd rather buy from AMD or Intel.

ikr, meanwhile people were so happy with the 7800 XT which brought no improvement over the 6800 XT and was more expensive. The 9070 XT and 7900 XT are closer to being what the 7800 XT should have been in the first place, but they were both priced above €850-900+ on release day instead of being €600.

Hecate91Four years is quite a long time in the tech space, after 4 years Nvidia has gotten more greedy, prices have gotten out of control, and they have a melting power connector.

There we go again x2. And reminder, it took 8-9 years for AMD to fix OpenGL and Minecraft performance on all their GPUs.

Vayra86It is instead called 'rose colored glasses'.

It's always interesting to hear the argument of incredulity (happens far too often), or the argument, especially when made from an extreme outlier/niche case, of that specific thing doesn't/won't specifically affect me for niche reasons, so why should I care?

Nothing is one size fits all, and I can see reasonable people rolling the dice on reasonable odds of potential issues, or future benefits or defecits that anyone could experience because nothing is without risk, and indeed certain options carry more risk...

But hot damn the mental gymnastics employed on this topic, I can barely keep up with the excuses, pardons and justifications why, not only the person who won't be affected isn't bothered, but apparently nobody should be.

RinSenpaiNo. If a driver update brings performance uplifts, it means the previous version was broken. End of story.

I disagree, and I find it ridiculous the goalposts are being moved from necessary performance uplifts to previous drivers were broken.

RinSenpaiYou people are so stubborn to get your 4K 240Hz+ Max settings experience, it's actually crazy.

Nope, I expect a $1500 GPU to be delivering enough performance for a 1440P 144Hz monitor, without the upscaling and fake frame gimmicks, doesn't seem crazy at all IMO.
Yet in some of the latest AAA UE5 games reviewed here are struggling on anything less than a 5090.

RinSenpaiYes, because so far no major game support happened to Vega/Polaris branch. 25.8.1 for Polaris/Vega only fixes bugs.

So it's about Polaris and Vega now? The last Vega card launched 8 years ago. Nvidia doesn't give their older cards the latest bug fixes either, the difference is they just don't tell you what parts of the driver are legacy features.

RinSenpaiikr, meanwhile people were so happy with the 7800 XT which brought no improvement over the 6800 XT and was more expensive.

7800XT was an improvement over the 6800XT, in performance and power consumption, more of an improvement gen over gen than some Blackwell cards were than Ada.
www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-7800-xt/32.html

RinSenpaiThere we go again x2. And reminder, it took 8-9 years for AMD to fix OpenGL and Minecraft performance on all their GPUs.

Yes it's worth bringing up because people are still acting like this is worse than everything Nvidia does, especially coming from Nvidia users.
And I'm not aware of Minecraft as I don't personally play it, but if it was an issue someone would've made a massive PR issue regarding Minecraft crashing on Radeon GPU's.

Hecate91Nvidia doesn't give their older cards the latest bug fixes either, the difference is they just don't tell you what parts of the driver are legacy features.

They do though. And they certainly give them more love than AMD is promising now for the same age (or even much younger if we consider how recently new RDNA2 endowed products have launched, like 2025...). Nvidia has maintained the same branch, and delivered more features and improvements and bug fixes for the ages, did you miss this on page 4 of this thread?

GTX1080Ti 5 years into it's life.

Hecate917800XT was an improvement over the 6800XT, in performance and power consumption, more of an improvement gen over gen than some Blackwell cards were than Ada.

First half is correct, the 7800XT is to the tune of just over 5% faster than 6800XT with the most recent comprehensive figures we have circa Sep 2025, and indeed while using less power which is good.

More of an improvement gen on gen vs literally any Blackwell card is a mathematical no though.

As per those recent, GPU bound figures, here is the improvement vs their direct predecessor.

6800XT to 7800XT + 5%
4060 to 5060 + 21%
4060Ti 8Gb 5060Ti 8Gb +9%
4060Ti 16Gb 5060Ti 16GB +22%
4070 to 5070 + 25% (+7.5% from 4070 Super to 5070)
4070Ti to 5070Ti + 27% (+16% from 4070Ti Super to 5070Ti)
4080 to 5080 +13% (+11% from 4080 Super to 5080)
4090 to 5090 + 31%

Not a larger improvement than any Blackwell vs Ada counterpart. And Blackwell is a decidedly poor generational uplift from Nvidia, so not exactly a high bar to compete against, and not mediocrity worth drawing attention to or contorting reality about.

AusWolfEdit: Let's not forget about the issues Blackwell has faced. Missing ROPs, lacking 32-bit CUDA support that Nvidia conveniently forgot to mention, the still melting connector, driver problems, zero performance / power / price uplift from last gen... yeah, "good products" through and through. ;)

But if that didnt affect you as a hypothetical Nvidia user, why would you care?

