Digital Foundry is citing 3-4x performance multipliers (DLSS3 enabled) over the 6900xt, pretty much the best card AMD has to offer (at ~$1,099 MSRP). On top of that, it's also considerably more power efficient than the 30-series, but that's probably a side-effect of the node bump and increase in silicon.
Still though, as indifferent as I am towards Nvidia I think this is a good deal as well. There's plenty to balk at with that price-point, but there's also lots of (good) cards on the market right now. Nvidia deciding to release the 40-series in the current market seems almost downright experimental.
AMD is expected to announce the RDNA 3 cards on November 3. (I'm not sure when they're expected to be available for purchase.)
Unless there's a need to buy immediately or to stick with nVidia, it might make sense to see the RDNA 3 cards' pricing, performance, and power requirements.
This seems like a strange question. Nvidia just improved upon their own performance by about 60% this generation. Do we consider that miraculous?
AMD is moving to chiplets and more advanced nodes at TSMC, and they've been executing well on CPU and GPU improvements. Who knows what advances they make, or how much more hardware they throw at the problem. They are likely to improve upon their own performance by at least 33%, but perhaps they'll also approach Nvidia's 60%.
Certainly if they only reach 33%, pricing will be key - they will not be competing against the RTX 4090, but only against lower tier cards if that's the case.
The problem is right there: DLSS3 enabled, most of the game don't or won't support that tech, and so AMD is better and cheaper with plain rasterization. The 6800xt was a better deal than the 3080.
DLSS was adopted quite rapidly. I suspect every newer game is going to launch with DLSS3 support, or will soon receive a patch for it. And it's the newer games that you're going to want DLSS for anyway, older games will perform just fine without it.
NVIDIA also announced toolkits that allow moders to apply DLSS to older games that aren't receiving updates anymore.
NVIDIA has effectively changed the naming scheme for their cards this year.
Now there are two 4080 cards, with wildly different specifications. Basically, one of them is actually a 4080 and the other is what they used to call a 4070.
This is reflected in their name and price here[1].
People let a bunch of the AMD twitter bros work them into a froth over power efficiency. Everyone knew it was basically a 2-node leap (Samsung 8nm is a 10+ node, it's about on par with TSMC 10nm, so there's 2 generations of improvement there), the bullshit from the twitter gang was utterly unfounded since day 1.
Everyone who wasn't in the tank was telling you god's own truth: NVIDIA is going to leap two nodes, it was always gonna be a huge leap, bigger than Pascal. They were drowned out by the AMD hypetrain crowd as usual who desperately wanted a flop and were trying to will it into existence.
It does go to show just how far NVIDIA is ahead on architecture... they could fight RDNA2 to a standstill with basically a whole node of disadvantage, and they did the same thing with Turing vs RDNA1 where they were using TSMC 12FFN (which is literally 16FF with the "your mom-sized" reticle - there is no optical shrink in 12FFN) and managed to fight 7nm cards to a draw on both performance and efficiency.
I'm surprised we're not starting to see motherboards+cases designed to let GPU connect to the back of the motherboard. I imagine that would be a big win for air-cooled systems.
That would make sense. But AFAIK the standards could be amended if there was enough commercial justification. So I'm just wondering if we're headed towards a day when that happens.
There are "sandwich style" SFF cases which mount the GPU parallel to the back of the motherboard, if that's what you mean. It's more for space than for airflow, but you can get good airflow too with the right design (e.g. standoffs/separation, exhaust fans).
Most of the video card is actually a huge heatsink, and they didn’t install a heatsink on that motherboard. Worse, the heatsink and fans on a video card are less efficient than the ones you put on your CPU because of the limitations of the form factor.
This might be a great card for a CAD or video rendering workstation, but AAA game studios aren't going to be able to afford to spend hours lovingly drawing intricate details if only 0.1% of players can play their games in 4k because it costs $1600 for just the graphics card.
I don't think AAA studios have been doing that for a while. The top cards aren't so much faster than the mid-range of the generation as to require extra effort in the content pipeline. Usually the top card can just dial up the visual effects higher (eg using more ray tracing samples per frame).
Why people have big GPU's is not because games look better (they don't). It's because they want the best fps and no micro-stutters.
A game on max settings looks the same on different cards. The thing that really changes is the framerate.
Game studio's bring in more demanding settings when people have the power to run them. So what will happen is even more raytracing and post processing effects that you can turn on or off.
>AAA game studios aren't going to be able to afford to spend hours lovingly drawing intricate details if only 0.1% of players can play their games in 4k
I've always thought that they start off making the best graphical version of the game and then just start cutting off bits and bobs to make the lower tier versions.
> AAA game studios aren't going to be able to afford to spend hours lovingly drawing intricate details if only 0.1% of players can play their games in 4k
They do this anyway for future proofing. The tools they use capture far more detail than can be used on modern hardware. So they down-sample for target hardware and keep the hi-res assets around for the eventual next-gen "remaster".
Publishers have realized that AAA titles have long legs. GTAV and Skyrim have seen releases on several generations of hardware because people will keep buying them. So now the concept of a "remaster" release on future hardware is baked into development.
