AMD Pits Its Radeon RX 7900 Series Graphics Cards Against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080

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The AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series has been designed to compete against NVIDIA's current second-best graphics card for gamers, the GeForce RTX 4080, according to new slides shared by red team that include comparisons between the hardware and some of the key reasons as to why an enthusiast might decide on one over another.

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Can't wait for some comparative reviews. Thing is if Nvidia delays the only real hardware to review against will be the 4090. Kind of a crap situation for AMD. Well depending on how you look at it I suppose.
 
Disappointing, but not surprising.

I didn't think they'd be able to be competitive against he 4090.
 
I was cautiously optimistic about the 7900XTX going against the 4090 but I do hope that it can trade blows with the 4080. If it does, and at $300 less, it's going to make things very interesting for 4080 and anything under it. If someone can get almost, or more, than the same performance for $300 less then why wouldn't they? This card could be the proverbial fly in NV's soup for anything under the 4090 right now. I think we have the beginning of price wars for the mid to high tier now and depending on the pricing for AMD's other cards it could get even more interesting.

Edit: I'm years beyond making comic-type images, just don't have the time, but it would be funny to see one of Lisa and Jensen, and somehow-Raja, playing chess, but the pieces are the new GPUs and CPUs and the Kings are consumer wallets.
 
If someone can get almost, or more, than the same performance for $300 less then why wouldn't they?
Watch and see: nVidia might come down some on price, but they will always ask a premium over AMD performance. And people will continue to pay that premium gladly.

There's always some reason (some are valid, some were valid at some point in the past, some are just plain out FUD), pick your favorite (I'm sure we'll see some chime in support of their favorites):
- Drivers
- Compatibility with something or another
- Performance with some aspect other than gaming (rendering, transcoding, AI, etc)
- Support for things other-than-gaming (e.g. AI noise filtering)
- Linux (nothing specific here, just Linux in general)
- DLSS / PhysX / pick a proprietary API
- Green is better than Red
- Raytracing
- Higher quality AIB providers
- Availability
- Higher top-tier performance (even if you aren't buying that top-tier card)
- Woodscrews make it easier to use your own aftermarket cooling
- SLI
- Loyalty programs (trade-up, etc)
- Overclocking results
- Influencer / eSports / advertising
- Leather Jackets are cool
- Cooler / Quieter stock coolers
- Ability to bypass unhackable hardware locks for great mining performance
- Game / Software bundles
- Geforce Experience is just that good
- Shield streaming
- Found them dirt cheap gray market / used mining rigs
 
Watch and see: nVidia might come down some on price, but they will always ask a premium over AMD performance. And people will continue to pay that premium gladly.

There's always some reason (some are valid, some were valid at some point in the past, some are just plain out FUD), pick your favorite (I'm sure we'll see some chime in support of their favorites):
- Drivers
- Compatibility with something or another
- Performance with some aspect other than gaming (rendering, transcoding, AI, etc)
- Support for things other-than-gaming (e.g. AI noise filtering)
- Linux (nothing specific here, just Linux in general)
- DLSS / PhysX / pick a proprietary API
- Green is better than Red
- Raytracing
- Higher quality AIB providers
- Availability
- Higher top-tier performance (even if you aren't buying that top-tier card)
- Woodscrews make it easier to use your own aftermarket cooling
- SLI
- Loyalty programs (trade-up, etc)
- Overclocking results
- Influencer / eSports / advertising
- Leather Jackets are cool
- Cooler / Quieter stock coolers
- Ability to bypass unhackable hardware locks for great mining performance
- Game / Software bundles
- Geforce Experience is just that good
- Shield streaming
- Found them dirt cheap gray market / used mining rigs
Well I think the list is a little over the top but some valid points for sure. However, in places like the Steam lists where the GTX 1660 is reigning supreme, along with some similar AMD cards, I think I suspect which directions those folks will go.
 
However, in places like the Steam lists where the GTX 1660 is reigning supreme, along with some similar AMD cards,

AMD?

The top.. I dunno - 20-something or so models, I pasted a screen grab below.

You don't get to a specific AMD model until the RX580 at #25, and a current gen AMD until the RX6600 at something around #50. I didn't go and add it up, but all the AMD cards together look to be somewhere around .. 7-9% marketshare? Which compares to the nVidia 1060 - just that one model, all by itself.

