News AMD Graphics Cards Are the Better Value at Every Price Point

[Admin]

The anticipated and hoped for graphics card sales have arrived, at least for AMD GPUs. Nvidia's prices meanwhile are often insulting by comparison.

AMD Graphics Cards Are the Better Value at Every Price Point : Read more

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

IMO, AMD GPUs are as fast as Nvidia, or sometimes faster - In general raster performance.

Outside of that, and including RT goodness, and upscaling tech, AMD fall behind. My two cents. I know there will be some that don't agree with me.

 

[irateogle]

Looking around the used gpu market in my area, you get way better bang for your buck with AMD cards. 3060's were going for 400 or so and the 6600 xt I bought was 325 which comes with much better performance (prices in $CDN).

 

[blacknemesist]

IMO, AMD GPUs are as fast as Nvidia, or sometimes faster - In general raster performance.

Outside of that, and including RT goodness, and upscaling tech, AMD fall behind. My two cents. I know there will be some that don't agree with me.

AMD needs to focus more on drivers and optimize them for games.
NVidia drops drivers so often it is even annoying.
DLSS and RT are still NVidia's win and the 4090 wins vs anything but AMD is ever so close, they just need to make the GPUs better with support, NVidia wins a lot in that department.
Also AMD develops for all GPUs so even if inferior it still is a props for me, hate patented and gate keeping(not saying it is not fair to do so because it cost $ but as a consumer I want everything )

 

[Amdlova]

Amd gpus are better for old cpus and new ones. Nvidia drivers are bugged latency higher than amd. Kinda sucks for low ipc cpus (with amd your old computer fly, with nvidia you need a high end cpu).

 

[Phaaze88]

AMD needs to focus more on drivers and optimize them for games.
NVidia drops drivers so often it is even annoying.
DLSS and RT are still NVidia's win and the 4090 wins vs anything but AMD is ever so close, they just need to make the GPUs better with support, NVidia wins a lot in that department.
Also AMD develops for all GPUs so even if inferior it still is a props for me, hate patented and gate keeping(not saying it is not fair to do so because it cost $ but as a consumer I want everything )

Radeon drivers are great now - Radeon drivers are poor still... what's the actual ratio of these claims?
Radeon Software better than Nvidia Control Panel has been consistent though...

With how much smaller(budget and resources) AMD is than Nvidia, how do you expect any of that to happen?
"WTH AMD, your drivers are so crap. You gotta do better than that. Nvidia gpus all the way.

/next gpu gen arrives
"They were so close, but can do better next time. Meanwhile, I'll throw more money towards the more costly Nvidia options."

/next gpu gen arrives
"You've failed us again, AMD. Come on, try harder! Nvidia still offers the best - though pricing is higher - so I'll buy more Geforce."

/next gen gpu arrives and the above has been rinsed and repeated for how many years now?

Sometimes I think whether this is really a gpu duopoly...

 

[drivinfast247]

Amd gpus are better for old cpus and new ones. Nvidia drivers are bugged latency higher than amd. Kinda sucks for low ipc cpus (with amd your old computer fly, with nvidia you need a high end cpu).

WTAF?

 

[dalauder]

Okay, I was wrong before. Tom's does write pro AMD articles, they're just more pro Radeon and anti Ryzen.

I do think this article needed writing--well done. Buyers tend to just think "GeForce is better" and that's mostly not true. I do have a game from 1999 that has trouble on my Radeon drivers though.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

WTAF?

I think what Amdlova is talking about is that AMD has a dedicated hardware scheduler on its graphics cards which offloads a lot of CPU overhead meaning older/slower CPU’s aren’t as big of a bottleneck when paired with an AMD graphics card vs nvidia.

Of course, it could just be Amdlova trolling nvidia fans and he was not talking about the hardware scheduler at all…

 

[shady28]

I agree with the article, bought a 6700 XT for $330 about a month ago. I haven't used an AMD card since, well, I think it was an ATi 9700XT or some such.

