It's not even close to being the same thing, Nvidia literally tried to call a product that was 20% slower exactly the same, that's straight up lying.
Oh I must heartily disagree because they are
almost exactly the same thing. The way that nVidia and AMD both separated the two cards was with the suffixes. On on hand, you had nVidia with the RTX 4800 16GB or RTX 4800 12GB and on the other you had AMD with the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. There is a 20% performance gulf between the GeForce cards and a 16% gulf between the Radeon cards. AMD had already demonstrated that even a 9% performance gulf was enough to change the
actual number of the card (not just the suffix) the way that they did with the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT.
Is nVidia worse in this case than AMD? Of course they are, they always are (and I'm not saying that ironically). I can't remember a time when AMD did something under-handed but was completely outdone in the under-handed department by either Intel or nVidia while many times Intel or nVidia did something downright sleazy and AMD refused to follow suit.
Now, don't get the idea that I'm anti-AMD because I'm far from it. Personally, I
only buy AMD CPUs and ATi GPUs because of what Intel and nVidia have both done in the past. Having said that, I'm not an AMD fanboy (because fanboys are a level of stupid that I'll never approach) and I won't defend the indefensible just because AMD did it and nVidia was slightly worse.
I don't love AMD, I just buy their products because I don't want to buy anything from Intel or nVidia. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the products themselves, it's six of one and a half-dozen of the other because they all work and they all work well. The thing is, what if the pushback against AMD had been as strong as the pushback against nVidia? What if AMD had capitulated like nVidia did and sold the RX 7900 XT with the far more appropriate part number of RX 7800 XT and dropped the price an extra $100 like nVidia did? It would've caused a price war with the RTX 4070 Ti and drove prices down further for
everyone. That would have been an ideal situation and not let AMD off the hook for overpricing what is now permanently known as the RX 6900 XT. Instead, what we have is the RX 7800 XT being comparable to the RTX 4070.
It's bad enough that AMD pushed their number stack down because the perception that people will have is that GeForce cards are just stronger because Radeon cards have to have a higher part number to match them. I know that it sounds ridiculous but people who are tech-ignorant (which is most people) often get ridiculous impressions from things. What AMD really should have done is not release the RX 7900 XTX as a level-9 card in the first place and kept the level-9 moniker for a later refresh that could have more closely rivalled the RTX 4090. I don't necessarily believe that AMD should follow nVidia's numbering scheme but the fact is that nVidia owns so much of the market that they are the de facto standard against which all others are compared.
AMD found success back in the day by making their Phenom II part numbers more similar to Intel's because people knew Intel's numbers and understood where each CPU stood in performance. For example, the Phenom II X4 940 was meant to compete with the Q9400 and the part number similarity made it easy for people to know what the Q9400's AMD equivalent was. People are lazy and if they have to do any mental gymnastics to figure out that you must go one number series higher on a Radeon compared to the GeForce, most will just say "screw that" and buy the GeForce. This is why I said that heads should have rolled either at AMD or ATi as a result of this debacle.
The last generation was pretty good in this regard but not as good as it could've been. I'll use last gen's numbers because they're more complete:
RX 6400 ≈ RTX 3040 (didn't exist so the equivalent was the GTX 1650)
RX 6500 ≈ RTX 3050 (the RX 6500 XT had no business using the XT suffix)
RX 6600 ≈ RTX 3060
RX 6600 XT ≈ RTX 3060 Ti
RX 6700 ≈ RTX 3070
RX 6700 XT ≈ RTX 3070 Ti
RX 6800 ≈ RTX 3080
RX 6800 XT ≈ RTX 3080 Ti
RX 6900 ≈ RTX 3090
RX 6900 XT ≈ RTX 3090 Ti
Now of course, this would be in a perfect world but the reality wasn't too far off and people had an easier time understanding it. Remember that we in the tech community aren't the norm and most people have no idea how to read part numbers for video cards or CPUs any more than we know how to read auto part numbers (which are actually
less confusing).
In the end, the only side I'm on is the consumers' side because that's what I am and that's who I care about (Ray Zelinsky). If you think that the 4% difference in the performance deltas is enough to give a pass to one company over the other, I don't know what to tell you because it means that you're
not on the consumers' side, you're on AMD's.
To be fair, it's usually true that being on AMD's side is the same as being on the consumers' side but this is one of those (admittedly rare) times that this doesn't apply.