Now, I defend the underdog a good bit (I don't consider myself a Republican or Democrat, I like to root for the underdog and the outsider) - but here's some real criticism of AMD. I thought AMD hit that same price/performance gap that the current 4000 vs 7000 lineup is looking to hit.

But... they are almost no where to be found in this list. The 6800XT is sitting at 0.16% -- almost at the dead last position. The 6900XT is not that many spots ahead of it - at 0.18% (The XTX isn't even listed).

Now, I don't think that's entirely because they are being shunned and poor AMD. My list is a lot of hyperbole, but a good bit of it is legitimate, and one of my biggest gripes is that AMD went in gunshy and just didn't allocate production. My circumstantial evidence: these installation numbers.

There are only 2 ways I can think of to explain these dismal numbers that are plausible: The first is that AMD is doing just that poor in sales. And that is possible, for all the reasons I listed (real and fake) and dozens of other ones I haven't even put to text - but we just went through a period where Every. Single. GPU. Made. Sold. Now, most of that was to miners, but tend to make their way to gamers as well eventually, and nVidia sold it's fair share of cards (and then some) to miners as well, so it wasn't just "Oh the miners got them all".

The other would be that AMD only has a finite amount of fab allocation, and is choosing to prioritize their CPU production at the expense of their GPU production. Now, AMD seems to be selling every bit they can produce, and CPU dies are ~much~ smaller than GPU dies, which makes them (I suspect) more profitable. So I can't really blame AMD for making the business decision, but as a gamer, it really is allowing nVidia such a dominant position that I hate to see it.


I said only 2 ways to explain this: there are 3 more I can possibly think of, but I also discount them. But for the purposes of being complete:
You could also say it's because Steam is just a small subset of gamers and these numbers in no way reflect real life. I'd counter saying - yes, it's a subset, but it's more than large enough to be statistically significant. They may not be absolutely accurate in terms of actual marketshare, but I believe they are going to be relatively indicative of how the market looks overall. And it could be those generic "AMD" entries (and Intel and others) are the countless cards that I'm looking for, just misidentified in either the reporting or by the driver -- but just looking at the magnitude of it all, I don't think that comes close to the magnitude of canceling out my criticism. And you can say these Steam numbers get way skewed by Asian gaming cafes. To that, I say - they are gaming too - why shouldn't they be counted? Maybe they should be counted multiple times, because multiple gamers are leveraging the same hardware (depending on if you want the Hardware survey to be indicative of physical hardware sales/installations, or what hardware gamers are using to play - which are similar but not identical metrics)

1668568265664.png
 
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AMD?

The top.. I dunno - 20-something or so models, I pasted a screen grab below.

You don't get to a specific AMD model until the RX580 at #25, and a current gen AMD until the RX6600 at something around #50. I didn't go and add it up, but all the AMD cards together look to be somewhere around .. 7-9% marketshare? Which compares to the nVidia 1060 - just that one model, all by itself.

Now, I defend the underdog a good bit (I don't consider myself a Republican or Democrat, I like to root for the underdog and the outsider) - but here's some real criticism of AMD. I thought AMD hit that same price/performance gap that the current 4000 vs 7000 lineup is looking to hit.

But... they are almost no where to be found in this list. The 6800XT is sitting at 0.16% -- almost at the dead last position. The 6900XT is not that many spots ahead of it - at 0.18% (The XTX isn't even listed).

Now, I don't think that's entirely because they are being shunned and poor AMD. My list is a lot of hyperbole, but a good bit of it is legitimate, and one of my biggest gripes is that AMD went in gunshy and just didn't allocate production. My circumstantial evidence: these installation numbers.

There are only 2 ways I can think of to explain these dismal numbers that are plausible: The first is that AMD is doing just that poor in sales. And that is possible, for all the reasons I listed (real and fake) and dozens of other ones I haven't even put to text - but we just went through a period where Every. Single. GPU. Made. Sold. Now, most of that was to miners, but tend to make their way to gamers as well eventually, and nVidia sold it's fair share of cards (and then some) to miners as well, so it wasn't just "Oh the miners got them all".

The other would be that AMD only has a finite amount of fab allocation, and is choosing to prioritize their CPU production at the expense of their GPU production. Now, AMD seems to be selling every bit they can produce, and CPU dies are ~much~ smaller than GPU dies, which makes them (I suspect) more profitable. So I can't really blame AMD for making the business decision, but as a gamer, it really is allowing nVidia such a dominant position that I hate to see it.


