Question Do you thinks the new AMD cards will make Ray Tracing affordable?

Barty1884

Retired Moderator
Sony have confirmed the PS5 (based on custom AMD Navi GPUs) will support Ray Tracing in some way..... So it's a good assumption that the new GPUs will allow for it.

On what cards, and what the performance will look like, is anybodies guess at this stage.
 
Yeah, it's still too early to say for sure what the performance and pricing of their next generation of cards will be like. Hopefully, they'll offer better performance for the money than Nvidia's current offerings, but it's difficult to say for sure, and it will probably be at least a couple months before any detailed information about them is confirmed.
 
It seems that they will sell RTX2070 cards below the price of the RTX2060.

are you referring to the talk about how AMD will sell card with GTX2070 performance but with much lower price point than RTX2060 (the speculated price is $250 i believe). to be honest don't count on it. this is the kind of hype that always end up destroying AMD when they finally launch the real product. if their new card going to have RTX 2070 performance then AMD will price it accordingly to the competition not severely under cut them. maybe slightly under RTX2070 pricing but don't go dreaming RTX2070 performance for GTX 1660 -GTX 1660 Ti pricing.

the recent base pricing for RX590 and Radeon 7 clearly shows that AMD will not going to undercut nvidia to the point some people hope it to be. people hope AMD will make things more affordable for the mass public but if you have been aware what has been happening in this past few weeks the one that force the price to drop is not AMD but nvidia instead.
 
the recent base pricing for RX590 and Radeon 7 clearly shows that AMD will not going to undercut nvidia to the point some people hope it to be. people hope AMD will make things more affordable for the mass public but if you have been aware what has been happening in this past few weeks the one that force the price to drop is not AMD but nvidia instead.
You mean those cards that were likely the result of that Radeon Technology Group executive that AMD "retired" less than a year after hiring? >_>


"He presented suggestions that werent really feasible such as ‘Radeon VII‘ which was to be a Vega 20 based consumer facing part that cost $750 to build and would barely tie in with an [NVIDIA] GTX 1080 Ti."

Those might have been rumors, but considering the informant revealed the Radeon VII as a failed project well before that card was announced or even on anyone's radar, it seems likely that there's some truth to them. At the very least, AMD's official stance that it was an "ordinary retirement" seems a bit hard to believe when the guy just joined the company in the beginning of that year.

The Radeon VII design was already completed by that point, so AMD ended up releasing it, but with its large amount of expensive HBM2 memory, which likely couldn't be cut down without hurting performance, the card is simply too expensive to manufacture to be competitive against the RTX 20-series. The same goes for the prior Vega parts, which AMD could only reduce the prices of so much, similarly making them uncompetitive against their 20-series counterparts.

And the RX 590 was bizarrely priced at launch, being only around 10% faster than an RX 580, which could already be found for around $200 or less at that point. The RX 590 and Radeon VII might have been somewhat more viable at those price points had they been released a year earlier, but they had no business getting launched alongside Nvidia's 20-series. It's perhaps no coincidence that executive's "retirement" was announced in the weeks following the RX 590's launch.

So, Radeon VII and RX 590 pricing is likely not going to be indicative of what Navi pricing will be like. AMD knows they need to provide significantly better value than what Nvidia is offering, due to their current market dominance and the fact their cards released around half a year earlier. Add to that Nvidia's recent support of adaptive sync on FreeSync displays, and AMD no longer has that advantage going for them. Then, there's Raytracing, which AMD's cards will undoubtedly support in some form, but it's difficult to say whether they will feature dedicated hardware with RT performance similar to Nvidia's RTX cards. I have my doubts about the prices and performance levels being as described in that "leaked" information from some months back, but I do think we'll see better value than what Nvidia is currently offering.

As for Nvidia "forcing prices to drop" with their recent 16-series cards, if you look at the actual performance-per-dollar that these cards offer, they are only now starting to catch up to the value that AMD has been offering for months with the RX 580 and 570, and even there they are still a little behind. Supposedly, the 1650 might offer performance near that of a 1060 3GB or RX 570, but it's also rumored to be priced around $150, while many RX 570s could be found for less for quite a while now. The lower power draw could be good to have, but value-wise they aren't really bringing much new to the table. The performance gains might look decent compared to Nvidia's prior cards, but that's only because Nvidia hadn't dropped the prices of those cards at all since they launched back in 2016. Considering the time that has passed since the 10-series launched, these performance gains are actually quite mediocre.
 
