AMD Radeon "Where Gaming Begins Ep. 3 Liveblog:" Radeon RX 6700 XT Announcement

[mechtech]

That may never come, unless you're talking about ex-mining cards dumped on ebay when the bubble bursts.

It's more than just COVID, Taiwanese drought, and Crypto mining though: Taiwan was exempt from the US-China trade war tariffs until December 31st last year, now they are not - and just like Brexit the price hike is bigger than just the tariff itself because it brings extra delays, inspections, administration - all of which adds cost to perform, and takes additional cost if you want to expedite that process.

Even when COVID's impact on manufacturing is 100% gone, and the droughts in Taiwan are over, and there is enough supply to go around because the miners aren't interested any longer - things will still be a bare minimum of 25% more expensive before tax and inflation are even considered, unless Joe Biden and Xi Jinping can come to an agreement.

It's not even as simple as the flat 25% price hike either, since some of the components that go onto those PCBs are from US-owned companies as well, and also subject to 25% tariffs. What if your GPU uses, say, Texas Instruments components that come from the US and get imported to Gigabyte? 25% tariff. Do you suck up that tariff or do you invest time and costs into finding a different solution using alternative Taiwanese parts instead? That's just one component in one direction at one stage of manufacture. Where do Texas instruments get their rare-earth metals from? Probably China, paying the 25% export tariff.

The "25%" tariff is just the raw value for a single jump across the divide. Everyone is making everything more expensive on both sides of the trade war and it's having a multiplicative effect. The more complex the end product the greater the likelihood that subcomponents have involved one or more additional US-China boundary hops :\

Thanks Donald, you 'helped' :\

I was talking about new. If it never comes, then it will be integrated graphics and everything at low settings

 

[phanbuey]

I forget to mention earlier that DLSS 2.0's performance increase isn't anywhere near 40% on average either. In some tiles like Metro Exodus it's 4% and in other's 16% (Tomb raider).

I can get a slightly higher performance bump from CAS with the resolution scale set to 80% with minimal visual quality loss in CP2077. At 50% resolution scale it does look like vaseline but at 80% there's hardly any difference. DLSS is a good technology but it's in too few games and you can't make blanket statements about how much performance you'll get because it varies a lot based on the title and resolution and it does poorly at 1080p. There are a lot of caveats. CAS might not be as good compared to an ideal scenario for DLSS but it just works and it does so across a broad range of video cards.

"It's not about apples to oranges... it's that if you don't like it"

That's sidestepping the question. It IS apples to oranges and it is never acceptable to compare two video cards with different settings. That's benchmarking 101, you ensure the only variable that's different is the card you are testing. Failing to isolate means your data is worthless.

What question? All I'm saying is yes it's limited tech, but 1) it's very good and definitely growing, and 2) it's EXTRA! BONUS! - a nv card does both CAS and DLSS... for the same price and performance... that's the killer sale - why would you buy a card that only does one thing when you can get one that does both things? What because it's not rolled out to everything yet? That doesn't make sense.

 

[evernessince]

What question? All I'm saying is yes it's limited tech, but 1) it's very good and definitely growing, and 2) it's EXTRA! BONUS! - a nv card does both CAS and DLSS... for the same price and performance... that's the killer sale - why would you buy a card that only does one thing when you can get one that does both things? What because it's not rolled out to everything yet? That doesn't make sense.

Pricing is out the window right now in general as you can't get any card at a reasonable price. If you are referring to MSRP AMD holds the advantage price wise, especially comparing the 6900 XT to the 3090. You are looking at paying anywhere from $50 to $500 more for an Nvidia card. The AMD cards are also more power efficient and sport more VRAM as well, the 6800 XT has 6GB more than the 3080.

Just to be clear, you can only use CAS in games that support it on an Nvidia card so really, great if you happen to play a game that has it but otherwise it's worthless to you if the games you play don't. The same goes for DLSS really. You don't buy graphics cards based on the hope that the games you play will include the feature and the hope that Nvidia will continue to support it. More likely than not, if the tech does gain adoption a vendor agnostic solution will be used over an Nvidia proprietary one. FreeSync is a good example of that and to boot, it didn't require you buy a monitor that locks you into an Nvidia card. People who bough G-Sync monitors are stuck with Nvidia if they want Adaptive sync, people who bought into the more open FreeSync can use AMD or Nvidia cards.


"What because it's not rolled out to everything yet? "

I went 3 years since DLSS's release having not played a single game that supported it (and to top if off that game supported alternatives anyways).

The problem is that DLSS hardly supports any games at all. Here's the complete list of upcoming DLSS games:

That's pathetically small and that's considering we are on the 2nd gen of DLSS. At what point is this going to ramp up?

In the end the equation is really nowhere as simple as you portray it. DLSS is still a niche feature with only a small selection of games that support it. It shouldn't even be considered when purchasing a GPU unless you know you will use it, not think or hope to. You should primarily be looking at the core performance factors of the GPU when making a purchase (Power consumption, Performance, Thermals, Noise), all of which are more important than any software feature offered by AMD or Nvidia.

 

[phanbuey]

Here is the list of games that non-dlss cards can do this with:
-

^ that's REALLY small. I mean if you think your list, of which you excluded a few (probably because they added 4 games between now and then), is pathetically small you must really think this one is super pathetic.

You can also ignore this:
"Originally, Nvidia had to train DLSS on a per-game basis, but the DLSS 2.0 algorithm can apply its enhancements to any game that supports the feature and makes it easier for developers to implement."
- Use DLSS to Make Your PC Games Run Better (lifehacker.com)

You're overcomplicating the equation to try to take down what is actually a great tech that people will want. If you don't like DLSS 2.0 because you bought 1.0 3 years ago and it sucked, and the 22 games that currently support DLSS, many of which are AAA and graphically intense, you didn't play, and the 17 games with upcoming support, many of which are also AAA, are not enough...

That's totally fine, you should save the $50 price difference and stick with the 0 games and 0 support. And use sharpening on global resolution scaling and tell yourself how awesome it is, there will definitely not be a AAA game in the future that will support DLSS 2.0 that you want to play, probably. And if there is, you can just go over nuanced points you mentioned above to justify not having bought a card with the feature.

I will choose to stick to my DLSS 2.0 purchasing equation and crank up Mount & Blade: Bannerlord II in 4k and enjoy the fact that I am getting massively more performance than a 6900xt from a 3080.... in about 3 weeks.