I had always said it was worth an extra $50 or so for more stable drivers, but Nvidia cards are just way overpriced even after the recent price declines and it's by more than $50 - way more now. The 3060 Ti is still north of $400, and the 6700 XT marginally outperforms it.

I've no overt issues at all with drivers, and the AMD control panel is simpler and easier to use. However, I've had a couple of instances in the last month where when my PC goes to sleep the monitor won't come back on. No idea if that's related or a coincidence.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Okay, I was wrong before. Tom's does write pro AMD articles, they're just more pro Radeon and anti Ryzen.

I do think this article needed writing--well done. Buyers tend to just think "GeForce is better" and that's mostly not true. I do have a game from 1999 that has trouble on my Radeon drivers though.

We're not anti-AMD. Paul has written some good reviews of Ryzen CPUs. The issue with Ryzen right now is that the AM5 parts are relatively overpriced — not so much the CPU, but the motherboards are expensive. Given Intel's chips often still end up faster (13th Gen stuff), there's a reason AMD is putting the 7000-series on serious discount. And we've written those articles as well. You'll notice Intel CPUs aren't going on sale, other than maybe $10 of 12th gen parts.

I've swapped and tested GPUs from both companies so many times that I've lost count. For the past year or more, I've really had nothing that I would quantify as an overtly negative experience on the AMD or Nvidia side. Sometimes, things can go a bit quirky, but often that's just because I change GPUs so darn often. Run DDU, clear out all the AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPU drivers, do a clean install: It almost always works fine. And by "almost always" I mean I'm sure I've had the occasional hiccup with all brands at some point, but lately it's all gone about as well as could be expected.

Nvidia's advantage right now is that it has DLSS support (still not totally sold on DLSS3 though), plus Reflex. Reflex is in more games than Anti-Lag and probably works better overall. And Nvidia does have better DXR hardware. How much extra are those items worth? That's the difficult thing to assess. For all the games that don't have any special Nvidia features (DXR, DLSS, Reflex), you might end up paying 25% to as much as 50% more than equivalently performing AMD hardware. But if you start factoring in DLSS2... well, it's still a bit of a nebulous target.

Personally, I think spending 10% more for equivalent performance Nvidia could easily be justifiable, maybe even 20%. That's using my base level of performance (meaning no DXR or DLSS). So if you want a high-end card like an RTX 3080, even if we use the $700 price (which requires sketchier hardware brands), you're looking at that or the RX 6800 XT. AMD's card is $515, so Nvidia costs 36% more. That's just too big of a jump in my book.

And looking at the upcoming cards, hypothetically the RX 7900 XT might outperform the RTX 4080 while costing $300 less. Like, it wouldn't surprise me to see AMD (in rasterization games) delivering 10% better performance. Which means the 4080 might end up at something like a 45% price premium, for getting DLSS, DLSS3, Reflex, and DXR boosts. It's becoming an awfully wide gap that favors AMD.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

I foolishly bought a G-Sync monitor. Like a month before Nvidia announced that other variable refresh rate displays would be "G-Sync Compatible". 😆
So if I want to keep VRR (which I do), I'm stuck buying Nvidia cards, unless I get a new display (which I don't plan on. I love this one.)
If I had a FreeSync/G-Sync Compatible display, I would likely be buying an AMD card right now. Even though I love ray-tracing, and I'd probably have to sacrifice it in many games... Those AMD prices are really compelling. Finally.

 

[Blacksad999]

And yet AMD just dropped down to 8% market share, and that was the quarter BEFORE the 4000 series release. They're cheaper because they're objectively inferior products. If you're super budget minded, by all means, grab one. They're a good deal in that regard. But if you aren't broke, there's little compelling reason to go after an AMD card.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

Perhaps one more important note should be added;

The telemetry in Nvidia drivers are far more evasive then AMD's. Anyone ever looked through that?

