If you ever dally in the world of PC gaming, there is one thing for sure: at some point, you will need to upgrade your video card.
It used to be that when you upgraded your Voodoo2, you simply bought a Voodoo3 (or maybe an Nvidia RIVA TNT2 if you wanted full 32 bit color). But nowadays, looking at the feature list of a video card is like reading some strange sort of code.
Poor Xbox sales have affected AMD’S bottom line
Oh wow. How surprising! Nvidia overpriced their RTX cards by +100% and AMD instead of offering real competition, decided to join Nvidia in their greedy approach, while not having the same mindshare as Nvidia (sadly) does. The 7900 launch was a marketing disaster. All the reviews were made while the card was not worth the money at all, they lowered the price a bit later on, but not only not enough but also too late and out of "free marketing" window coming along with the new card generation release. Then the geniuses at AMD axed the high-end SKUs with increased cache etc, cause "nobody will buy expensive cards to play games" while Nvidia laughed at them selling their 2000€ 4090s.
Intel had all the mindshare among PC enthusiasts with their CPUs. All it took was a competetive product and good price (Ryzen 7000 series and especially 7800x3d) and guess what? AMD regained the market share in DYI PCs in no time! The same could've have happened with Radeon 5000, Radeon 6000 and Radeon 7000.
But meh. Why bother. Let's cancell high-end RDNA 4 and use the TSMC wafers for AI and then let the clueless "analysts" make their articles about "gaming demand dwingling".
I'm sure low-end, very overpriced and barely faster if not slower RDNA4 will turn things around. It will have AI and RT! Two things nobody asked for, especially not gamers who'd like to use the PC for what's most exciting about PC gaming (VR, high framerate gaming, hi-res gaming).
8000 series will be slow, overpriced and marketed based on its much improved RT/AI... and it will flop badly.
And there will be no sane conclusions made at AMD about that. There will be just one, insane: Gaming is not worth catering to. Let's go into AI/RT instead, what could go wrong..."
Well that's gonna happen when you don't really try. I want to support AMD so badly and give Nvidia some actual competition but they don't very much seem interested in challenging, by their own accord. I been waiting for them to attack the GPU segment the same way they took over CPU, but they just seem so content with handing Nvidia the market year after year, and it's happening again this year with their cancelled high end card.
AMD prcied their cards thinking that they will sell out just like in the mining craze. I suspect reality has hit home when they realized most gamers cannot afford to spend over $500 for a gpu.
AMD has long been the best value option if you're looking for a new GPU. Now even their latest Radeon RX 7000 series is getting cheaper.
Nvidia DLSS 3.7 is the latest update to the long-running AI upscaling technology, and it further shows native performance doesn't matter.
I think hardware development is at a point where they need to figure out how to draw less power, These beefy high end cards eat wattage, and I'm curious if using DLSS & AI in general will lower the power draw. It would seem like the days of just adding more VRAM & horsepower is over. Law of diminishing returns. Pretty soon DLSS/FSR will be incorporated into everything, and eventually the tech will be good enough to hardly notice a difference if at all. AI is the future and it would be foolish to turn around and not incorporate it at all. Reliance on AI is only going to pick up more & more.
PS4 Pro had dedicated hardware in it for supporting checkerboard rendering that was used significantly in PS4 first party titles, so you don't need to look to PC or even modern PC gaming. The first RTX cards released nearly 6 years ago, so how many nails does this coffin need?
Almost deaf person:
- lightweight portable 5$, speakers of 0,5cm diameter are the final nail in coffin of Hi-Fi audio!
Some people in 2010:
- smartphones are the final nain in the console gaming's coffin!
This is just the same.
AI upscalling is complete dogshit in terms of motion quality. The fact that someone is not aware of it (look at the deaf guy example) doesn't mean the flaws are not there. They are. And all it takes to see them, is to use a display that handles motion well, so either gets true 500fps at 500Hz LCD TN or OLED (or faster tech) or uses low persistence mode (check blurbusters.com if you don't know what it means) also known as Black Frame Insertion or backlight strobing.
Also, image ruined by any type of TAA is just as "native image" as chineese 0,5$ screwdriver is "high quality, heavy duty, for professional use". It's nowhere near it. But if you're an ignorant "journalist", you will publish crap like this article, just to flow with the current.
There's no coffin to native res quality and there never will be. Eventually, we'll have enough performance in rasterization to drive 500fps, which will be a game changer for motion quality while also adding other benefit - lower latency.
And at 500fps, the amount of time required for upscalling makes it completely useless.
This crap is only usable for cinematic stuff, like cutscenes and such. Not for gaming. Beware of ignorants on the internet. The TAA is not "native" and the shitty look of the modern games when you disable any TAA, is not "native" either as it's ruined by the developer's design choice - you can cheat by rendering every 4th pixel when you plan to put a smeary TAA pass on it later on. When you disable it, you will see a ruined image, horrible pixellation and other visual "glitches" but it is NOT what native would've looked like if you'd like to honestly compare the two.
Stay informed.
How much VRAM is standard today? My laptop has a 1080p QLED display but only an Intel Iris Xe with 128MB of VRAM. I currently do all my gaming on it but certain titles do suffer because of it. I plan on getting a Steam Deck OLED soon to play the newer and more demanding titles.
best shopping guide for noobs is to just get a ps4. That way u dont need to be so damn smart.
I was currently in the market for doing a PC upgrade and found it cheaper, and easier to actually purchase a prebuilt one from an online supplier. In my case I found Digital Storm to suit my PC rig need. You can find some great deals that if your not savvy with upgrading are the best route. Most people that want to upgrade to play games on PCs might end up finding that the GPU is the least of their worries.