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.

Corporations are not our friends. 🤷‍♂️

Say it loud and say it proud, cooperations are no one's friend!

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.

Generally agree, but when one of the two participants in a market is actively hostile to users and the other is actually competing for market share, seems like that's worth acknowledging. Especially when we so many examples of either outright collusion or as soon as one corporation introduces a new hostile feature all the others in the market follow.

On that note, I'm waiting for the day Nvidia announces a subscription service for unlocking cores or clock speeds.

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.

It is the lesser of two evils imo. Not saying that AMD is any good, their alternatives are just that bad.

drivers have been solid for years now

Always back the underdoge

There is a way around the account requirement. I uninstalled GeForce experience forever ago

Amd's epyc server cpus would be like 64 Machamp. Mf is huge and requires a hell of a cooler. See them at the datacenter I work at and when I opened the server up I thought I was looking at a turbocharged car engine or something.

Corporations aren’t your friend.

Correct. But AMD is doing things that benefit FOSS and Linux, where as nVidia is a menace. Intel is also doing pretty decent, they just need to catch up in terms of driver features.

They are still much less than nvidia...

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.

AMDGPU is open source: https://github.com/radeonopencompute/rock-kernel-driver/, it's also upstreamed into Linux. The firmware is a binary blob though.

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.

"W" is a letter often used to represent a "Win" which I assume is what's meant here since that's what AMD have been doing.