I said only 2 ways to explain this: there are 3 more I can possibly think of, but I also discount them. But for the purposes of being complete:
You could also say it's because Steam is just a small subset of gamers and these numbers in no way reflect real life. I'd counter saying - yes, it's a subset, but it's more than large enough to be statistically significant. They may not be absolutely accurate in terms of actual marketshare, but I believe they are going to be relatively indicative of how the market looks overall. And it could be those generic "AMD" entries (and Intel and others) are the countless cards that I'm looking for, just misidentified in either the reporting or by the driver -- but just looking at the magnitude of it all, I don't think that comes close to the magnitude of canceling out my criticism. And you can say these Steam numbers get way skewed by Asian gaming cafes. To that, I say - they are gaming too - why shouldn't they be counted? Maybe they should be counted multiple times, because multiple gamers are leveraging the same hardware (depending on if you want the Hardware survey to be indicative of physical hardware sales/installations, or what hardware gamers are using to play - which are similar but not identical metrics)

View attachment 2051
RE: AMD, I think I was remembering from a while back. I tend to feel that these Steam lists are fairly relevant. Sure right now we have all the hype for the 4090 but then I read posts in a lot of forums and see signatures showing anything from a 1080 Ti to 3060/3070 which leads me to believe that there is only a small percentage of the top tier cards being made and sold. However, I suspect that might be changing due to 4K and RT becoming more of a norm.

I root for the underdog too and would really like to be able to buy a top tier AMD card. I might still end up with an 7900XTX after I get the new build done. It'd be nice to be able to use Freesync with the CRG9 and that could be a good match as its demands are slightly less than 4K.
 
I think that steam is no longer the all encompassing behemot it used to be and a bunch of the more popular games are not available on it or not exclusively.

Statistically these nrs might be a decent ballpark estimate but not more then that.

If you look at some actual nrs iso % (this is some napkin math) for simplicity' sake there are 120 million monthly steam users, and AMD has around 10% market share, that's still 12 million cards, not a small amount.

I also see that for example the 3080 which has been oos for almost 2 years in certain markets has gone up by almost 1/3 rd in the last 5 months
the 3060 even almost doubled, there seems to be a huge spike in Nvidia 3000 series availability recently.

Availability seems to play a decent role in these nr's and AMD has admitted a couple years ago they were mainly focusing on CPU's hence the abysmall 5000 series of GPU's and have more recently had more time and money to invest in GPU's, one can only hope they have some decent stock this generation.
 
I also see that for example the 3080 which has been oos for almost 2 years in certain markets has gone up by almost 1/3 rd in the last 5 months
the 3060 even almost doubled, there seems to be a huge spike in Nvidia 3000 series availability recently.
Yeah, I noticed that too. Thanks again @Brian_B ! I think we are seeing a trend change but also I think that the "restocked" campaign that dropped prices a few months ago may have played a factor. I know in Europe you guys are still having a rough time of it but stateside a lot of the 3000 series has dropped significantly and those who don't want to deal with or wait for the 4000 series are willing to move on them.
 
Watch and see: nVidia might come down some on price, but they will always ask a premium over AMD performance. And people will continue to pay that premium gladly.

There's always some reason (some are valid, some were valid at some point in the past, some are just plain out FUD), pick your favorite (I'm sure we'll see some chime in support of their favorites):
- Drivers
- Compatibility with something or another
- Performance with some aspect other than gaming (rendering, transcoding, AI, etc)
- Support for things other-than-gaming (e.g. AI noise filtering)
- Linux (nothing specific here, just Linux in general)
- DLSS / PhysX / pick a proprietary API
- Green is better than Red
- Raytracing
- Higher quality AIB providers
- Availability
- Higher top-tier performance (even if you aren't buying that top-tier card)
- Woodscrews make it easier to use your own aftermarket cooling
- SLI
- Loyalty programs (trade-up, etc)
- Overclocking results
- Influencer / eSports / advertising
- Leather Jackets are cool
- Cooler / Quieter stock coolers
- Ability to bypass unhackable hardware locks for great mining performance
- Game / Software bundles
- Geforce Experience is just that good
- Shield streaming
- Found them dirt cheap gray market / used mining rigs
As AMD has caught up to Nvidia in a number of market sectors that GPUs address, my own list has gotten much smaller.

