We don't even know that yet it could be. It's currently battling with Turing for that honor at least for the last decade... The ever at the end probably isn't accurate though I'm sure we've had a worse generation than this I just can't remember them
I'm just talking performance uplifts at each tier ofc.
That's not how I personally look at things. More performance is a good thing, but we've had enough performance to make excellent games for a very long time now. Blackwell represents the perfect union of powerful hardware backed by a strong, reliable software ecosystem which, to me, largely justifies its price tag. Turing placed extreme emphasis on a newer feature set in an age where the software to back it up simply did not exist, and this technology came at a very high price - and the fact remains that commercial software developers must always cater to the lowest common denominator, which is almost always Radeon and largely due to their drivers, not because of their hardware. That made the investment in the RTX 20 series early on something that had pretty much only futureproofing as a justification, and we all know how flimsy that justification is - there is no future proofing in this business.
I'd like to make a parallel to Nintendo again. Hiroshi Yamauchi had always believed that powerful hardware without quality software (read: games) is worthless, as that is what owners of hardware will ultimately be interacting with. He believed that great games were first and foremost created by artists. This mantra is what made the Famicom the powerhouse it was, eventually being infused in the very DNA of the Super Famicom and indeed, every Nintendo console to date. Today, many would argue that this is what defines Nintendo, and I'd fundamentally agree. Just look at the Switch, and even the upcoming Switch 2: by modern standards, the hardware is bad. Like, laughably bad. But the software is great! Its games are awesome. Creative, interesting, and in many instances, even original.
Now, hear me out, this is why I brought that up: By software, Yamauchi obviously referred to the
games that would run on their machines. My argument is that in the modern age, where software (as in, productivity suites and bespoke video games) heavily relies upon another layer of a support software (such as drivers, standardized APIs and abstraction layers such as DirectX, CUDA, etc.), the importance of a robust, strong ecosystem has become
just as important as the software itself. Modern computers are no longer programmed to the bare metal.
This has always been my first and foremost frustration with AMD, they invest the absolute barest minimum to make whatever's currently on the market work on their video cards. It's not uncommon to find bug fixes for games that are years old on Radeon changelogs, because stuff has always been broken and many didn't even know about it. You know why I paid this mountain of cash on an RTX 5090? Because it supports
EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter if the software I am trying to run is new or old. If it's state of the art, futuristic stuff, or a crufty old Direct3D 7 game from the 1990's.
It works. I want to run video editing software? It's going to work with
EVERYTHING. And it's going to demolish anything in its path with its raw performance while at it. Do I want to run any sort of generic program on my graphics card? I will have all 104+ TFLOPS of its compute power available, with a runtime for a compute language that is concise, well-documented, well-supported and more importantly,
IT JUST WORKS.
Combined, all of these Nvidia technologies not only enable games that are great and boring, new and old alike to be played, but also be developed, tinkered, and modified with confidence, always with an emphasis and focus on the
user experience, without neglecting the developer side. The only other company which has more or less mastered this in the tech world happens to be Apple. To me, the value provided by having years upon years of driver support (Release 570 drivers offer support for GPUs spanning over 11 years!), rapid response to any issues that occur and solid, well-developed features both under and over the hood is something that presently, and for the foreseeable future, AMD couldn't hope to match, especially not as long as all they got is their ad-ridden
CCC2 "Radepn Software" and second rate, often poorly documented clones of Nvidia features for show.
I don't have to swap driver versions like a t-shirt. I don't get the backseat to any experiences, new or old. I don't have to beg any developers for fixes, when an issue is found Nvidia usually has a hotfix available within 48 hours to a week. To me, this is worth whatever price they ask, and if I can't afford the uppermost model, I'll just buy a lower end one.
), or a hopeless fanboy, but I am also not going to waste my time stressing about the costs, and will try to enjoy my luck, as best I can!