As for Nvidia "forcing prices to drop" with their recent 16-series cards, if you look at the actual performance-per-dollar that these cards offer, they are only now starting to catch up to the value that AMD has been offering for months with the RX 580 and 570, and even there they are still a little behind.

because for years being the king of price/performance is not nvidia goal. and i believe it is still like that right now. the very purpose they do that is to pressure AMD to lower their price and in return AMD will get less revenue/profit for themselves for each card being sold. with maxwell and pascal nvidia primary target is mainly the high end. remember when nvidia ninja'd Fury X launch with 980ti priced at $650? back then many speculated that nvidia will charge even more expensive price than 780ti for 980ti. 980ti at $650 is to pressure AMD pricing on Fury X. nvidia know Fury X will be very expensive to manufacture because of HBM and they play that pricing scheme to pressure AMD. Fury Nano that priced at the same price as Fury X indicate that AMD intention to sell those Fury at much higher price. and then with pascal nvidia did the same when they price 1080ti at $700 and cut GTX1080 price by $100 a few months before Vega launch. during this two generation nvidia is pretty much let AMD to be the value king in the mainstream (mid range and lower). now that nvidia completely dominate the high end and charge what ever price they want in that segment they start turning their attention in the mid range to slowly pressure AMD in this segment as well. yeah those lower price on RX500 series is nice for us consumer but not for AMD as a company. this in turn will probably going to set "competitive" pricing for upcoming Navi but that's also mean nvidia is successful in pressuring AMD not to price their card at the price they really want. and nvidia for their part most likely ready to engage the price war if AMD intend to initiate one.
 
now that nvidia completely dominate the high end and charge what ever price they want in that segment they start turning their attention in the mid range to slowly pressure AMD in this segment as well.
I don't see Nvidia applying much pressure to the mid-range segment right now. 32 months after the GTX 1060 launched, they released the 1660 in a similar price segment, while only offering around 20% more performance than a 1060 6GB. Or if we figure in the price being positioned between the 1060 6GB and 3GB, we are looking at maybe around a 30% improvement in performance per dollar. After the better part of 3 years, which is atypically long for a graphics card generation, those kinds of performance gains are not particularly impressive. They were offering a far greater performance improvement when they launched the 1060, and that card came out just 18 months after its predecessor. I do suspect that Nvidia's next generation of cards might be a bit more competitively priced though, since they'll also likely be dealing with competition from Intel in addition to AMD. And this current generation of cards likely won't last nearly as long as Pascal, seeing as they'll undoubtedly want to move to a smaller process architecture next year.

It's also not guaranteed that Nvidia will retain their current grasp on the high-end either. The graphics architecture that AMD has been using in recent years hasn't scaled to the enthusiast-segment as well as Nvidia's, but that could change as they redesign it with greater scalability in mind. AMD's CPUs were not exactly competitive at the higher-end either for a number of years, and we saw them become far more competitive with the introduction of Ryzen.
 
I don't see Nvidia applying much pressure to the mid-range segment right now.

not from consumer perspective. take this an example: before nvidia launched GTX1660ti AMD able to sell RX590 from $250-$260. but when 1660ti comes out AMD are now forced to sell those RX590 much closer to $200. we consumer are happy to see the RX500 series becoming amazing value for it's performance (not to mention those game bundles) but for AMD it is not something that happy for them see their profit margin are reduced because what nvidia has been doing with GTX 16 series pricing scheme.

I do suspect that Nvidia's next generation of cards might be a bit more competitively priced though, since they'll also likely be dealing with competition from Intel in addition to AMD.

intel can be dangerous. especially for AMD. if they really got the right mind set this time even nvidia have to be very careful with their next move. just look what happen in HPC segment with those compute accelerator card. before the market is pretty much duopoly between nvidia and AMD. intel came with their xeon phi and then they pretty much kill AMD in that market and slowly eroding nvidia market share.