We are looking at this the wrong way. The latest iteration of any tech is always expensive and over time it leads to a drop in price for the “old” tech. Because of the 4090, my 3090 is likely to drop in value. Similar to older models that are still very capable.
Game studios find these cards useful because their own processes get faster not because they expect people to run games on a 4090. The 3090 in my case has sped up my workflows quite significantly. I can render, play, model and bake textures at the same time.
So if anything this will improve the state of things.
I don't think you really understand the asset workflow or why artists lovingly draw things. The artist pipeline usually spits out massively over detailed assets. Everything from cuticles to the roughness on scales comes out of an artist's model.
Making a usable asset from that is almost always a task of reduction not iterative addition.
> but AAA game studios aren't going to be able to afford to spend hours lovingly drawing intricate details if only 0.1% of players can play their games in 4k because it costs $1600 for just the graphics card.
That's not really how it works. The faster cards allow people to play at higher resolutions and higher framerates with full resolution textures, wider field of views, more detail rendered off in the distance, higher resolution shadows, and so on.
I'm not sure this is really targeted at gamers. For eg deep learning workstations, it's extremely reasonably priced for the amount of horsepower it provides - it seems likely to stomp 2-3 2080 Ti's, at a much lower power draw, while fitting larger models.
For games, unless I was running a top-of-the-line res/refresh rate monitor, I'd probably just get whatever the 4060-4080 ends up being and call it a day.
> higher resolutions that require lower native rendering resolutions, which thus run at higher frame rates. Nvidia and AMD needed two generations of their respective technologies to accurately upscale lower pixel counts; in particular, fine details like particles are now mostly preserved by DLSS and FSR. Often, the final resolved image can look better than the picture produced by native resolution and treated with temporal anti-aliasing.
Am I correct in understanding that DLSS fundamentally modifies the original rendered picture/game ? Do designers/artists compensate for that ? Do they still have a "final product" in mind ?
Original DLSS 1.0 worked by "hallucinating" a full-res image from a lower-res source image. This didn't work all that great and seems to be abandoned at this point.
DLSS 2.x is a fundamentally different approach, it is standard TAA where the sample weights are set by a ML model based on previous frames and motion vectors.
DLSS3 takes this further and actually does interpolation (or, extrapolation?) of additional frame(s) based on the previous "concrete" frame and the motion vectors for objects inside the game.
DLSS doesn't alter the results that much, but there is a noticeable "sharpness" to DLSS-upscaled content when you look at screenshots side-by-side with native res. That's probably what they are eluding to by claiming "the final resolved image can look better" with DLSS.
I doubt artists thought about this with the current generation of games. The tech is so new that it was shoe horned into a lot of games, and it has evolved a lot in just a few hardware generations. Going forward, I'm certain artists will give it more consideration, since it is clear now that this is the future of gaming.
I think I'm getting old, but I can't for the life of me get excited about this 450W behemoth. For me, there's absolutely no game that needs this kind of performance, I can just go to settings, lower them slightly, and run it perfectly on a 3060 Ti.
The only spec of this card that I appreciate, is the 24 GB memory, but that's for machine learning and, according to NVIDIA, that's not even for the target audience.
I know someone who has had multiple 3090s for a couple years now, using them exclusively for ML(he's a data scientist) and none of them have failed. So I'm not sure which models you have in mind when you say "consumer grade" - the 3090(and the 4090 by extension) were always meant as replacement for the Titan series, which wasn't exactly "consumer" level.
I never had one fail, but I had to go through some big hurdles to use them at work (University research lab) properly.
Namely, there are 2 big issues:
- Virtualization: Getting vGPU functionality out of them (most of the time, there's no point in having a full 1080 Ti for only 1 job, we want to have it split on more than 1 VM).
- Kubernetes workloads: I'm running a simple workload that uses the GPU (for testing for instance) and k8s wants it all for only one pod.
Just set the required/requested gpu number to 0 and k8s will let you use same gpu with multiple pods.
You'll need to make sure to not overload gpu mem, otherwise you'll get oom errors. You can use k8s patch functionality to add custom resources, essentially use that to represent gpu mem and include the amount of gpu the pod uses in its definition, that way you don't go over the limit.
Depends on what you're playing and the experience you want. 4k@60fps or 2k@144fps is a struggle with a lot of newer games with any of the RTX 3000 cards. And ray tracing brings even the mighty 3090 to its knees.
Granted, ray tracing is optional (I can't even distinguish between RT and non-RT in games like CP:2077), and DLSS is a game-changer for 4k gaming. But there are plenty of games that I've been playing would be served better by a 4080 over my 3080.
> I can't even distinguish between RT and non-RT in games like CP:2077
Mostly because fake reflections in triangle-based rendering is convincing enough unless you're looking for it or have just gotten good at spotting it.
It's like bad kerning. If you don't know what to look for, you probably don't notice it or pay it any mind. But once you do, you see it EVERYWHERE. [0]
But I see artifacts of fake reflections in games everywhere. The problem is that most games rely on screen-space reflections which don't work if the reflected object isn't on the screen. So imagine being over water, looking over mountains in the distance, and you see the mountains reflected in the water. But as the camera pans down and the peaks go off screen, suddenly the mountain peaks get cut off in the reflection.