 

[salgado18]

And yet AMD just dropped down to 8% market share, and that was the quarter BEFORE the 4000 series release. They're cheaper because they're objectively inferior products. If you're super budget minded, by all means, grab one. They're a good deal in that regard. But if you aren't broke, there's little compelling reason to go after an AMD card.

AMD is definitely not inferior, except in raytracing. FSR is almost as good as DLSS, other techs have equivalents, and raster performance is on par (better if you look at price/performance). If you value raytracing, then AMD is inferior, sure. For everything else they are equally good.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

And yet AMD just dropped down to 8% market share, and that was the quarter BEFORE the 4000 series release. They're cheaper because they're objectively inferior products. If you're super budget minded, by all means, grab one. They're a good deal in that regard. But if you aren't broke, there's little compelling reason to go after an AMD card.

You should probably check the meaning of objectively and subjectively. Objectively, as a graphics card reviewer who has been doing this coming up on 10 years (and been doing tech journalism for nearly 20 years), I wouldn't say AMD is objectively inferior. It's the subjective side. I mean, sure, inferior DXR performance. Inferior image quality on FSR2 vs. DLSS (but it's pretty close). Overall, though, for most gamers? The actual day to day experience between AMD and Nvidia is about as small as it's ever been.

It all comes down to performance and price, and I'd certainly have no qualms about telling someone to buy a high-end AMD card because it offers performance that's generally comparable to Nvidia cards that cost 30% more. The only way AMD is really "objectively" inferior is if you compare performance based on original MSRPs. Even in ray tracing, it's pretty dang close when looking at similarly priced RX 6750 XT and RTX 3060. Slightly lower RT perf, significantly higher non-RT perf.

 

[MoxNix]

Amd gpus are better for old cpus and new ones. Nvidia drivers are bugged latency higher than amd. Kinda sucks for low ipc cpus (with amd your old computer fly, with nvidia you need a high end cpu).

In my experience Nvidia GPUs in the 20 and 30 series (probably 40 too) are extremely sensitive to noisy power. I had terrible latency for years with multiple different hardware configurations until I finally bought an expensive double conversion UPS to clean up the power coming from the wall outlet.

 

[King_V]

I foolishly bought a G-Sync monitor. Like a month before Nvidia announced that other variable refresh rate displays would be "G-Sync Compatible". 😆
So if I want to keep VRR (which I do), I'm stuck buying Nvidia cards, unless I get a new display (which I don't plan on. I love this one.)
If I had a FreeSync/G-Sync Compatible display, I would likely be buying an AMD card right now. Even though I love ray-tracing, and I'd probably have to sacrifice it in many games... Those AMD prices are really compelling. Finally.

Given some of the prices that we're seeing on good monitors, and given the ridiculous premium that seems to me lingering for Nvidia, it might be getting to the point where it makes economic sense to get an AMD card AND a new monitor.

I say this, though, as a guesstimate, as I don't know your monitor's specs.

 

[kiniku]

I've used Nvidia products in my PCs for a very long time. But my loyalty is to my wallet. So I recently bought a Merc 6900XT Black limited. I was stoked to give AMD a try. AMD's GPU drivers are the best of the best. I truly wish Nvidia develop similar driver packages. But...I had problems with mine. My screen would randomly black out in the middle of anything non gaming. I use my PC for business too and the random timeouts would drive my crazy! I had to sit there and wait for it to come back -because my entire computer would freeze- or force a power down which I hate doing. And their driver settings would reset randomly sometimes and I'd have to go back in and set/save them over again. So I returned it to - we don't do refunds - NewEgg. And to my luck, they didn't have replacements in stock so they gave me a refund so I bought a used 3090 on Ebay for the same price.

I just didn't have a good experience with my short try at a Radeon based GPU. Nvidia has always been VERY reliable and predictable to me. I follow developments with GPUs closely. I do not see the AMD 7000 series being any different from prior launches than AMD's usual recipe: lesser for lesser. I hope the next gen will be better.

