Breaking Dad's Big Bad Gaming Discussion - For all things to do with PC Gaming !

[RMerlin]

Gelsinger has a lot of work to catch up with Lisa Su (AMD) and Jensen Huang (nVidia)... I would add that Cristiano Amon has a big part to play as well..

This is what happens when you put an engineer in charge of a tech company: he will hire the right persons, and drive the company in the correct direction. Gelsinger, Su, Huang, Nadella, they all have this in common: they are engineers, so their understanding of the market isn't based on financial projections, it's based on knowing what the next "big thing" is going to be. And to know what it will take to make sure that they get on board and don't miss the boat. Who to hire, what to prioritize. Let the CFO worry about pleasing the stockholders, the CEO should be the man with the vision and also the understanding of the products their company should be investing in.

Nadella is another great example here. Replace Balmer (the salesman) with Nadella (an engineer). And suddenly, Azure becomes a serious thing, while under Balmer Microsoft were very close to leaving that market all to Amazon and Google. Like they left the mobile market to Apple and Samsung/Google.

On the GPU front, Arc was pretty impressive for a first gen product. Heck, their tensor core performance was pretty much a match for AMD's second gen tensor cores in terms of raytracing performance. Battlemage will be a very interesting product if they can keep iterating on the current tech.

 

[Maverick009]

I can't believe that there are still Radeon users for gaming or editing video something. I thought we could find Radeon as a fossil for gaming. It's cheaper than NVIDIA though.

As has been mentioned rasterization is on par or better than the Nvidia equivalent. Ray-Tracing is the only thing lacking but again it is 2nd Gen compared to 3rd/4th Gen tech. I personally upgraded from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB card to the Radeon 7900 XTX Red Devil OC 24GB card as it was a massive upgrade over what I had, plus more memory and cheaper than the equivalent GeForce card.

I am getting a decent amount of performance including in the newer games with practically all eye candy on max. The recent driver update increased performance and finally fixed the high power issues. It will only get better from here. AMD is still in the game and offering comparative performance and features at a better price at this time.

 

[follower]

As has been mentioned rasterization is on par or better than the Nvidia equivalent. Ray-Tracing is the only thing lacking but again it is 2nd Gen compared to 3rd/4th Gen tech. I personally upgraded from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB card to the Radeon 7900 XTX Red Devil OC 24GB card as it was a massive upgrade over what I had, plus more memory and cheaper than the equivalent GeForce card.

I am getting a decent amount of performance including in the newer games with practically all eye candy on max. The recent driver update increased performance and finally fixed the high power issues. It will only get better from here. AMD is still in the game and offering comparative performance and features at a better price at this time.

You feel huge difference with 7900, because you were using 1080ti. Your choice is not bad. 7900 is a cost effective card.

 

[Maverick009]

You feel huge difference with 7900, because you were using 1080ti. Your choice is not bad. 7900 is a cost effective card.

My Son has a 3070 EVGA card in his still was a big leap, but my 7900 XTX Red Devil OC beats that card too nicely. I am not discrediting the Nvidia cards either as I still use them and even moved my 1080 Ti to my Unraid multimedia gaming NAS server.

I just think this time Nvidia made a money grab while cutting back on performance and constraining memory this go around. That was in part what helped me decide. The last time I had a Radeon card was with the R290X lol.

 

[Paliv]

I just wish nVidia would put enough VRAM on their non-flagship cards to last more than 2 years. I had an RTX 3070, that started having issues running out of VRAM at 1440p, but it still had enough processing grunt to keep kicking. I got a RX 7900XT with 20GB of VRAM as an upgrade. I wish the 4070ti would have had at least 16GB of Ram and I would have gotten that instead.

 

[Maverick009]

I just wish nVidia would put enough VRAM on their non-flagship cards to last more than 2 years. I had an RTX 3070, that started having issues running out of VRAM at 1440p, but it still had enough processing grunt to keep kicking. I got a RX 7900XT with 20GB of VRAM as an upgrade. I wish the 4070ti would have had at least 16GB of Ram and I would have gotten that instead.

When I was using my 1080 Ti with 11GB I noticed a few games that were out even during the middle to end of the pascal generation of cards that struggled at 1080P let alone 1440P depending on how graphically rich in features it was.

The RX 7900 XT is a good card especially now in pricing and beats the 4070/Ti cards at nearly every level, mainly thanks to better rasterization and memory. Even with 16GB it would not change the card much. I believe that was seen in a supposed launch or leak of a 4060 Ti 16GB card. Until Nvidia goes all in with memory and the performance tweaks to benefit correctly, that will be the area AMD continues to beat them. Also the RDNA3 architecture was supposed to go head to head and even beat Nvidia but something did not go quite well towards launch. An eventual "fine wine" driver may change some of that later, but either way I am happy with the performance and features from this card.

 

[Paliv]

When I was using my 1080 Ti with 11GB I noticed a few games that were out even during the middle to end of the pascal generation of cards that struggled at 1080P let alone 1440P depending on how graphically rich in features it was.