The only way to render a mirror accurately in triangle-based rendering is to effectively use a technique similar to Portal, but then your transform engine has to would twice as hard, since it has to project the scene twice. Even then, you're limited to flat mirrors without taking shortcuts.
Curved objects can't be reflective in triangle-based rendering at all. They fake it well enough by using environment mapping of textures, but then they won't accurately reflect things around them.
IMO photorealistic immersive rendering just makes the limited unrealistic behaviors more jarring. It feels more like broken reality than a realistic fantasy.
It's great for a movie displaying on a wall, not for a game on a desktop monitor.
If your 4k pixel count is based on 3-5 screen driving/flight simulator on big screens, then sure that's great to have
This is why I think they created RTX, they knew hardware was already good enough for most players playing at 1440p or even 4k ( I run AAA games non-rtx at high 144fps ). It's the same thing with iphones, it's been diminishing returns for a couple of generations already that they are now focusing on creating new software features to justify better cameras, soc, displays...
I build a new machine about once every 4 years for gaming/development, and I just don't really see all that much difference between the capabilities of the machine I built two generations ago (now ~9 years old) and the one I specced out last year.
I can still load up modern AAA titles on the 9 year old machine and they run just fine at 1080p 60fps with some minor tweaks to the graphics. Turns out the GTX 970 from 2014 is still more than capable.
Basically - these top end cards are a complete waste of cash for the average consumer. Hard to even claim you're future-proofing the machine with it - you're just plain wasting money.
I will never understand people that bought a 3090 for gaming.
It was literally double the price of a 3080, but was at most 20% faster, and usually only 10-15% faster.
nVidia's claim that "It's for 4K gaming!" was marketing bullshit. With a such a small performance premium over the 3080, I'd argue that if a 3080 can't handle a game in 4K, the 3090 probably can't either.
Also, you couldn't buy a 3080 at launch, it was never in stock. Now, the real 4080 16 GB is too close to the 4090 in price to be worth it. For the moment, it is the best to wait for AMD and hope it will be good.
I will bet you anything that had they numbered the cards in reverse, the 3090 would still sell better. There is something about having the highest number that pleases the minmaxer in us.
> Nvidia rebranded their Titan cards as 3090/4090 and people lap that up for some reason.
Two reasons people are gobbling these really expensive cards:
* Inventory constraints of the 3xxx series pushed people to buy any available card and it just so happens the 3090 was there waiting for them as the only available card (or within parts bundles).
* Streamers normalize overpriced setups. It used to be cool to be thrifty with pc builds, now its just all about "performance" as games become less and less optimized on launch.
It has definitely made me question how often I want to upgrade my PC or if I even want to going forward. Feel like there is a limit to how much I want to spend to play video games and this is starting to get pretty far away from it
> I think I'm getting old, but I can't for the life of me get excited about this 450W behemoth.
Then don't buy it?
These are flagship cards. It's like the $100,000 Corvette in Chevy's lineup. It's fun to watch the reviews and see on the showroom floor, but most people aren't in that enthusiast market segment. They're going to the dealership for the $40,000 Camaro or the $30,000 Colorado truck because those get the job done for them at a reasonable price.
If you're an enthusiast and this is your thing, you save up the money and buy the flagship. It's a small audience, but the product is there for those who want it. If you're a casual gamer, you get something like a 3060 and it works great as long as you're not maxing out settings and trying to play everything at 4K.
I honestly don't understand all of the criticism for these flagship parts. When auto makers release a ridiculous flagship car, everyone cheers it on and understands the purpose. When hardware makers release a flagship part, it seems everyone wants to criticize it for existing.
Compared to past cards, these behemoths aren't the equivalent of a top-end car. They are the equivalent of an oil tanker: slow, wasteful, and while yes, you might sometimes need to harness the power offered by one of these, as a private individual you definitely want something whose fuel efficiency is not measured in hundreds of tons of fuel per day.
Besides all that, releasing "consumer" cards with such overly inefficient power consumption is just being tone-deaf at a time where half of the Western world is facing rapidly rising electricity bills.
in contrast to the breathless rumors, those power numbers look incredibly reasonable... it's less than the 3090 pulled last gen, and it's 1.7x the perf/w of a 3080 or 2x the efficiency of a 3090. 3090 was always known to be pushed a little far, but, there is an easy 70% uplift in efficiency here, and none of the power-creep stuff ended up actually happening.
4090 Ti will eventually happen, and will pull about the same as 3090 Ti. Which, if it gets 1.7-2x the perf/w, sounds fine.
I think people lament that you could previously have the flagship experience for a couple hundred dollars, but now the flagships have become much less reasonable price wise.
> I think people lament that you could previously have the flagship experience for a couple hundred dollars
I think you're right. I imagine a lot of people don't like the feeling that something faster exists outside of their budget.
Ironically, I suspect these people would be happier if the faster cards simply didn't exist and the GPU lineup topped out at something like a 3060. It's funny that people get angry that faster parts simply exist.