Big ones are:
- Compatibility with content-creation apps
- Support for things other than gaming (the AI noise cancelling stuff, as well as streaming apps)
- DLSS
- RT performance

To add to the above, I picked up an RX6800 to run my biases against, which did a brief stint in case reviews so I'm just now really putting it to use. First title I ground into was Forza Horizon 5 - which recently added more RT support in-game. Well, wouldn't you know - 4k, 60Hz with sub-16ms frametimes with RT and nearly all of the quality options maxed out, no problem.

This machine in particular, which is an ITX build with a 5800X3D, is going to be run on the living room OLED (a 2017 model) for controller oriented games like Forza 5, and it's already seen some use behind my Freesync-compatible 38" Alienware. Aside from learning AMDs software / drivers, which is one reason for me running the RX6800, I'm really just looking forward to playing some of these games!



So far, I can say that:
- Drivers seem to be a non-issue; not that there aren't / can't be hiccups, but that the past struggles that AMD has had appear to no longer hinder them, and that both Nvidia and themselves are struggling to keep up with new game releases
- AMD addresses content-creation app support with the 7000-series unveiling, and this is where they could make some excellent inroads
- AMD isn't going to be able to fully counter DLSS anytime soon - FSR is an entirely less advanced approach to the problem, however, FSR does reduce the lead that DLSS provides
- RT performance on the 6000-series is quite.... 'serviceable' - it's obvious that RT intensive games are best played with the feature off, but at the same time, I've been playing with RT on with my 3080 12GB and been fairly impressed at how well it runs, and the RX7000-series looks to be its equal in RT performance while eclipsing it in overall GPU performance - so, looking good for actually playing RT games!

And I'll say that I've looked into the AI noise cancelling stuff and that while it does work, I'm not terribly impressed by the usability. It may be 'better' in terms of absolute effectiveness, but it needs tuning for reliability such that it doesn't wind up losing spoken words and breaking intelligibility. It seems more useful for cleaning up recorded tracks than it is for VOIP.
 
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The reason those lower cards rule the roost is that's what primarily comes in pre-built gaming PC's that cost $1000-1500. That's what mom and dad buy their kids. That's what people feel comfortable, or are reluctant, to spend on a gaming rig. 99.9% of people aren't building their own gaming PC's, and if they are only a fraction of that 0.1% are spending $1000-2000 on a GPU.

While the 4090, 4080 and 7900XTX are great top performers, they only really being sold to 0.05% or less of gamers. They're more common in our circles because we're that 0.05%.

4K gaming and RT may be the new big thing, but the mass majority of people simply aren't gaming at 4K with RT. 1080P is still king because monitors are cheap and the hardware to drive them is cheap.
 
The reason those lower cards rule the roost is that's what primarily comes in pre-built gaming PC's that cost $1000-1500.
Great point and something I have noticed. I do take a look at prebuilt stuff just to see what's out there. Most are still junk but every now and then one stands out but is usually 4K-5K, or more, by then.
 
The reason those lower cards rule the roost is that's what primarily comes in pre-built gaming PC's that cost $1000-1500. That's what mom and dad buy their kids. That's what people feel comfortable, or are reluctant, to spend on a gaming rig. 99.9% of people aren't building their own gaming PC's, and if they are only a fraction of that 0.1% are spending $1000-2000 on a GPU.

I have a feeling... that a lot of people can't justify spending the cost of what equates to a mid tier laptop on a video card. PLUS... there are a veritable **** TON of people who only game and PC on laptops. Never touching a desktop at all for any of their compute needs. So they will go to microbuy and get the laptop the saleseperson says their kid would love to game on that is in their budget and be job well done.
 
I have a feeling... that a lot of people can't justify spending the cost of what equates to a mid tier laptop on a video card. PLUS... there are a veritable **** TON of people who only game and PC on laptops. Never touching a desktop at all for any of their compute needs. So they will go to microbuy and get the laptop the saleseperson says their kid would love to game on that is in their budget and be job well done.
I agree. $1000-2000 is a tough pill to swallow on a GPU alone. Even for people that can afford it. That's most people's whole budget, which has to include a monitor, keyboard, mouse and headset. Makes those pre-build combo deals pretty enticing, even if the specs are low to low-mid.

And you're right. Laptops with those mid-tier 10, 20 and 30 series GPU's are probably the bulk of what's reported on Steam.
 
And you're right. Laptops with those mid-tier 10, 20 and 30 series GPU's
My last laptop (just under 2 years ago), an MSI GP66 Leopard, was one of those. I got the model update with the 3070 (130W variant) and 11800H (8c/16t that boosts to 4.45) and love it for 1080p gaming. It's aging well.
 
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