They were lower wattage, but also lower performance, so not really.
From the latest GPU review tested with 2023.2 bench.
View attachment 305435
6800 is in a good spot since it's lower clocked, but the rest are the same or worse than equivalent NVIDIA series.
It's more impressive when you consider that RDNA2 was on TSMC 7 nm and Ampere was on Samsung 8 (10 nm).
It's so stupid because the stock voltages are insanely high
I can lose 50Mhz and shave 150W off my GPU, or lose ~110W at the same boost. They went insanely hard to push them to stupid levels.
Most if not all 144hz monitors probably have VRR, you can just cap the framerate to 60 or any other arbitrary number and it will be fine, you don't have to use refresh rates that evenly divide the max refresh rate.
This is correct, if you cap within the VRR range you're good to go thanks to the large vertical blanking total being used - so 60FPS on 144Hz still runs with the timings of 144Hz, it just blanks the backlight during the spare time resulting in a fairly good image that's still displayed faster
I don't have the correct wording on the top of my head, but you can think of it as getting the display latency of your max refresh rate, anywhere within that VRR range (so 48FPS on a display that does 48-144Hz, you're getting the display latency of 144Hz)
It gets weird when below that range, 47FPS doubles to 94Hz but the duplication adds a frame of latency so 48FPS/Hz (20.83ms) displays faster than 47FPS/94Hz
94Hz = 10.6ms (times two) for 21.2ms *(see below)
48FPS is ready in 20.83ms
144Hz is 6.94ms
6.94 - 13.88 - 20.82 - 27.76ms
both would end up being displayed at the same time here, in that fourth refresh cycle - but as far as the system responsiveness goes that means the CPU and GPU were asked to render the next frame later in that fourth cycle (or 2nd/3rd with pre-rendered frames) so the next frame is 20.82ms/13.88ms/etc newer than a traditional Vsync cycle, so it
feels a lot less laggy.
*Again here, because of the way the adaptive sync tech works the CPU and GPU are asked to render a new frame based on the second ones timing - so you're getting a duplicated frame on the display, but the CPU and GPU aren't waiting that extra time, they act based on the second cycle. This is why VRR duplicate frames dont add latency like DLSS3 or those motion smoothing modes on a TV.
It gets weird because many displays have motion smearing and overshoot at lower refresh rates so 47FPS at 94Hz could be picture perfect beauty, but 48FPS while technically faster adds in the overshoot and issues. My monitor has this, reviews point out that it's best overdrive mode causes artifacts below 90Hz.