For me, it's not the MSRP cost, it's that they've thrown power efficiency out the window entirely. It'd be like that automaker's flagship car getting only 2 miles per gallon on highways. Granted, that comparison makes the vehicle functionally useless anywhere but a drag strip, but that's not the point I am focusing on, I'm arguing the lack of focus on achieving performance with efficiency.
These new GPUs and even CPUs are entirely about power and performance. The upfront cost is one thing, but the long term cost of the both the energy consumption and central air system having to handle the massive thermal load is getting out of hand, particularly in a hotter region.
It's severely overlooked or just lightly complained about as "this thing needs cooling" without really elaborating what that entails or means. It's one thing to cool down a large studio area with a commercial HVAC system for doing youtube videos, but it's another to try and cool a bedroom in a house with the normal central air system.
I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient, do more with less. You can always do more by consuming more, that's less impressive. And to go back to cars. Take a huge engine, and one half its size, both output the same power, but one uses a third as much of the same fuel. Which one is more impressive?
I understand flagship is the extreme edge. But when the power consumption of the flagships keep increasing, it normalizes the lower and mid ranges to also keep increasing. I just want to see a focus on efficiency, stop doing more with more. Do more with less instead.
I think what we're seeing is just an increase in the power envelope: more power for more performance.
Efficiency should be better than previous gens, at least this was the case for the CPUs I looked at (looking at their power efficiency ratings at full TDP they're hard to tell).
Marginal efficiency is lower when the power envelope is expanded to make these higher performance numbers achievable.
I'd wager that performance matched, these "power hungry" current gen GPUs/CPUs would show better efficiency than previous gens.
> For me, it's not the MSRP cost, it's that they've thrown power efficiency out the window entirely. It'd be like that automaker's flagship car getting only 2 miles per gallon on highways
Flagship cars generally do get significantly worse gas mileage than mainstream cars.
But you're exaggerating the inefficiency of a 4090. In terms of performance-per-watt, it's not that far off from their lower level cards.
If low power is a primary driver, it's very easy to move a slider and reduce the power usage for any of these cards.
> I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient,
They do! Efficiency and performance are one in the same. They wouldn't be able to squeeze out this much performance if they didn't optimize the efficiency. More efficient parts result in higher performance for a given thermal envelope.
If you wanted the most efficiency, you would buy a 4090 and turn the power limit down to 50%. This is very easy to do. Reducing voltage and power limits is extremely common in small case builds.
Pretty bored with the resolution / FPS race. Path tracing was a huge leap, but I'd rather see artists / render tech to fully exploit image quality at 1080p than 4k. I waiting for AI's to start hallucinating game graphics to to look as good as a DVD or even VHS.
I'm actually looking forward to when the pendulum swings back towards efficiency. I recently built a mini ITX build around a 2070S, which is basically silent and takes up barely any space. Smaller, cooler and quieter is more appealing to me by a long shot.
These must have been sitting in a warehouse for a bit because there's no way they'd be penny-pinching and not support PCIE Gen 5 nor DisplayPort 2.0 on a $1600 piece of hardware.
PCIe Gen 5? Please, they've already announced PCIe Gen 7, NVIDIA is so behind. /s
But seriously, unless you need PCIe Gen 5 or have a 240hz monitor, it's not that huge of a deal. Yes, it's a $1600 card, but what are you going to do? Buy AMD (which presumably won't have quite as good performance), or wait until next year?
It's possible you'll need Gen 5 over the lifespan of this card as storage takes up more and more lanes. That this card takes 2x as many as necessary to save a fraction of a dollar doesn't make much sense unless these things were far enough in the production timeline... which means these were being produced for a while now.
Same for DisplayPort 2.0. These benchmarks show games exceeding 120fps at 4K already. Displays that support those higher rates and resolutions will be common in 5-6 years.
It's more of a question of "why not?" rather than "does it need it" at this price point.
I think we're well overdue for a redesign from the current standard ATX layout. The graphics card is now the centrepiece, and almost always the only PCI-E card in use. It's time to lay it parallel to the motherboard, or at least give it more support in some way.
Probably my age showing, but the value proposition of PC gaming seems to have fallen steeply in the past few years compared to consoles. The prospect of playing Serious Multiplayer Games has almost fallen off my radar completely, and that was one of the primary draws for me in the past. Nowadays, I don't want to fiddle with Windows (which insists on forcing updates when I do power my PC up to play with friends), mess with hardware, or anything like that.
I have a big Steam library that I don't want to give up, but I could see being all in on future versions of Steam Deck.
Very much in the same boat. I like the Steam Deck for the fact that it provides suspend/resume functionality to my PC games, which is useful with my limited time now that I'm older and have a kid.
Steam on Linux work great too, if you don't want to give up your PC. All of the games in my library (that I've still got interest in) work well, if not flawlessly.
With my steam library, about 1/5 works "Great with Steam", and 3/5 shows up with the "Verified and Playable" filter, which includes everything labelled "Great With Steam".
> Probably my age showing, but the value proposition of PC gaming seems to have fallen steeply in the past few years compared to consoles.
Consoles have been the better value for a long time.