 

[rluker5]

Amd gpus are better for old cpus and new ones. Nvidia drivers are bugged latency higher than amd. Kinda sucks for low ipc cpus (with amd your old computer fly, with nvidia you need a high end cpu).

You must mean older than Core/Zen. I had hoped for this rumor to come to fruition with my 5775c, but the difference was not significant. I still dropped just below 60fps in CP2077 in heavily crowded scenarios when I tried a 6800 vs the 3080 I used previously. Core/Zen and newer CPUs are capable enough that the difference is not large if even noticeable. Users will still be typically GPU bound.

Perhaps one more important note should be added;

The telemetry in Nvidia drivers are far more evasive then AMD's. Anyone ever looked through that?

AMD drivers put something in my bios called AMD health or something. Even in mobos that are barely UEFI. BIOS intrusions are pretty invasive.

In my experience Nvidia GPUs in the 20 and 30 series (probably 40 too) are extremely sensitive to noisy power. I had terrible latency for years with multiple different hardware configurations until I finally bought an expensive double conversion UPS to clean up the power coming from the wall outlet.

Seeing as this is not commonly known or heard of, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with software issues, maybe you have power fluctuations beyond the capability of your PSU to regulate and a UPS is probably protecting the rest of your hardware as well. I have seen the voltage at my wall outlet drop by 10v under full pc load, per voltmeter, but I was tipped off by my lights, and have had no problems with Nvidia, AMD or Intel stability because my PC power supplies are normal and have active PFC to deal with small fluctuations.

Edit: But the AMD GPUs I've had are quite comparable to Nvidia so long as they get the same fps. I would rather have my 6800 than a 3070 at the same price. I do find Nvidia's drivers to be easier to use, faster to use, more reliable and have more meaningful features. But I've used Nvidia probably at a 10:1 ratio to AMD so I'm definitely more accustomed to them. This and the features (DLSS is the biggest one for me lately) would make an Nvidia card worth slightly more $per frame than an AMD one. Maybe 10%? Not 30%. And those AMD cards really are a deal right now.

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

AMD needs to focus more on drivers and optimize them for games.
NVidia drops drivers so often it is even annoying.
DLSS and RT are still NVidia's win and the 4090 wins vs anything but AMD is ever so close, they just need to make the GPUs better with support, NVidia wins a lot in that department.
Also AMD develops for all GPUs so even if inferior it still is a props for me, hate patented and gate keeping(not saying it is not fair to do so because it cost $ but as a consumer I want everything )

I just got an AMD card and I've found it's quite the opposite, AMD tends to try to stick to standards and do things correct the first time around, so new games work even with existing drivers, whereas nvidia needs a driver update each time a new game comes around, and constant patching to keep the game running normally.

Old games seem to work fine as well, so this old "AMD drivers" myth must've been someone not doing a clean install (understandable) of windows, or more recently, not completely removing nvidia drivers when they had an nvidia card and switched to AMD. They leave around so much crap still that can affect OS stability that it is not funny.

If any of you decide to switch card vendors, reinstall windows, as painful as it is.

 

[Thunder64]

We're not anti-AMD. Paul has written some good reviews of Ryzen CPUs. The issue with Ryzen right now is that the AM5 parts are relatively overpriced — not so much the CPU, but the motherboards are expensive. Given Intel's chips often still end up faster (13th Gen stuff), there's a reason AMD is putting the 7000-series on serious discount. And we've written those articles as well. You'll notice Intel CPUs aren't going on sale, other than maybe $10 of 12th gen parts.

I've swapped and tested GPUs from both companies so many times that I've lost count. For the past year or more, I've really had nothing that I would quantify as an overtly negative experience on the AMD or Nvidia side. Sometimes, things can go a bit quirky, but often that's just because I change GPUs so darn often. Run DDU, clear out all the AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPU drivers, do a clean install: It almost always works fine. And by "almost always" I mean I'm sure I've had the occasional hiccup with all brands at some point, but lately it's all gone about as well as could be expected.