....
I hope the penny drops at some point for you. There is a real identifiable gap in quality here. The melting connector though.. yeah. I aint burning myself on that one either.

wolfThey do though. And they certainly give them more love than AMD is promising now for the same age (or even much younger if we consider how recently new RDNA2 endowed products have launched, like 2025...). Nvidia has maintained the same branch, and delivered more features and improvements and bug fixes for the ages, did you miss this on page 4 of this thread?

GTX1080Ti 5 years into it's life.

It's weird how ever since the 570 driver branch, I have to resize my TV screen every time it wakes up from sleep with my GT 1030 because the edges are out of alignment. I can definitely feel the "love".

Vayra86But if that didnt affect you as a hypothetical Nvidia user, why would you care?

....
I hope the penny drops at some point for you. There is a real identifiable gap in quality here. The melting connector though.. yeah. I aint burning myself on that one either.

So if the AMD driver branch reallocation doesn't affect you then it's all fine, right? So why do you care?

Edit: I care because I care about all hardware. My current AMD system doesn't mean that I limit my future choices. I'd be happy to buy Nvidia again if prices were right, which is a far cry at the moment (also, a bit more love for Linux would be nice, but that's a different story).

AusWolfSo why do you care?

Edit: I care because I care about all hardware

Thanks for confirming that and we have now come full circle. This is exactly why people care, and it underlines there is no brand favoritism per say. People are calling out what they see and how it affects them (emotionally) wrt their current or next hardware purchase or their options when they are going to.

So there is definitely more than your current personal hardware ownership and yes people are definitely at liberty to have an opinion of it even if it 'doesn't affect them' directly. Because it really does affect us all, in the end, contrary to what you've been saying earlier. Similarly, you do care, even if you haven't personally experienced something not working due to a lack of updates. Logic dictates that if the market would welcome broad FSR adoption and a better iteration of it, it also benefits you if the products you buy include it and support it well across multiple generations; because indirectly, this funnels more money to the same company you own a GPU of, which guarantees continued support. This is the foundation of trust and consistency that, in the end, we're all looking for. Nobody wants to buy something that is quickly relegated to the sidelines, even if its only 'PR' saying so.

Vayra86Thanks for confirming that and we have now come full circle. This is exactly why people care, and it underlines there is no brand favoritism per say. People are calling out what they see and how it affects them (emotionally) wrt their current or next hardware purchase or their options when they are going to.

That's why I think saying things like "nobody will buy AMD now" is factually wrong.

Vayra86So there is definitely more than your current personal hardware ownership and yes people are definitely at liberty to have an opinion of it even if it 'doesn't affect them' directly. Because it really does affect us all, in the end, contrary to what you've been saying earlier. Similarly, you do care, even if you haven't personally experienced something not working due to a lack of updates. Logic dictates that if the market would welcome broad FSR adoption and a better iteration of it, it also benefits you if the products you buy include it and support it well across multiple generations; because indirectly, this funnels more money to the same company you own a GPU of, which guarantees continued support. This is the foundation of trust and consistency that, in the end, we're all looking for. Nobody wants to buy something that is quickly relegated to the sidelines, even if its only 'PR' saying so.

That's generalisation again. I, for one, don't care about upscaling, be it DLSS or FSR or XeSS. The blurification of modern games with the intent to hide bad optimisation should die a painful death. Just like I don't care about PR, either. If I did, I would have never bought an AMD GPU, as they're obviously bad at it. No, what I care about is a stable product at a solid price. I also care about modest size (dual slot max), and Linux support. Even Intel ticks more of these boxes than Nvidia these days.

Talking about bad PR, let's also not forget that 5070 = 4090, right? ;)

I don't know how people can trust Nvidia when they lie into our face with a smile, sell the same crap at 10-20% higher price, and have to release a new "hotfix" driver every second day to clear up the mess they created with the 570 revision, some of which still isn't fixed today. Oh I know, if you have SuperBlur(TM) instead of FSR, everything is fine. :rolleyes:

Anyway, rant over. I just wanted to prove that people look for different things in a product (whoever actually takes the effort to look at the product instead of the stupid PR, I mean).

tpa-prAMD says "FSR4 can't/won't run on the older hardware" only for the community to get it working under something like Linux.

Not quite how the narrative goes.
While the original FSR4 implementation indeed did not (and still does not) work on pre-RDNA4 chips, but AMD evidently was working on adapting the tech to run with the data primitives older hardware supports. What the community got to work was AMD’s own work.
The current fiasco leads one to conclude that the official, FSR4 porting program is canned, but not due to incompetence (at least, not an engineering one specific to FSR), given the above.

AusWolfTalking about bad PR, let's also not forget that 5070 = 4090, right? ;)

That's just great marketing, not bad PR. Those who know better will ignore it, and those who don't, will fall for it, while it still draws attention to MFG x4 in exactly the way Nvidia wants.