That said, it's a mistake to look at $1600 flagship cards and AAA titles and think that's the only way to game on a PC. Even entry-level cards in the $200-300 range can play modern games at 1080p or even 1440p as long as you're not trying to max out the settings (max PC settings aren't available on consoles anyway)
The real upshot to PC gaming, IMO, is that there are hundreds of highly-rated PC titles over released over the past decade that you can access with a few clicks.
> Nowadays, I don't want to fiddle with Windows (which insists on forcing updates when I do power my PC up to play with friends),
Ironically, this was my experience with consoles. Since I play infrequently, I'd often be stuck on forced console software updates whenever I turned it on. AAA console games also need to be updated frequently, some times with 10s of gigabytes to download before I can play. Updates aren't exclusive to PCs any more.
For me, the biggest reason to continue PC gaming (aside from the sheer breadth of titles and generally better visuals) is that, sure, the GPU alone cost me $700 and the whole thing cost as much as 3 consoles...
...but I already needed a computer. My desktop PC is my workhorse and still performs better than any laptop at a similar price point. I just look at that $700 GPU as a $500 upgrade to a more basic option - similar to a PC without a nice GPU plus a dedicated game box.
Doesn't hurt that I can also make use of it in photo/video/animation/etc applications as well as in games.
Still, I imagine that if you don't do anything that can't be done on an $800-900 laptop, it might just be simpler to buy that and an Xbox.
>Still, I imagine that if you don't do anything that can't be done on an $800-900 laptop, it might just be simpler to buy that and an Xbox.
I always found it funny that PC gamers seem to think console gamers don't own a computer. We do, we've simply found that for the price of building a gaming PC, one can buy a decent laptop AND a console, and run them both without needing further upgrades for a decade. This has a huge bang for buck. I should know, I've done this twice with the x360 and PS4, paired with a mid range dell laptop. Both are flawless for their respective niche.
I'm probably building a PC next year, but even I acknowledge that I'm going pretty far out into diminishing returns of enjoyment curve to do so.
I think it depends when in the cycle you buy. Yes if you buy at the same time the new console generation comes out, the console is probably going to be cheaper (if it's even available) due to economies of scale, and the fact that they may loss-lead since they make margins on game licensing.
But console generations are long, and after a couple years, even low end PC components will catch up and exceed console performance.
The PC component industry honestly does a great job of selling people things they largely don't need. Games mostly have to work on console, so it doesn't generally make a huge difference to have a GPU for instance which is 5-10x as powerful as the consoles, since the games are optimized for the consoles anyway.
Yes you can go for high resolution or high frame-rates, but how much would you really miss it if you didn't have it?
I've kept a PC for years now that I only use for gaming and its not too much of a hassle. There's still a lot of games that are PC only, and with a lot of major console games eventually getting a PC release I think the value is still there. I do with there was some sort of "gaming only" option for Windows to keep it from being annoying.
In the 2000s and early 10s, I would tell friends that $1000 is all you need to spend for a complete tower of hardware - at least, a sweet spot of performance and value. $250 was /pricey/ for a GPU in 2005.
But to be fair, like cars from the 80s to now, they do a lot more these days. I never installed a Physx processor for Crysis but now that's on the GPU.
Eh... I build a new machine about every 4 years. $1000 is still a-ok as a price point.
$1000 on a new machine will get you running basically any new release at 1080p 60fps with only a little tweaking in the settings. I usually do 4k @ 60fps with medium/high graphics on my now nearly 4 year old rig, and it's FINE.
Don't buy these stupidly overpriced cards unless you have a really compelling use case (as in - you're using these commercially) or you're overflowing with cash.
Simply, change to Linux. or at least, try a multi boot setup. I can play nearly everything that its on Steam on Linux, and avoid touching that spyware that has become Windows.
Steam deck is fantastic, and that's probably selling it short. I'm not quite all in on it yet, but I use it extensively. Especially with a USB-C dock on my TV. It's like the Switch, only better, because I have access to PC-only games.
The 4090 clocks in at an incredible 80tflops. Compared to the 10tflops of the PS5's GPU. Now compare that to a Nintendo Switch at about 1tflop if we are being generous.
>Mocking your friends' resolution and frame rate is extremely fun.
I know you're probably joking, but I see this sentiment spoken seriously over on PCMR, and it's so cringe. Graphics quality between PC and console are so close now that the only people who care spend all their time pixel peeping at 4x zoom.
Der8auer's review[1] highlights that the power/performance curve on the stock 4090 is awfully strange, and the card could have come out with a 280W or 330W power target, and a much more modestly sized cooler. It didn't have to be the monster that it is, and I wonder if 3rd parties will make more reasonably sized and powered cards.
Once upon a time, the visual difference between PC and console used to be shocking. Now? Even reviewers have to freeze frame and zoom in 400% and pixel peep to show a difference. I honestly think graphics have been 'good enough' to not be distracting since the x360/ps3 days. I still haven't seen a demo of RT that makes me go 'wow, those reflections are totally worth tanking my fps'
>Nowadays, I don't want to fiddle with Windows (which insists on forcing updates when I do power my PC up to play with friends)
Unfortunately consoles have become normal PCs in this regard - if you wanna play online you'll be forced to update the console OS and applyvgame patches.