The RX 7900 XT is a good card especially now in pricing and beats the 4070/Ti cards at nearly every level, mainly thanks to better rasterization and memory. Even with 16GB it would not change the card much. I believe that was seen in a supposed launch or leak of a 4060 Ti 16GB card. Until Nvidia goes all in with memory and the performance tweaks to benefit correctly, that will be the area AMD continues to beat them. Also the RDNA3 architecture was supposed to go head to head and even beat Nvidia but something did not go quite well towards launch. An eventual "fine wine" driver may change some of that later, but either way I am happy with the performance and features from this card.

My biggest problem is how much hotter and power hungry they are. NVidia still has them beat in power efficiency.

 

[Maverick009]

My biggest problem is how much hotter and power hungry they are. NVidia still has them beat in power efficiency.

My 7900 XTX was not that bad at idle, but still had more power draw, but AMD just released the 23.7.1 WHQL drivers and the big bug fix was the high power draw for the 7900 series cards that has plagued them since launch. I have not personally checked but that may finally put them where they should of been drawing less than NVIDIA equivalent cards.

 

[L&LD]

If that 23.7.1 fixes anything, it will be in idle power use.

 

[sfx2000]

If that 23.7.1 fixes anything, it will be in idle power use.

Well, that's been the problem, looks like it might be sorted...

Going into a heavy load scenario - it's really about the resources at hand - low/mid/high - at a given price point/performance level - nVidia is still a bit ahead, but not enough to worry about...

driver support is more important with the games one plays - and there, devs do hook into the GPU vendor SDK's as this is the easy path to take.

Recall the 3DFX Voodoo cards - glide ruled because of the games that used that API...

 

[sfx2000]

This is what happens when you put an engineer in charge of a tech company: he will hire the right persons, and drive the company in the correct direction. Gelsinger, Su, Huang, Nadella, they all have this in common: they are engineers, so their understanding of the market isn't based on financial projections, it's based on knowing what the next "big thing" is going to be

And then you have Tim Cook - he's not an engineer - but on his watch there was services, a number of new product lines (Watch, AirPods) - but the key thing with Apple was flat-out execution at an operational level - end to end - from inception to delivery...

Same goes for Lisa Su over at AMD - yes, engineering focused, but a lot of background on operations as well, and it was on her watch that AMD/ATI sorted out their differences...

 

[RMerlin]

Recall the 3DFX Voodoo cards - glide ruled because of the games that used that API...

And also because Glide was insanely simple to implement, compared to OpenGL or DirectX 5/6..

 

[sfx2000]

And also because Glide was insanely simple to implement, compared to OpenGL or DirectX 5/6..

glide was pretty awesome for the time and cross platform - wasn't just Windows - Mac was there as well with Quake cards...

I'll admit - I bought one there...

 

[eightiescalling]

On the GPU front, Arc was pretty impressive for a first gen product. Heck, their tensor core performance was pretty much a match for AMD's second gen tensor cores in terms of raytracing performance. Battlemage will be a very interesting product if they can keep iterating on the current tech.

It's certainly got Nvidia wary if this article is an indicator.

 

[Maverick009]

If that 23.7.1 fixes anything, it will be in idle power use.

Not just idle but also on higher power draw due to optimizations especially with multi monitor and 1440p setups. This will put it much closer to the power draw specs that they initially claimed as this was one of many launch bugs now being fixed.

 

[Maverick009]

Working on a few home projects, but to keep with the gaming theme somewhat, My main PC is about to get a nice upgrade. Just purchased an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16C/32T Gaming CPU along with 64GB of G.Skill Trident Neo DDR5-6000Mhz dual-channel memory, a 2TB WD Black SN850X NVMe M.2 Gen4 SSD and Asus X670e Crosshair Hero board to seat it all in. Will end up moving my other drives and components over including Radeon 7900 XTX Red Devil card. Gaming and multitasking will be on a new level lol. Still waiting on the CPU and GPU water blocks to begin building. Next will be a modest update to the network...

 

[BreakingDad]

Working on a few home projects, but to keep with the gaming theme somewhat, My main PC is about to get a nice upgrade. Just purchased an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16C/32T Gaming CPU along with 64GB of G.Skill Trident Neo DDR5-6000Mhz dual-channel memory, a 2TB WD Black SN850X NVMe M.2 Gen4 SSD and Asus X670e Crosshair Hero board to seat it all in. Will end up moving my other drives and components over including Radeon 7900 XTX Red Devil card. Gaming and multitasking will be on a new level lol. Still waiting on the CPU and GPU water blocks to begin building. Next will be a modest update to the network...

First job, slap on the latest asus firmware to avoid all the soc voltage concerns.

 

[Maverick009]

First job, slap on the latest asus firmware to avoid all the soc voltage concerns.

Very aware of that. Asus just was the best overall for performance and features but firmware was the first thing I grabbed and double checked last night as a newer one came out to my surprise but glad they are working to fix all corks while adding further support to the board so quickly at the moment.

 

[BreakingDad]

Very aware of that. Asus just was the best overall for performance and features but firmware was the first thing I grabbed and double checked last night as a newer one came out to my surprise but glad they are working to fix all corks while adding further support to the board so quickly at the moment.

Yeah I would stick with 1415, which seems pretty solid, until 1516 is out of beta.

 

[BreakingDad]

So, who's stoked for Starfield then?