It's also not guaranteed that Nvidia will retain their current grasp on the high-end either. The graphics architecture that AMD has been using in recent years hasn't scaled to the enthusiast-segment as well as Nvidia's, but that could change as they redesign it with greater scalability in mind. AMD's CPUs were not exactly competitive at the higher-end either for a number of years, and we saw them become far more competitive with the introduction of Ryzen.

but nvidia is not intel. Ryzen finally catch up because intel really let their guard down thinking AMD will never making a coming back. not with the sad state of their financial situation at the time. they slow down the advancement on PC and set their eyes to crush ARM in the mobile segment with their x86. turns out ARM is quite formidable in the mobile segment (part of it thanks to Qualcomm and their modem/baseband tech) and after years and years of failure they never aware AMD finally arrive at their door step to kick their butt.

so far nvidia still consistently coming up with new GPU every year and that GPU at least brings in 20%-30% performance uplift. on AMD side such performance increase only happening every two years. ever since pascal nvidia has been holding back a bit. the fastest gaming pascal GP102 is not even the best nvidia can do at 471mm2 when they can go as big as 610mm2 with TSMC 16nmFF (GP100). i'm sure nvidia will be ready to face what ever new GPU AMD will coming up with. remember: nvidia still not utilizing 7nm yet (they might opt for 7nm+ or TSMC upcoming 6nm node).
 
take this an example: before nvidia launched GTX1660ti AMD able to sell RX590 from $250-$260. but when 1660ti comes out AMD are now forced to sell those RX590 much closer to $200.
I don't think too many people were actually buying the RX 590. It didn't make much sense when an RX 580 came within 10% of its performance, and was already priced substantially lower. If someone wanted an AMD card with more performance than an RX 580, it made more sense to move up to a Vega 56. Again, I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing of the RX 590 came down to some questionable business decisions by that Radeon executive during his brief tenure. The RX 590 was always sort of an awkwardly-positioned card acting as a stop gap until Navi arrives, and should have been priced in-line with what the RX 580 was selling for from the get-go.

And we could likewise say that the RX 580 and 570 have been pressuring Nvidia to lower prices, as they are currently still the best value options in the sub-$200 range. As for those mid-range cards being priced low, that's been the case since long before Nvidia's new mid-range cards starting coming out. At this point, AMD is likely offloading existing stock in anticipation of the launch of their next generation of 7nm cards in a few months.

And if anything, I would say Nvidia might have the most to lose from Intel entering the graphics card space, as both AMD and Intel offer a more diverse ecosystem of computer hardware. There are too many variables to know for sure how things will play out, but I wouldn't underestimate AMD's ability to launch a more competitive graphics architecture.
 
Again, I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing of the RX 590 came down to some questionable business decisions by that Radeon executive during his brief tenure.

actually it might be a bit more complicated than that. remember AMD launch RX590 after nvidia go crazy with those RTX pricing. with those RTX we saw nvidia intention about keeping older generation performance price intact into new generation while the even more faster card from new generation will start asking even higher price. AMD saw this an opportunity to get better profit for themselves. how about extend that trend to mid range and lower? that what could be set the initial pricing of RX590. what if GTX1660ti with the performance of 1070 retain the same price as 1070 in 2016? this is what AMD probably hope to see nvidia to do with their mid range and lower. the RX590 pricing is more about AMD telling nvidia "let's not push this performance tier into much cheaper price point than it already is and we both get benefit from it".

And we could likewise say that the RX 580 and 570 have been pressuring Nvidia to lower prices, as they are currently still the best value options in the sub-$200 range.

for years i did not see nvidia being pressured by AMD when it comes to pricing. the one that doing the pressure has always been nvidia. for years AMD has been the value king. why is that? i like i said nvidia has no intention to make themselves as "brand that will give more value to your money". it has always been like this: nvidia set a new bar for the pricing and performance. and then AMD will respond by cutting their price. but nvidia will never respond back by engaging direct price war. when AMD starts slashing their price they already met their goal. take 1050ti launch for example. AMD set the price for their RX460 4GB at $150. then nvidia directly put their 20% faster 1050ti 4GB also at $150. this prompt AMD to officially cut RX460 price down to $120 and RX470 down to $170 ahead of 1050ti launch. did nvidia revise their 1050ti pricing? no at all.

And if anything, I would say Nvidia might have the most to lose from Intel entering the graphics card space, as both AMD and Intel offer a more diverse ecosystem of computer hardware.

it might have bigger effect on nvidia since they only do GPU but intel entrance to discrete GPU might might end up killing AMD altogether in PC graphic. they already did on HPC space with those accelerator card. and some might said it was with unfair tactic. but there is nothing AMD can do about it because in accelerator card market intel is not the leader so they somehow able to get away with it. it is the same with discrete GPU market. intel is not the leader in this market so if their pull similar tactic that they did before the immediate threat is more dangerous to AMD than it is to nvidia.

There are too many variables to know for sure how things will play out, but I wouldn't underestimate AMD's ability to launch a more competitive graphics architecture.

AMD is very capable there is no doubt in that. nvidia for years have acknowledge what AMD is capable of. hence they never underestimate what AMD can do.