Well here is my recent experience: my daughter's cheap Lenovo laptop broke, after three years of college. It served her well except for one thing: this new game "Stray" (on steam) requires something better than Intel integrated graphics to work.
Anyway, so new laptop is HP "Victus" for $1100. It includes Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti, so now she can play Stray. It seems like a good deal: 512 GB SSD, Core i7, 16 GB RAM.
The laptop is all fan :-) She discovered that it quickly overheats if you put it on the bed (blocks the vents on the bottom). Also the battery drains real-fast when using the GPU. Also the power brick is larger.
The Steam Deck on the other hand is an absolute dream to use, $400 and I was off to the races with a handheld that’s so powerful it can emulate the Nintendo Switch.
The biggest siren's call of PC gaming over consoles, to me, is modding. I love to tweak games and add mods and features.
Coming of age during the golden age of GoldSrc modding may have something to do with this. From Minecraft mods to Rimworld, or Elder Scrolls, Factorio, Fallout. Even tweaking rules.ini in older Command & Conquer games. I love modding and don't want to give it up by going to the walled garden of a console.
FWIW, they have mods on xbox and playstation now. Not all PC mods can run on console, but many can. I've really enjoyed fallout 4 with a few choice gameplay and graphics mods.
keep in mind this is high-end gaming with cutting edge features. you can get a used 2080 for 200-300 which is amazing for 1080p and 1440p (without raytracing)
and there's still a backlog of older games which you can max out for not a lot.
Try Linux with steam. Most of your library will probably still work and you can update at your own pace. If it works on the Steam Deck, it will work on Linux.
Steam will still self update which is annoying but usually fairly quick. But otherwise, keeping linux up to date is pretty easy and something you can control. With Manjaro, I run a "yay" once a week or so and it takes 10 minutes or so maximum and everything is up to date.
It's important to note that the definition of CUDA "cores" changed with Ampere due to their adding dual-issue, which is not always possible, but they count it as a flat doubling of "cores", where "cores" previously meant ALUs / vector lane units.
There's also been quite a bit of inflation since the days of the 1660 Super...
Is very cuda core as powerful as very other cuda core?
So 10x 4090 cuda cores are as powerful as 10x 2060 cores?
A graph that plots price per core and power usage per core would be awesome.
Google Sheets is so amazing, it just works and I can watch how somebody edits the document and collaboration is dimensions ahead of every service I know.
Seems the cards in the comparison is 4090, 3080ti, 3080 and 6800XT.
Why is there no 3090ti in there, which should be the top of the line card from the previous "generation"? Current generations top should be compared with previous generations top rather than third-to-top, otherwise it seems a bit disingenuous.
> Honestly if you don't intend on playing AAA games at 4K/+100fps with ray tracing you don't need this.
On the other hand, if you're doing other things with your GPU than just gaming, this might be a very well-worth card, depending on how much AI/ML/video encoding/3d rendering/physics simulations/X you do.
Personally I'm waiting for some benchmarks related to CUDA and particularly Stable Diffusion to come out before I decide.
And I don't game that much anymore, maybe some hours per month at maximum. But I'm using my GPU a lot for video encoding and 3D rendering, so still interested in GPU development.
You're saying all other use cases besides gaming together is niche compared to gaming itself? Not sure about that, a lot of NVIDIA cards are used in both the creative and engineering industries. And when they buy cards, they usually buy a lot of cards, not just one per device, as gamers do.
If you observe NVIDIA movements and actions, you'll see that they are starting to focus a lot more on B2B than they ever did before. Almost like their B2C is not the main focus anymore, just a good PR piece for them.
Counting integrated graphics, it might have a lower market share. But when it comes to discrete graphics (which most people on the gaming scene, including all the other sectors, actually run), nvidia has 83% of the market share according to [1].
Going by public information(https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...), "graphics" is still the majority of their income at about 58% (other part being "Compute & Networking" at 42%). However, "graphics" also include "the Quadro/NVIDIA RTX GPUs for enterprise design, GRID software for cloud-based visual and virtual computing, and automotive platforms for infotainment systems.", none of which are gaming use cases. Question is if those represent more than 10% of the "graphics" revenue or not.
My guess is yes. And even if 1% of consumer graphic cards are being sold for the non-gaming use cases, it seems pretty clear that the demand in the non-gaming use cases seems even bigger than gaming ones.
Also note that from the press release linked above, there are only a few lines dedicated to gaming. The rest is all about non-gaming use cases.
I see a big mix of positive and negative in the comments, I’m gonna take a slightly different tact, and say I’m extremely bullish on the GPU market in the near-to-mid term on the consumer side. Obviously, a coming recession and relaxing of sales due to pandemic/lockdown pull ahead will probably dampen sales, but having 3 vendors taking 3 separate approaches to their designs is great for competition and consumer choice. We have Nvidia at the high end with monolithic chips probably delivering the highest performance in most/all areas, especially gaming. AMD is going with a chiplet architecture that should allow them to stay in the same ballpark of (non-raytracing) performance at a lower price. And finally we have Intel coming in at the low end with cards that seem like (once all the driver issues are sorted out) are going to be adequate for gaming, maybe even offer best in class price/performance in certain cases, and that seem to be also targeting productivity as well. They were the first out of the gate with AV1 hardware support, as well what looks like some relatively impressive matrix math units, similar to Nvidias tensor cores.
