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.
I’m just clutching my pre-covid, pre-shortage GTX 1080ti. Hoping it’ll keep powering through a little longer. Honestly, it’s an amazing card. If it ever dies on me or becomes too obsolete, I’ll frame it and hang it on my wall.
I just wish AMD cards were better at ray tracing and “work” than Nvidia cards. Otherwise I’d have already splurged on an AMD if I could.
There is no doubt that AMD is a better company than NVIDIA in OSS terms.
But don’t simp for a company, vote with your wallet and always look for the best and consumer friendly product.
For now, not gonna lie AMD is pretty rad, but I hope next generation Intel GPUs are competitive.
I think AMD is a great competitor and we need more competition to lay it to NVIDIA and AMD as well, BUT HOLY FUCK. I can’t stand AMD’s software/control panel vs NVIDIA’s.
I just switched from nvidia to and and I have the exact opposite feeling lol
Care to explain your gripes?
At least with NVIDIA’s control panel I can find what I am looking for but my god AMD’s software feels so damn unorganized.
Well I guess there’s two parts of the nvidia software experience, geforce and the control panel. The control panel is functionally fine, but the ui is very dated and the available features are a bit limited. Geforce is pretty widely reviled as far as I can tell so I won’t go into it.
I just find the amd ui nice, and I like how you get quite simple and direct control over your video card, eg you can do some simple oc/undervolting, choose which software special sauce you want at a glance, and so on.
My first-ever Nvidia card was a 3080Ti. After installation I was genuinely confused and kept clicking around everywhere looking for the real settings panel.
Actually I remember, my older laptop had a MX150 (lol) so I did know all about GeForce Control Panel and Experience—I just thought they were the outdated bargain-basement solution assigned to POS hardware like mine, not worth (understandably) slapping shiny new chrome on.
Subsequently I had automatically assumed without a doubt in my mind that the pandemic card I had paid for in tainted blood would have some uber slick new interface that I couldn’t wait to play around with.
Needless to say, my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined.
Aye. The Nvidia control center was cool when I installed it for my Ti 4600 in 2002 and not much has changed. I’m not particularly fond but the aesthetics of the Radeon software, but it beats the heck out of the semi-useless GeForce experience. I have to make an account just to see if there’s a driver update available? I can’t even control fan speeds in Windows without third party software?
They’re both bad but in comparison Nvidia’s offering is garbage.
I am so fucking sick of having to make an account for everything, I swear to God
You don’t need an account for drivers. You can still get those for free off their website just like you could in 1999. You only need an account for their experience app.
I thought the current gen Intel ones are actually pretty decent. Solid budget choice for modern games.
If it can run them… I sold mine because they never actually fixed the drivers. Out of hundreds of games on my PC, it was able to run 3-4. This isn’t before their updates either. This happened 2 weeks ago. It can’t run davinci resolve despite having good encoders, it couldn’t even fucking run valorant Also they are only good in benchmarks, I found that my old 3050 was outperforming it in terms of fps.
I am super happy with my 7950X3D. However, their GPU drivers still need some work for the 7900XTX.
I switched from windows to Linux with my 7900XT and went from some GPU crashes to none
I used to have lots of driver crashing and weirdness on my RX 580, but I’ve had mostly smooth sailing with my 6600 XT.
To be honest, I only get the driver crash at the absolute worst times now. After I did the switch to AMD from Intel and Nvidia, I did do a fresh windows install and have only had to reinstall the AMD graphics drivers about 4 times in the last couple of months. (While true, the last paragraph is not as bad as it sounds. Annoying, yes. End of the world, no.)
There is a pattern to the madness though. If I go from gaming to other GPU intensive apps used across different screens, it’s probably going to hang the driver. Not fatally, but I reboot anyway when it happens.
AMD is on the right track though. I think I have been through three different GPU drivers versions since I built the system and it is slowly getting better. I get a driver crash about once a week instead of once a day now.
It’s possible your gpu voltages are too high, aka unstable, even at stock. I was having similar problems with the 6800xt, although they were rare. Undervolted it with MorePowerTool, and haven’t had any issues since.
I have been thinking about that, actually. Adrenaline does have an undervolt option, so I’ll give that a go first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll absolutely try More PowerTool.
