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

[JarredWaltonGPU]

What I read was this:



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?

At some point, the mods killed the threads for the GPU Hierarchy as well as the Best GPUs articles. I had asked them to create a new thread, since the original was years old and so the first comments were terribly outdated. Instead, they killed the comments completely.

I’d suggest either making a new thread on your own and tagging Paul in it, or just send Paul a PM. He’s not in the forums as often as I am, but he’d likely respond.

I can understand the confusion from my saying “using the base level of performance without DXR,” and that’s why I gave a lengthier explanation. Because if you start with the DXR or DLSS results as a baseline, it throws things off. Plenty of games support neither so those “normal” games are my baseline. 😃

 

[thor220]

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.

Did anyone ask? Do we really need the same comment plastered everyone on this website 10,000,000 times?

 

[Phaaze88]

Holy...

 

[Blush]

I can only comment from first hand experience. But I boughta new PC recently and with it my first AMD card, a 6500 XT. I had recently really been wanting to try AMD products after always using Intel and NVIDIA and went for an all AMD build.

Right out of the gate I had driver timeout issues. No overclocking, no memory errors. Fresh windows 11 fresh windows 10 tried to remedy it but as I found with other userswith the same issue it's just AMDs drivers. Returned it the second day I had it and bought a NVIDIA card and waiting for it to arrive now.

I really, REALLY wanted to like AMD but that issue was just so frustrating that I'll never choose them again for the foreseeable future.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I can only comment from first hand experience. But I boughta new PC recently and with it my first AMD card, a 6500 XT. I had recently really been wanting to try AMD products after always using Intel and NVIDIA and went for an all AMD build.

Right out of the gate I had driver timeout issues. No overclocking, no memory errors. Fresh windows 11 fresh windows 10 tried to remedy it but as I found with other userswith the same issue it's just AMDs drivers. Returned it the second day I had it and bought a NVIDIA card and waiting for it to arrive now.

I really, REALLY wanted to like AMD but that issue was just so frustrating that I'll never choose them again for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully the price on a pre-built with an RX 6500 XT was super low, because that's at the very bottom of the price and performance ladder for modern GPUs (only the RX 6400 lands below it). I also suspect there were other factors in play, like the PC itself or the specific model of card.

 

[Chung Leong]

Performance is just one factor when buying a graphics card. For many consumers, prestige often matters more since it's socially important. Say you're on a date with a fashion model. You took her home. After a couple glasses of wine you show her your gaming rig. If she sees a RTX 3080, she'll think, "Why, he's got class!". If she sees a RX 6900 XT, she'll think, "This guys just wants the most bang for his buck! What am I doing here?". Instead of a night of passion, you end up playing Fortnite with no RT.

 

[Thunder64]

Performance is just one factor when buying a graphics card. For many consumers, prestige often matters more since it's socially important. Say you're on a date with a fashion model. You took her home. After a couple glasses of wine you show her your gaming rig. If she sees a RTX 3080, she'll think, "Why, he's got class!". If she sees a RX 6900 XT, she'll think, "This guys just wants the most bang for his buck! What am I doing here?". Instead of a night of passion, you end up playing Fortnite with no RT.

I almost don't know if you're making fun of video cards or women. I kid, of course.

 

[ddcservices]

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.

When it comes to price for motherboards, you have to look at what the motherboard has on it. Do you compare DDR4 to DDR5 motherboards, or PCIe 4 boards to the new AM5 motherboards that all have SOME PCIe 5.0 on them? Do you compare motherboards that came out a year ago(Z690) to the AM5 boards that came out in September/October that have similar connectivity and features?

There are definite issues on the NVIDIA side where the drivers require more CPU power, and I have wondered for years if the problem is that NVIDIA doesn't fully implement DirectX 12 in hardware, so is using the drivers to compensate. We have seen since the transition from DirectX 11 to 12 that AMD cards did not lose as much performance in the move to DX12 compared to NVIDIA, and the drivers taking care of some DX12 functionality COULD be the reason for that.

As far as DLSS, I've said it before and I will say it again, it is a crutch for video cards. If you reduce resolution, then apply features before using ANYTHING to upscale back to the target resolution, no matter what, you are going to lose SOMETHING. You may not notice it at 1080p, but it will always be there. FSR, XeSS, the same applies, it is a crutch to help frame rates, but you end up with problems. It's better to have a video card that can actually handle the job without needing a crutch. Ray tracing just drains too much performance for most to be happy with it, so they feel a crutch is worth the image degradation in some areas, for what may not really improve the visuals by enough to be worth it.

Now, for the comparisons, RTX 4000 series vs. Radeon 7000(7900XTX and XT come out on December 13th), that is where performance in ray tracing remains to be seen. For the money, the 7900XTX and even XT look like they will be faster than the RTX 4080 16GB in raster performance, and we just have to see how far behind AMD will be in ray tracing. Paying more for NVIDIA if you aren't using ray tracing makes no sense when AMD has pretty much caught up or even surpassed NVIDIA in raster performance makes no sense to me. NVIDIA is losing its lead, not quickly, but AMD isn't really all that far behind at this point, and if you go back to a 2019 generation CPU, NVIDIA has even less of an edge.

 

[dalauder]

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.

Thanks for the thorough reply.

I'm mostly complaining because Intel has basically gone crazy with power usage the last couple of years (maybe Nvidia too) and many people on Reddit comment on not seeing benchmark Intel performance because of thermal throttling in most OEM systems. The testing of chips always uses a several hundred dollar case that most people won't have. The tests where Intel is held to reasonable power draw see like 12% drops in performance, where they would no longer be performance leaders.

So can someone please do a review with an average 240mm water cooler and $90 case? That would be more real-world and reflect a lot of high-end OEM builds.

Intel's marketing is essentially cheating, taking advantage of the fact that reviewers use a $300 case and $150 280mm or 360mm water cooler. That's smart for Intel, but reviewers should call them out on this.

 

[dalauder]

I can only comment from first hand experience. But I boughta new PC recently and with it my first AMD card, a 6500 XT. I had recently really been wanting to try AMD products after always using Intel and NVIDIA and went for an all AMD build.

Right out of the gate I had driver timeout issues. No overclocking, no memory errors. Fresh windows 11 fresh windows 10 tried to remedy it but as I found with other userswith the same issue it's just AMDs drivers. Returned it the second day I had it and bought a NVIDIA card and waiting for it to arrive now.

I really, REALLY wanted to like AMD but that issue was just so frustrating that I'll never choose them again for the foreseeable future.

I've been running a Radeon RX 480 for six years and the only issues I've had are with 20 year old games that call OpenGL or DirectDraw wrong.