Overall looking very promising for the next 5-10 years, and Im hoping any potential recession doesn’t cause Intel or AMD to take their foot off the pedal, or in the worst case (more likely for Intel), even scrap the product lines.
> …I’m gonna take a slightly different tact, and say I’m extremely bullish on the GPU market in the near-to-mid term on the consumer side.
Count me in as bearish, at least for aftermarket discrete GPUs. Desktops' share continues to slowly deflate as a percentage of PC shipments. Fewer and fewer consumers upgrade their built-in GPU, whether discrete or integrated. The GPU "middle class" is disappearing between "whatever came with my computer" and behemoths like the RTX 4090.
I don't know if that's a bargain after the shortage and pricing disaster in the recent years. Looks like I am going to skip another 10 years until I buy anything with Nvidia on it.
> When a standalone GPU is as large as a modern video gaming console—it's nearly identical in total volume to the Xbox Series S and more than double the size of a Nintendo Switch—it's hard not to laugh incredulously at the thing.
Watching Der8auer's review[1], the performance for power curve is awfully wonky. I would happily tune this card down to 70% or even 60% of the power target for a very minimal performance loss, totally acceptable to me for the efficiency gain.
I wonder what allowance 3rd parties have to detune these cards, and perhaps produce a 4090 with a more modest cooling solution suited to a ~300W power level, maybe making a 2 or 2.5 slot size card, rather than the current monster cards we're seeing.
If I had more time and dedication, I would foster a social media campaign to discourage people from buying the new generation of expensive-ass GPU's. To send a message to NVidia that they need to reconsider more consumer-friendly RTX4xxx pricing.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadStill though, as indifferent as I am towards Nvidia I think this is a good deal as well. There's plenty to balk at with that price-point, but there's also lots of (good) cards on the market right now. Nvidia deciding to release the 40-series in the current market seems almost downright experimental.
Unless there's a need to buy immediately or to stick with nVidia, it might make sense to see the RDNA 3 cards' pricing, performance, and power requirements.
I think it's likely that some RDNA3 cards will be on that Pareto surface.
AMD is moving to chiplets and more advanced nodes at TSMC, and they've been executing well on CPU and GPU improvements. Who knows what advances they make, or how much more hardware they throw at the problem. They are likely to improve upon their own performance by at least 33%, but perhaps they'll also approach Nvidia's 60%.
Certainly if they only reach 33%, pricing will be key - they will not be competing against the RTX 4090, but only against lower tier cards if that's the case.
NVIDIA also announced toolkits that allow moders to apply DLSS to older games that aren't receiving updates anymore.
Now there are two 4080 cards, with wildly different specifications. Basically, one of them is actually a 4080 and the other is what they used to call a 4070.
This is reflected in their name and price here[1].
[1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-serie...
This is going to be awful when buying pre-built machines. They'll just say it has a 4080 and stick the crappy one in.
Everyone who wasn't in the tank was telling you god's own truth: NVIDIA is going to leap two nodes, it was always gonna be a huge leap, bigger than Pascal. They were drowned out by the AMD hypetrain crowd as usual who desperately wanted a flop and were trying to will it into existence.
It does go to show just how far NVIDIA is ahead on architecture... they could fight RDNA2 to a standstill with basically a whole node of disadvantage, and they did the same thing with Turing vs RDNA1 where they were using TSMC 12FFN (which is literally 16FF with the "your mom-sized" reticle - there is no optical shrink in 12FFN) and managed to fight 7nm cards to a draw on both performance and efficiency.
Picture with an itx motherboard for launghs: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/xjl017/asus_really_p...
That would make sense. But AFAIK the standards could be amended if there was enough commercial justification. So I'm just wondering if we're headed towards a day when that happens.
This might be a great card for a CAD or video rendering workstation, but AAA game studios aren't going to be able to afford to spend hours lovingly drawing intricate details if only 0.1% of players can play their games in 4k because it costs $1600 for just the graphics card.
A game on max settings looks the same on different cards. The thing that really changes is the framerate.
Game studio's bring in more demanding settings when people have the power to run them. So what will happen is even more raytracing and post processing effects that you can turn on or off.
I've always thought that they start off making the best graphical version of the game and then just start cutting off bits and bobs to make the lower tier versions.
They do this anyway for future proofing. The tools they use capture far more detail than can be used on modern hardware. So they down-sample for target hardware and keep the hi-res assets around for the eventual next-gen "remaster".
Publishers have realized that AAA titles have long legs. GTAV and Skyrim have seen releases on several generations of hardware because people will keep buying them. So now the concept of a "remaster" release on future hardware is baked into development.
Game studios find these cards useful because their own processes get faster not because they expect people to run games on a 4090. The 3090 in my case has sped up my workflows quite significantly. I can render, play, model and bake textures at the same time.
So if anything this will improve the state of things.
Making a usable asset from that is almost always a task of reduction not iterative addition.