TBH, higher voltages and clocks with the 7900XTX are only good for benchmarks and real world performance gains are not that noticable. (I could only get between 100-200 point gains on Kombustor) Undervolting is probably going to be good for the longevity of the card anyway.
Four times in 2 months? Hangs every time when switching from gaming to other GPU centric apps? Jeezuz, how are people finding that acceptable? You’re paying premium money for these products, demand better from these fucks. And the comment below you isn’t any better, crashing any time when waking from sleep mode is craziness.
Stop making excuses for AMD. They’re just another soulless corporation like any other, including Nvidia’s greedy asses.
Yeah, the GPU drivers haven’t been stable. Hell, one time they just stopped working completely and failed to recognize the card. Wut?
I mainly bounce between Diablo IV, War Thunder, Fusion360, PrusaSlicer and sometimes Blender. It doesn’t always hang, but when it does, it’s because I have been moving the apps back and forth between monitors. Multi-monitor support is buggy and that is absolutely a combination of the GPU drivers and the apps.
Yeah, I paid some coin, that is for sure. It is frustrating in that regard but I knew what I was getting into with AMD drivers. The first few generations of drivers are almost always garbage with new cards and they are showing improvements over the last few iterations of drivers.
Also, yes. I am tempted to give my 7900XTX to my daughter when the NVIDIA 5000 series drops. For now, I am just tolerating the issues. (I rarely had an issue with my 3070.)
No excuses here! The CPU is gold but the GPU drivers are shite. I am an extremely patient person though, so that helps.
I commend you on your zen master level of patience, haha. I’m only patient up to a degree and then it all goes out the window, heh.
I’m guessing you have the hotkey combination for rebooting the graphics drivers without having to reboot your PC? When I had a 5700 XT, that hotkey combo was a lifesaver (drivers on that would constantly hang for me as well).
I’ve never had amd drivers crash during normal usage, 6700xt water block. Microsoft sleep mode wrecks my pc and makes it instantly crash though.
Sleep mode is rough, for sure. It’s also one of the reasons why I did a completely fresh installation of Windows. (Sleep mode was suicide.) Also, I had heard an obscure rumor that AMD chipset drivers could be picky for old windows installations. (Like, not enabling the 3D cache on the CPU kind of picky.)
But yeah, you aren’t alone with the sleep mode woes.
I’m fairly sure the Windows drivers are still closed source and this is referring to the situation on Linux.
Some of the points in the meme do stretch across OS’s.
GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.
Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.
Corporations are not our friends. 🤷♂️
something many people overlook is how intertwined nvidia, intel and amd are. not only does the personnel routinely switch between those companies but they also have the same top share holders. there’s no natural competition between them. it’s like a choreograhped light saber fight where all of them are swinging but none seem to have any intention to hit flesh. a show to make sure nobody says the m word.
…mayfabe?
They’re cycling out the old curse words. The Carlin ones are now fine. The new list is:
- Monopoly
- Union
- Rights
- Child labor
deleted by creator
I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…
Say it loud and say it proud, cooperations are no one’s friend!
not to mention except north america, in almost all countries amd gpu is always $100 more expensive than nvidia counterpart making it just non sense to buy any amd card unless you are just a fanboy
I have zen 2 and the apu is good enough for me, high end shit is always ridiculous.
100%. Outside of brand loyalty, I just simply don’t see any reason to buy AMD’s higher tier GPUs over Nvidia right now. And that’s coming from a long, long time AMD fan.
Sure, their raster performance is comparable at times, but almost never actually beats out similar tiers from Nvidia. And regardless, DLSS virtually nullifies that, especially since the vast majority of games for the last 4 years or so now support it. So I genuinely don’t understand AMD trying to price similarly to Nvidia. Their high end cards are inferior in almost every objective metric that matters to the majority of users, yet still ask for $1k for their flagship GPU.
Sorry for the tangent, I just wish AMD would focus on their core demographic of users. They have phenomenal CPUs and middling GPUs, so target your demographics accordingly, i.e. good value budget and mid-tier GPUs. They had that market segment on complete lockdown during the RX 580 era, I wish they’d return to that. Hell, they figured it out with their console APUs. PS5/XSX are crazy good value. Maybe their next generation will shift that way in their PC segment.
AMD still has better Linux support for now, which is about 90% of the reason I went with them for now.
