I apologize for a lot of repetitive bla-blah-blah! Maybe I shouldn't post this, but...
It seems RDNA4 is long overdue. Ideally this is what RDNA3 should have been, instead of releasing half baked product. This is important, because not only dGPUs are based on it, but iGPUs, as well. And the last require these improvements even more. Things are worse, because APUs/mobile are stuck with RDNA 3/3.5 for a long time. It means that the laptops comming in the next couple years, will still have the outdated iGPUs, that should have been replaced by RDNA4 at least year ago. And yet they advertise this as an achievement.
The power consumption, is the biggest threat right now. I would say even bigger than the inferiority of upscale and RTRT technologies. No matter how much someone uses the upscale, this won't fix the situation, if the card is a powerhog. It's completely clear, that the primary market for any company in the world is US, where company like AMD sells their absolute mass of products, and where people do not count, or think about amount of electric power being used. Especially when it comes to gamers.
So why does it matter? Because once again, the iGPUs use the same µarch, but scaled down/limited to just few CUs. If the efficiency is bad for desktop, it will be as bad with smaller iGPUs/hanheld/mobile GPUs either. And sadly, the inefficiency, is not only a result of an inferior node, but of inferior design as well. Not to mention, that there are ways to reduce the rendering load, without dumping the quality, instead of bruteforcing it. And this part alos heavily relies on the software side, which sadly still lags behind.
But enough complains. This won't fix the situation. Still would be great if these delays will turn into good fruition, and lead to abundance of powerful and improved, energy efficient products, even if they will not have the performance of next gen nVidia top solutions. But I don't hold my breath.
$650-700 would be ok, and in this market I certainly wouldn't expect much lower. It's just amusing to me that AMD started out (months ago, IIRC) with a declaration that they're bowing out of the high end, and now they're hedging their bets to such a degree that they've left room to undercut their previous "high-end" price points by no more than $100. Looks like someone in corporate realized that, "Hey, wait a minute, Nvidia might go so crazy with prices that we can spin $800 as a lol
Exactly. This is obvious, that nVidia get the pricing out of thin air, just to see where is the threshold they can get away with. And people paid that, thus set the pricing in stone, forever. The pricing was doomed, the day RTX 2080 was announced. AMD has no incentive, as they position themselves as "premium" brand. There can be no value-oriented market segment, and especially value oriented pricing for such segment, when each of the market participant (except intel for now) is a "premium" company.
This seems like great business model, where the consumer is pressed to the wall, and have no choice but to pay extortion prices, because both "rivals" set their SKUs and pricing vitrually the same. A "parity", with no losers, except the end user.
$700 is clearly inacceptable for a mid range GPU, even with inflation. Why midrange? Because from all the rumors RDNA4 will have no hi-end SKUs, just the refining of RDNA3 Rebrandeon RX 8000. So AMD just wants to stretch the maximal price nVidia would set, to their "top" midrange solutions. But at same time without submitting much effort, by maintaining the "GPU underdog" image, to justify their greed and laziness. This is ridiculous.
At least nVidia still has some pretense, that they "care" about "gamers", and still puts some fractions of R&D budget into the consumer GeForce. AMD does non of this, while asks as much money.
But this have began a while ago. Remember when AMD had to bring down RX5700 prices, due to outrage? They wanted to gouge people the way nVidia did, a while back, with the release of very first RDNA1. The completely new, raw and µarch, that had a lot of bugs and issues. But they somehow had hubris, to set the price tags, like they were flawless.
The problem with AMD is not because they have bad products. The problem is that they know that the nVidia pricing is delusional, but still comly with it. AMD being bashed more, because they follow the suit, and thus lose the public image and credibility. And it hurts them more, than nVidia themselves, because repeating the immoral move is even worse than comiting it in the first place (which can be explained as "unintentional" mistake).
No matter what people say, the CPUs and server, are not the only branches AMD has profited a lot from. Their GPUs still made them tons of money. But the Radeon is yet to have the same R&D treatment as Ryzen.
People say, that AMD has no money to put into better R&D, and they cannot compete with the scale of nVidia budget. But everyone forgets, that AMD made it's first Ryzen, by being on the verge of bancrupcy. The absolute end, with zero finacial backup. They had no additional sources of income, it was "all-in".
I don't say they must put all budget into consumer Radeon. That's stupid. But it would have been a great move, to improve RTG, as it can be an additional source of income. It's impossible to gain, without the input.
And the consumer/gaming branch poor sales are not due to people are uninterested in Radeon products. But due to the pricing being atrocious. It's not because people prefer nVidia, but because doubling down on margins alone, is destructive for the economy, and the company's health. If they don't see this now, then nothing will help.
7 99 is under $800.
Eitherway, I assume they will once again be similar in terms of Perf/$ VS nvidia
Coulpe bucks below nVidia counterparts, just to make an illusion of competition.
It has to be lower than that. If the top card is expected with "7900XT performance". The 7900XT can currently be bought for less than $799. So to have a good offer the new card needs to be cheaper or better performing, only some better RT performance won't be enough.. If it comes close to 7800XT pricing with 7900XTX performance and better RT, sound like a winner.
I dunno where is 7900XT for less than $799. Here are about 40 stores, all sell it for $1000. There's no competition.
But, yeah, this time AMD has to put at least some efforts for the consumer market. Otherwise it just looks as looks like a placeholder Radeon branch along with Enterprise.