Nvidia's advantage right now is that it has DLSS support (still not totally sold on DLSS3 though), plus Reflex. Reflex is in more games than Anti-Lag and probably works better overall. And Nvidia does have better DXR hardware. How much extra are those items worth? That's the difficult thing to assess. For all the games that don't have any special Nvidia features (DXR, DLSS, Reflex), you might end up paying 25% to as much as 50% more than equivalently performing AMD hardware. But if you start factoring in DLSS2... well, it's still a bit of a nebulous target.

Personally, I think spending 10% more for equivalent performance Nvidia could easily be justifiable, maybe even 20%. That's using my base level of performance (meaning no DXR or DLSS). So if you want a high-end card like an RTX 3080, even if we use the $700 price (which requires sketchier hardware brands), you're looking at that or the RX 6800 XT. AMD's card is $515, so Nvidia costs 36% more. That's just too big of a jump in my book.

And looking at the upcoming cards, hypothetically the RX 7900 XT might outperform the RTX 4080 while costing $300 less. Like, it wouldn't surprise me to see AMD (in rasterization games) delivering 10% better performance. Which means the 4080 might end up at something like a 45% price premium, for getting DLSS, DLSS3, Reflex, and DXR boosts. It's becoming an awfully wide gap that favors AMD.

You quite literally just said you would pay 10-20% more for an NVIDIA card even if you didn't care about DXR or DLSS. You clearly have a bias. Whether or not that shows in your articles or not is different. I haven't seen it.

With Ryzen I do. Articles like this pop up fairly often, and I don't like the methodology. I'll go through it.

CPU Pricing and Value: Intel. No problems wit this. Though with the recent price cuts, It's probably a tie.

Gaming Performance: Intel. I'm fine with this for now.

Content Creation/Productivity: Intel. Should be a tie. Intel wins single thread, AMD multi thread. After those first graphs there are six (!) graphs comparing Alder Lake to Zen 3, which is not relevant anymore.

Specifications: Intel. This looks like nothing more than a repeat of CPU Pricing and Value. In other words, just a way to give Intel another win.

Overclocking: Intel. This one is just a mess. First it is ALL Alder Lake vs Zen 3. Alder Lake can eat tons of power, so of course there is more headroom. It should be compared to Zen 4 since they have much closer TDP's. Also, all AMD CPU's are unlocked whereas with Intel you need a K CPU and Z chipset. That alone makes me say this one should go to AMD.

Power Consumption: AMD. It's closer now with Zen 4 but still a win for AMD.

Drivers and Software: Intel. Not sure what this is supposed to even mean. I do know I've never seen AMD win or tie in it though so it seems it's there just to get another win. Both are generally just fine with the occasional problem now and then. I'd call it a tie.

Process Node: AMD. I agree. Not sure why it really matters though. Maybe to throw AMD a bone?

Architecture: Tie. I'm fine with that.

Security: AMD. I don't think it really matters to most people. A lot of the exploits are more theory it seems. But, AMD does have less of them.

So by my count, I'd give Intel 5 because I'd remove Specifications as a duplicate. AMD would get 7 or 8 depending on whether I included pricing. I would consider throwing away security to make it 6 or 7.

Here's the best part though (and by that I mean worst), the comments section starts over two years ago and is closed! Therefore no one can point out the flaws like I just did. Intel wins 7-4. It's the truth. You can't challenge it. Content Creation and Overclocking are the worst by far, IMHO.

 

[Thunder64]

I've used Nvidia products in my PCs for a very long time. But my loyalty is to my wallet. So I recently bought a Merc 6900XT Black limited. I was stoked to give AMD a try. AMD's GPU drivers are the best of the best. I truly wish Nvidia develop similar driver packages. But...I had problems with mine. My screen would randomly black out in the middle of anything non gaming. I use my PC for business too and the random timeouts would drive my crazy! I had to sit there and wait for it to come back -because my entire computer would freeze- or force a power down which I hate doing. And their driver settings would reset randomly sometimes and I'd have to go back in and set/save them over again. So I returned it to - we don't do refunds - NewEgg. And to my luck, they didn't have replacements in stock so they gave me a refund so I bought a used 3090 on Ebay for the same price.