If you’re running Linux there’s only one option
It’s especially egregious with high end GPUs. Anyone paying >$500 for a GPU is someone that wants to enable ray tracing, let alone at a $1000. I don’t get what AMD is thinking at these price points.
FSR being an open feature is great in many ways but long-term its hardware agnostic approach is harming AMD. They need hardware accelerated upscaling like Nvidia and even Intel. Give it some stupid name similar name (Enhanced FSR or whatever) and make it use the same software hooks so that both versions can run off the same game functions (similar to what Intel did with XeSS).
Intel does the same thing with drivers
Nvidia is only now catching up
I’ll never go for Nvidia ever again.
I’ve been a Linux only user for over twenty years now and Nvidia is the fucking devil. Their drivers range in quality anywhere from “ugh” to “wtf!” and my current Nvidia card (it’s a loan) gives me continuous screen artifacts and kwin (screen manager) crashes. AMD drivers just work.
As an AMD fanboy, I approve of this.
And now, for a serious note: been running linux daily for almost 20 years and AMD machines are, per my personal experience, always smoother to install, run and maintain.
I’ve been intel w/ nvidia since 2007 on Linux. Recent trends have me thinking AMD is the way to go for my next one though. I think I’ve got so used to the rough edges of Nvidia that they stopped bothering me.
As someone who has been ignoring AMD for most of this time, (my last AMD product was something in the Athlon XP line), can I do Intel CPU w/ AMD discrete GPU?
Yeah, AMD GPUs work great across the board no matter the CPU.
I should have specified “in Linux” more explicitly - same answer? :-)
Can I get back to you, say, in three weeks?
I’m about to put together a machine based on a AB350 chipset, with a Ryzen 5 (g series, for graphics from the start) and after that I intend to install on it a budget RX580.
If the thing doesn’t ignite or explode, I’ll gladly share the end result.
No rush whatsoever, but I’d be thrilled to hear about your results when you are done.
Yeah, this is what my wife was doing. I’m also doing the reverse: AMD CPU, NVidia GPU. I considered AMD but went NVidia mostly for the PPW on an undervolted 4070. It results in a cool, quiet, low-wattage machine that can handle anything that matters to me, which AMD GPUs still can’t match this gen even with the upcoming 7800XT they’re trying to compare against the 4070. I’d wait for some PPW analysis before making a choice depending on your needs. There’s way more to the analysis than GPU source code or even raw performance that is often overlooked.
Oh,and don’t sleep on AMD. Though I don’t feel like the AM5 platform is fully baked, Ryzen architecture is rock-solid and I fully recommend using it if your history with Athlon is what’s keeping you away. I actively avoided them for the same reason until a friend convinced me otherwise, and I’m so glad I did.
Thanks, will take a hard look when it’s time to buy again. I forgot to specify that I was explicitly discussing Linux usage also - assume same answer?
Can’t speak to that, unfortunately. But I assume there would be no issues. The devices themselves are system agnostic; Windows isn’t doing anything special to make them play nice with each other.
Hey there fellow 20 year using Linux desktop Linux fanboy! Exactly the same here
I am not alone!!! Yes!
Still everyone uses Nvidia and everything has better Nvidia support than AMD. I love AMD but not being able to use my oculus connected to my PC without screen tear is pretty annoying :/
Most monitors support AMD better.
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
Wait, does this mean the adrenaline software is finally out for linux? Can we undervolt/set fan curves now? The interfaceless free driver is so freaking noisy with my gpu.
I checked, you guys are still celebrating the mesa code that was contributed ages ago -.- Yes it works and it’s foss. And AMD has been lazy on linux ever since, we get the bare minimum. They don’t beat nvidia by much imho.
I just bought my first Nvidia card since the TNT2. Up to today I always looked for the most FPS for the money.
This time my focus was on energy efficiency, and the AMD cards suck at the moment. 4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
Regarding DLSS: I activated it in control, and it looks… off? Edges seem unsharp, not all the time, but often, sometimes only for a second, sometimes longer. I believe it is the only game I have that has support for it, but I’m not impressed.
At OP: Brand loyality is the worst. Neither Nvidia nor AMD like you. Get the best value for your money.
Btw, Nvidia needed an account to let me use their driver. Holy shit, that’s fucked up!
