I don't understand all the hate. As a few people mentioned, I don't think many people expected AMD to be able to churn out a card this competitive with Nvidia's offerings at the high-end. The fact that they're now able to offer a card in the same ballpark as Nvidia says leaps and bounds about their progress. You can nitpick all you want about DLSS and raytracing and this and that and the other thing, but the bottom line is that Nvidia isn't miles ahead anymore, which means competition is heating up, which is good for us consumers.
Did anybody actually expect AMD's first try at ray tracing performance to match Nvidia's after they had over a year to refine and improve it? Similar story in terms of raw rasterization performance: did anybody expect AMD to suddenly leapfrog Nvidia and take the performance crown after having been behind for years? Each team seemed to focus on different things. For Nvidia, that appears to have been overall performance as well as ray-tracing and DLSS. AMD seemed like they tried to make their best of their superior process node and maximize performance per watt, thermals, power draw, etc. The fact that AMD has gotten as close to Nvidia as they have is an applaudable achievement.
As with any other consumer product, which one you decide upon comes down to preference and that depends a lot on what you consider to be important to you. For those that don't give a shit about ray-tracing, Big Navi might look really appealing with its comparable performance, better thermals and lower noise at a slightly lower cost. For those that really want to crank the eye candy, Nvidia's refined RTX implementation and all the other fancy graphics tricks like DLSS and whatnot probably put Ampere ahead. Each comes with a tradeoff that can only be evaluated on a personal level, so spouting left and right that "ABC is better than XYZ" when that opinion is clearly influenced by personal preference (on what is important to have in a video card) and the desire to not feel like you've made (or will make) a bad purchasing decision is just adding fuel to the fire. Let people be happy they bought what they did or are excited about what they're excited about.
For a bunch of enthusiasts that are part of the "PC Master Race", everybody really does a good job of stooping down to the classic "Xbox vs. Playstation" console war levels. Just be happy that innovation will be driven by competition, be sad that availability is currently dogshit, be kind to each other, and be safe from COVID.
PS: And I guess be jealous of
@lynx29 for somehow being lucky enough to score both a new CPU and GPU this generation. Congrats dude!
This is what marketing and naivety do to people.