I just didn't have a good experience with my short try at a Radeon based GPU. Nvidia has always been VERY reliable and predictable to me. I follow developments with GPUs closely. I do not see the AMD 7000 series being any different from prior launches than AMD's usual recipe: lesser for lesser. I hope the next gen will be better.

I don't get what you are saying. AMD has the best drivers, but then they were so crappy you couldn't work with them and went back to NVIDIA? OK, sounds like PEBCAK to me. Did you hopefully use DDU to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers. That could have been the issue right there.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

You quite literally just said you would pay 10-20% more for an NVIDIA card even if you didn't care about DXR or DLSS. You clearly have a bias.

Nope, stop right there. I said, because of their DLSS support and DXR hardware, I felt it could be justifiable to spend 10-20% more on an Nvidia card that was otherwise equal in performance to an AMD card. That's not a bias. That's a way of looking at features and performance and saying a higher price could be justified. I also went on to give concrete example of how, with or without DXR, it's difficult to accept Nvidia's current prices. If every game out there supported DLSS and DXR, Nvidia could justify even higher prices, but right now it's probably only 25% of major releases, if that... and the newer ones often support FSR2 as well, which mostly removes any DLSS advantage.

So again, to be clear: If two cards offer equal performance outside of DLSS and DXR, then I think it's not out of the question for people to pay 10% to 20% more for the Nvidia card because of DLSS and DXR. To give a concrete example, the RTX 3080 12GB and the RX 6800 XT have similar rasterization performance at 1440p ultra (102.0 fps on the 6800 XT, 103.4 fps on the 3080 Ti). Now if we were to look at the base MSRPs, the 6800 XT is supposed to cost $650 and the RTX 3080 Ti $1200. By my reasoning, a price of $715 to $780 for the RTX 3080 Ti might be justifiable (and this is also why I think the RTX 3080 12GB has been at least more reasonable than some of Nvidia's other cards, since performance is very close to the 3080 Ti).

At current prices, though, it's not even close. RX 6800 XT was selling for $515 on sale this weekend (sold out now). RTX 3080 12GB has been sitting at $900, and the RTX 3080 Ti at $1,150. It's laughably bad and I can't see why anyone would be paying such prices for Nvidia's previous generation hardware. Like, I have a friend that picked up an RTX 3080 Ti on sale back in August or September for $680. That was a great deal and worth considering! I don't know if Nvidia and its partners actually managed to sell through all their Ampere GPUs or what, but the current prices on anything above the RTX 3050 are pretty insulting.

Even the RTX 3050 isn't great. Performance (in rasterization at 1080p ultra) is 23% slower than the RX 6600 — or the RX 6600 is 30% faster, if you prefer. There's actually no direct AMD competitor on performance, because the 6600 is too fast and the 6500 XT is too slow. If you flip the "10% to 20% more" around, I guess you could say I think it's not out of the question to sacrifice 9% to 17% performance at the same price for an equivalently priced Nvidia card. Both the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3050 can now be found for $250... but the 3050 is 36% slower for the same price. And it also loses in DXR (without DLSS). RTX 3050 feels more like a $200 product.

As for the AMD vs. Intel, or AMD vs. Nvidia articles, we do those because they get a lot of traffic, and people don't want a wishy washy tie. I'm personally fine with ties, but others prefer a clear winner. And because these are regularly updated features, sometimes things get outdated (so old charts that are no longer relevant). It's an aggravating part of writing about CPUs or GPUs: always going back to update things for SEO purposes.