4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
But if you compare cards from the same generation, like the 3070 and 6800, they’re much closer. Nvidia still has the edge, but the 3070 TGP is 220W vs the 6800 at 250W.
if im not wrong 6800 perform way better than 3070
There is a way around the account requirement. I uninstalled GeForce experience forever ago
Wait what?? Thank you, I will look into it, I don’t need that crap!!
You can get drivers directly from their site without an account aswell
When you install the drivers there is a checkbox for geforce experience. I think you need to do “custom installation” or advanced or whatever they call it instead of just clicking the install button they show.
Aaaaaaand… it’s gone! Thanks!!
According to TomsHardware, the RX 6800 is currently the most efficient.
Maybe, but it draws 280 watts instead of 200. That’s just too much, at least for me.
You don’t necessarily need an account to use the Nvidia drivers, just if you want automatic updates through GeForce Experience. Not saying that’s any better, in fact it’s almost as shitty, just wanted to clarify.
I just used a junk email to make an account for the auto updates.
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.
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)
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.
I’m sorry, is a $1000 now cheap for gpu? I remember when an 80 series cost $500 and it felt expensive.
Yeah they ain’t cheap. AMD just follows NVidia’s pricing and just undercuts them by a few hundred. AMD has zero reason to price their GPUs this high. While I sorta get why NVidia does it. There is massive demand for their chips outside the gaming sphere. And these businesses are willing to pay top dollar. I bet most of their production capacity is allocated to produce data center GPUs.
Yeah but the same thing can be said about phones, it’s the new norm and for something that’ll easily last you 4-6 years, it’s a worthwhile investment I feel
Genuinely what are you talking about?
RX 7800 xt is dropping beginning of next month at $500 and it’s a beast of a GPU.
Yeah sure, but it’s not comparable to an 80 series. The 7900xt costs $900 and the xtx costs $1000 at msrp. Thats a ton of money.
The 4070 costs $600 btw, which is more comparable to the 7800xt you mentioned
Yeah agree the high range for amd is meh, if you’re just looking for the best out there money is no object, fine with >$1000 gpus, Nvidia has no competition there. The 7900s are more competitive with the Nvidia 4080s and undercut those on price too, 4080s are $1200. So they should really be looked at as a 4080 alternative not 4090 which has no real alternative. Amd offers nothing nearly as expensive as a 4090.
Im very interested in the 7800xt which is a 4070 competitor. If it’s outperforming the 4070 in most respects like the amd numbers suggests I think it’ll be a great value since it’s $100 cheaper. The 4070 only having 12 gb of vram is pretty disappointing too for future proofing, especially for the price. Would like to wait on the reviews of the 7800xt of course first, we only have company provided numbers so far. Also interested in their progress on ray tracing and fsr, which they’ve clearly been behind Nvidia on for a number of years. But getting enough fps and achieving the resolution you want should still be priority number one over something more niche and game dependent like ray tracing when you’re picking out a card I think.
Again, amd does undercut nvidia but not by a lot. There’s no reason for pricing their gpus so high other than pure greed. A 1000 usd is pretty damn expensive for something that does nothing by itself.
So no, AMD is not cheap
Oh didn’t mean to imply they’re not greedy, it’s a company. Nvidia would be far greedier though then unless you value their extra features with otherwise worse performance by that much more money. And without competition Nvidia would have free reign to get even more absurd in their pricing. Some competition is better than none. Maybe Intel gpus will start getting good and we can really get some competition going to drive prices lower hopefully.
Am I having a stroke, or does that actually say “here’s the our source code”?
youre crazy
*your crazy
what about my crazy ?
what if this is just a pyschology test and we are expected to not notice and discuss amd or nvidia
we’ll let you peak 🗻
Oops
AMD is the only real option for those of us using Linux. Nvidia’s weirdnesses regularly fill up support tickets on Linux forums it’s not even funny
I’ve been using Nvidia with Linux for a VERY long time. Currently I have computers running:
- GT1030 - two older PC
- GTX2060 Ti
- GTX 3050 Ti - laptop
They are all working fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. I install openSUSE, add the Nvidia community repo (a couple of clicks), run updates once, and reboot. Everything just works after that. I can count maybe 3 times in the past 6 years that there was any issue at all.
Now Ubuntu and derivative… I’ve had a LOT of issues and weirdness… drivers failing, doing weird things etc.
I’ve been using Linux on my desktop since 1995, have used a lot of nVidia cards and have yet to experience that weirdness you speak of.