And nope, I guess AMD won't make 7900XT for 7800XT money, since they already have set this pricing already, by shifting entire stack one class above. I mean 7900XT is just cries it is just a 7800XT, and what they call "7800XT" is just 7700XT instead. With 7900GRE being 7800 non-XT. 7600 being 7500, and 7700XT being true 7600XT. Only 7900XTX holds it's top SKU moniker, just having an excessive "X" at the end. So why would they do such favor, and undercut themselves by "gifting" the previous gen top performance, for "mid-end" prices? This is new era.
But the true cause behind the atrocious pricing, is that AMD is knee deep into top profit margins market of AI and enterprize. They don't make any assignment, no matter what.
However, the whole price/class shifting shenanigans, in reality made more disservice, rather than help. What I mean, is that the generational uplifts used to be due to each next gen one tier lower SKU performance, is same or more, than the higher tier/class SKU of previous gen. Or in other words, the same class SKU of the next gen should have performance uplift. Otherwise, this doesn't make sence, and is both counter-productive, and counter-evolutionary.
But AMD has really have shot themselves in both feet, by sticking to this scammy shenanigans, especially doing this
after nVidia backpedaled their dumb 4080 12GB naming. What they have done is even worse. This not only makes the products less attractive price-wise. But also completely abolishes the whole generational uplift, by making it twice as bad. I mean If they'd stick with the naming mentioned above, the performance growth would be true, and way greater, than it is. But shifting it one tier above, the entire stack lost their performance improvements altogether.
The reasoning behind this is clear. AMD wanted to increase the profit margins. But by raising prices without naming the SKUs accordingly, would have made the pricing an unreasonable and blatant rip off. And could show their true pursuit for nVidia behavior, thus might ended up into public outrage. So, here we are.
Speculation about the price is pointless as of now. It will all depend on how NV prices their mainstream offerings and what those are like in terms of performance. Once again, I doubt AMD will go extremely aggressive on the price.
The term has shifted over the years, it seems, but the overall wisdom is that the mainstream, most widely appealing segment is 200-400 bucks. Anything above that is in the “GPU alone more expensive than an entire console” and as such is well into enthusiast territory. And above a 1000 we are in halo/prosumer land, whatever anyone says.
The entire point of pricing the VGA for a grant and above, is just means these cards were supposed for use by prosumers, just the GPU maker (nVidia in this case) to extract maximum margins out of them. Well, JHH himself said this while announcing RTX lineup of GeForce, saying it's a "holy grail" for the developers. Both 2080 Ti and Titan RTX (true uncut 2080Ti, rather than Titan), were positioned as products for content creators and designers. Sorta Quatro for "poor".
So this is obvious, the ordinary "gamur" Joe/Jane doesn't need to waste this ungodly amount of hard-earned money, on device, which price was set and inflated artificially and unreasonably. Because they (nVidia) can.
If the Nvidia's 50X0 again offers decrease in price / performance, all bets are off. AMD has no intention of undercutting Nvidia's pricing, because they don't want to dedicate significant portion of their silicon - they are focusing on products with much higher profit margins. So we might see an increase in pricing compared to current products, without any new technology or performance uplift, just because they will follow Nvidia.
Indeed. There is the reason why AMD market cap is now almost twice as big as Intels. Everyone says it's server/data center and CPU branch. But everyone forgets that both nVidia and AMD made a fortune by selling ships of cards directly to the miners. And used convenient "scalper" scapegoat, as a reasoning to inflate prices forever. The true virtue signaling of them, as claiming they were unable to issue the solution. But it was clear, that they could enforce the sale restriction, as much as take the entire supply under their control, and sell cards, directly from their very own store. But they didn't.
Intel was just late with their miner-specific ASIC hardware, so they've just switched to AI instead, before anything came to the market. So they just had to hold by the Arc development, as it's now their bread.
I'm sure there's huge portion of current AMD wealth, that is due to one single non-stop covid-mining rampage. And they both GPU makers had no incentive to return their prices back to the sane levels, as both were already benefit from selling their entire stocks to the compute/data center tasks, which miners/crypto are directly related to.
That's why, instead of investing into consumer market, they just invented AI "surge" to justify their wish to continue to sell all silicon, including consumer/gaming grade graphic cards to non-consumer/gamer, compute markets. AMD is maybe a bit more descreet about it, as they've openly dropped the consumer market in favor of AI/enterprize. And nVidia is just creates a whole lot of different tricks to rebadge their gamer GPUs as "compute" cards and circuimvent the restrictions.
That is the reason, they all stuffing the useless "AI" features to every GPU and CPU, just to inflate the price and ride on this "AI" train, while it's still going full steam. Some even try to "coordinate" the independent/open AI endevours.
What happened with the "7900 XT performance for 500 bucks" claim? Now it's "under 800"? What the heck?
RDNA 3 shaders with new ray accelerators sound fine to me, but let's get the price right first.
Edit: Also, talking about RDNA 5 even before RDNA 4 is announced doesn't suggest much good. It sounds almost like "RDNA 4 will be shit, but don't worry, folks, the one after that is a complete redesign".
They don't even try. I might be wrong, but it may happen, AMD designs RDNA5 with the main intention, of use them later as WS cards. They aren't trying to "better" the RDNA cards for consumer/gamer market needs. They used to have CDNA based on Vega/GCN, but why just not use the chip for workstations and sell the "crisps" binned chips as consumers RX series.
Now AMD just makes minimal efforts, to use it as in order to Radeon would continue to "exist" (which BTW helps nVidia to not fall under "monopoly" status), for R&D and test gound for future iGPU products, used in APU and consoles. Since these two and OEM are the next more important ereas after AI/enterprise. The DIY market is sadly dead.
