Has your group looked into the Intel Arc A770 at all?
The raytracing performance in Blender... at least the public benchmarks for Blender... have impressed me, especially for only $350.
I'd imagine that AMD GPUs are the worst for your group, because AMD GPUs have the worst raytracing performance out of all three manufacturers (even if we "magic" the software into place, the AMD 6900 XT will never raytrace as quickly as NVidia or Intel counterparts. AMD simply put less raytracing hardware in these cards...) I dunno how many graphics packages are programmed to use Intel Arc yet though.
Nope. From reading the reviews the performance in certain things may be there but the driver is still way too immature to give someone one for production. Until there are numerous, reliable sources saying that all of the basic functionality with vital things like display detection, multi-monitor, refresh rate, colour depth, vsync etc is now working, I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole.
I want intel to succeed but I also haven't seen a SINGLE review by anyone anywhere that says it's actually usable as a daily driver. It's an interesting first attempt that currently requires you to spend as much time troubleshooting as you do using it. Until the general consensus says otherwise, it's not even worth my interest.
We went through a phase of almost exclusive AMD GPUs because GCN was fantastic and AMD were typically putting way more VRAM on their cards than Nvidia. Turing was the tipping point because so many plugins started leveraging RTX. Not DXR, but Nvidia proprietary RTX.
Similar here. Only the Sapphire listed in addition to the XFX at Newegg.
How is power consumption? In that aspect, I preferred the power/performance ratio of 6800 to the 6700/50XT. The 67x0XT seems pushed way past the efficiency range.
Stock settings, around the same efficiency as a 6600XT - about 10% faster, 10% more power draw.
I don't have a 6600XT but this particular 6700 undervolts like a champ - can drop core voltage by 200mv and still basically manage the same clocks. It's about a 30% reduction in power draw without any real loss. I guess the BIOS and driver see Navi22 and go "oh hey, 1.15V to reach 2.6GHz" Except the 6700 maxes out at 2.4GHz boost and can do that just fine on 900mv, so I have no idea why it keeps adding voltage to the boost bins because it's not clocking any higher (probably driver limitation to stop it cannibalising 6750XT sales)