 

[Thunder64]

Nope, stop right there. I said, because of their DLSS support and DXR hardware, I felt it could be justifiable to spend 10-20% more on an Nvidia card that was otherwise equal in performance to an AMD card. That's not a bias. That's a way of looking at features and performance and saying a higher price could be justified. I also went on to give concrete example of how, with or without DXR, it's difficult to accept Nvidia's current prices. If every game out there supported DLSS and DXR, Nvidia could justify even higher prices, but right now it's probably only 25% of major releases, if that... and the newer ones often support FSR2 as well, which mostly removes any DLSS advantage.

So again, to be clear: If two cards offer equal performance outside of DLSS and DXR, then I think it's not out of the question for people to pay 10% to 20% more for the Nvidia card because of DLSS and DXR. To give a concrete example, the RTX 3080 12GB and the RX 6800 XT have similar rasterization performance at 1440p ultra (102.0 fps on the 6800 XT, 103.4 fps on the 3080 Ti). Now if we were to look at the base MSRPs, the 6800 XT is supposed to cost $650 and the RTX 3080 Ti $1200. By my reasoning, a price of $715 to $780 for the RTX 3080 Ti might be justifiable (and this is also why I think the RTX 3080 12GB has been at least more reasonable than some of Nvidia's other cards, since performance is very close to the 3080 Ti).

At current prices, though, it's not even close. RX 6800 XT was selling for $515 on sale this weekend (sold out now). RTX 3080 12GB has been sitting at $900, and the RTX 3080 Ti at $1,150. It's laughably bad and I can't see why anyone would be paying such prices for Nvidia's previous generation hardware. Like, I have a friend that picked up an RTX 3080 Ti on sale back in August or September for $680. That was a great deal and worth considering! I don't know if Nvidia and its partners actually managed to sell through all their Ampere GPUs or what, but the current prices on anything above the RTX 3050 are pretty insulting.

Even the RTX 3050 isn't great. Performance (in rasterization at 1080p ultra) is 23% slower than the RX 6600 — or the RX 6600 is 30% faster, if you prefer. There's actually no direct AMD competitor on performance, because the 6600 is too fast and the 6500 XT is too slow. If you flip the "10% to 20% more" around, I guess you could say I think it's not out of the question to sacrifice 9% to 17% performance at the same price for an equivalently priced Nvidia card. Both the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3050 can now be found for $250... but the 3050 is 36% slower for the same price. And it also loses in DXR (without DLSS). RTX 3050 feels more like a $200 product.

As for the AMD vs. Intel, or AMD vs. Nvidia articles, we do those because they get a lot of traffic, and people don't want a wishy washy tie. I'm personally fine with ties, but others prefer a clear winner. And because these are regularly updated features, sometimes things get outdated (so old charts that are no longer relevant). It's an aggravating part of writing about CPUs or GPUs: always going back to update things for SEO purposes.

What I read was this:

Personally, I think spending 10% more for equivalent performance Nvidia could easily be justifiable, maybe even 20%. That's using my base level of performance (meaning no DXR or DLSS).

I took that to mean you would pay more for NVIDIA even without DXR/DLSS. Do you see how that could be misread? I get what you mean now, and I think better RT performance could be for 10%+. No games I play have it though, so I don't miss it.

Like I said, I couldn't even guess if you had a preferred brand. I see nothing to indicate that you do, if you even do. And your last post was excellent as to the reasoning behind you writing the article.

I used it on another forum saying that hopefully more pieces like it come out. Because even though AMD has been a better value for some time now, NVIDIA still gained market share and AMD is down to 8%! I pointed out that buying the 3050 or 3060 was basically criminally negligent. No one buys those cards for RT. Look at the Amazon best sellers though and it's crazy. On the higher end you could make an argument for RT but there is zero value. So don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the article and we need more of them to make the market a true duopoly or triopoly.

As for the CPU article, that one has flaws for sure and it isn't the only one. It is just frustrating in particular because I can't even comment on it in the appropriate article. Would it be possible to have a new thread every time that one was updated?