Hope you get this sorted out. Been reading and wow your system is a AMD beast. Yeah someone said it earlier I would play at 1440p. You will notice a huge difference in performance. Built mine for 1440p but I am running at 1080p which is a downgrade I know but I am so happy with the performance. Also you may want to get a bigger power supply. At least 1000w. And yes windows 11 sucks.
I get it, in the end I guess my expectations are just a bit too high, but the thing is that the RTX 2080 was already handling most of what I play at 1440p at similar settings.
I'll probably end up trading the 7900 XTX + cash for a 4090 in a month or two, once I get a couple more paychecks in and some other hobby stuff sells to offset. The 7900 XTX is a major disappointment - yes, faster than the 2080, but often not enough to matter... Or enough to be impressive, at least in modern titles. As of right now I would not recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore AMD loyalist, or those for whom ~$900 is the absolute top of their budget, with the understanding that they won't be able to to turn on anything beyond the most basic raytracing stuff.
Is it cool to see the Shadow of the Tomb Raider bench run at 4K with everything maxed around 90FPS? Sure, but it's also a 5 year old game that doesn't make extensive use of raytracing... And a 4080 runs it faster. I can't even max out Control without FSR on, and with it on I'm still not happy with the FPS.
When performance barely meets my "good enough" standard in years old titles with the card fresh out of the box my usual pattern of keeping the same card for 3+ years more or less happily seems highly unrealistic. This is also, ignoring inflation at least, far and away the most I have ever spent on a graphics card... And it feels like less of an improvement than the last several such upgrades, to me. If I spend $1000 on a single component (in the end after discounts and such I thankfully got it for a little less, but still, that's regular street price) there should be some wow factor there, and it's missing entirely.
It's so lackluster that I convinced myself something must be horribly broken with my computer, and it's just not. I'm losing maybe 10-15% of potential performance, between not having the latest and greatest high end CPU and some minor thermal issues. That's it. Even if I were to put all my components in a full size case and use a big dual tower air cooler or 360mm AIO with lots of fans, plenty of airflow, it wouldn't be "fixed" in my eyes. That 10-15% won't get me where I want to be performance-wise. The card simply can't do it.
I guess in the end I'm just angry this is the best AMD can or is willing to do, and that Nvidia has the gall to charge what they do for what is, at the end of the day, the only high end option currently available.
This must be what getting old feels like.
A solid week of fighting with this thing, and nothing to show for it. It'll probably be another 15 years before I give AMD a chance again, because the only way this could have gone worse in my eyes is if the thing literally caught on fire. Actually, that would have been ideal - I could have made an insurance claim and got hardware worth bothering with.