That's not really how it works. The faster cards allow people to play at higher resolutions and higher framerates with full resolution textures, wider field of views, more detail rendered off in the distance, higher resolution shadows, and so on.
For games, unless I was running a top-of-the-line res/refresh rate monitor, I'd probably just get whatever the 4060-4080 ends up being and call it a day.
Am I correct in understanding that DLSS fundamentally modifies the original rendered picture/game ? Do designers/artists compensate for that ? Do they still have a "final product" in mind ?
DLSS 2.x is a fundamentally different approach, it is standard TAA where the sample weights are set by a ML model based on previous frames and motion vectors.
DLSS3 takes this further and actually does interpolation (or, extrapolation?) of additional frame(s) based on the previous "concrete" frame and the motion vectors for objects inside the game.
I doubt artists thought about this with the current generation of games. The tech is so new that it was shoe horned into a lot of games, and it has evolved a lot in just a few hardware generations. Going forward, I'm certain artists will give it more consideration, since it is clear now that this is the future of gaming.
Artist always compensated to make games look and run better, even in NES era.
The only spec of this card that I appreciate, is the 24 GB memory, but that's for machine learning and, according to NVIDIA, that's not even for the target audience.
Namely, there are 2 big issues: - Virtualization: Getting vGPU functionality out of them (most of the time, there's no point in having a full 1080 Ti for only 1 job, we want to have it split on more than 1 VM). - Kubernetes workloads: I'm running a simple workload that uses the GPU (for testing for instance) and k8s wants it all for only one pod.
You'll need to make sure to not overload gpu mem, otherwise you'll get oom errors. You can use k8s patch functionality to add custom resources, essentially use that to represent gpu mem and include the amount of gpu the pod uses in its definition, that way you don't go over the limit.
Granted, ray tracing is optional (I can't even distinguish between RT and non-RT in games like CP:2077), and DLSS is a game-changer for 4k gaming. But there are plenty of games that I've been playing would be served better by a 4080 over my 3080.
Mostly because fake reflections in triangle-based rendering is convincing enough unless you're looking for it or have just gotten good at spotting it.
It's like bad kerning. If you don't know what to look for, you probably don't notice it or pay it any mind. But once you do, you see it EVERYWHERE. [0]
But I see artifacts of fake reflections in games everywhere. The problem is that most games rely on screen-space reflections which don't work if the reflected object isn't on the screen. So imagine being over water, looking over mountains in the distance, and you see the mountains reflected in the water. But as the camera pans down and the peaks go off screen, suddenly the mountain peaks get cut off in the reflection.
The only way to render a mirror accurately in triangle-based rendering is to effectively use a technique similar to Portal, but then your transform engine has to would twice as hard, since it has to project the scene twice. Even then, you're limited to flat mirrors without taking shortcuts.
Curved objects can't be reflective in triangle-based rendering at all. They fake it well enough by using environment mapping of textures, but then they won't accurately reflect things around them.
[0] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
It's great for a movie displaying on a wall, not for a game on a desktop monitor.
If your 4k pixel count is based on 3-5 screen driving/flight simulator on big screens, then sure that's great to have
I build a new machine about once every 4 years for gaming/development, and I just don't really see all that much difference between the capabilities of the machine I built two generations ago (now ~9 years old) and the one I specced out last year.
I can still load up modern AAA titles on the 9 year old machine and they run just fine at 1080p 60fps with some minor tweaks to the graphics. Turns out the GTX 970 from 2014 is still more than capable.
Basically - these top end cards are a complete waste of cash for the average consumer. Hard to even claim you're future-proofing the machine with it - you're just plain wasting money.
Before the 30 series, everyone knew RTX Titan was not a gaming card, but rather for compute/professional work.
Nvidia rebranded their Titan cards as 3090/4090 and people lap that up for some reason.
It was literally double the price of a 3080, but was at most 20% faster, and usually only 10-15% faster.
nVidia's claim that "It's for 4K gaming!" was marketing bullshit. With a such a small performance premium over the 3080, I'd argue that if a 3080 can't handle a game in 4K, the 3090 probably can't either.
The "1%" who have unlimited budget for consumer purchases like this, are millions of people.
Two reasons people are gobbling these really expensive cards:
* Inventory constraints of the 3xxx series pushed people to buy any available card and it just so happens the 3090 was there waiting for them as the only available card (or within parts bundles).
* Streamers normalize overpriced setups. It used to be cool to be thrifty with pc builds, now its just all about "performance" as games become less and less optimized on launch.
Then don't buy it?
These are flagship cards. It's like the $100,000 Corvette in Chevy's lineup. It's fun to watch the reviews and see on the showroom floor, but most people aren't in that enthusiast market segment. They're going to the dealership for the $40,000 Camaro or the $30,000 Colorado truck because those get the job done for them at a reasonable price.
If you're an enthusiast and this is your thing, you save up the money and buy the flagship. It's a small audience, but the product is there for those who want it. If you're a casual gamer, you get something like a 3060 and it works great as long as you're not maxing out settings and trying to play everything at 4K.
I honestly don't understand all of the criticism for these flagship parts. When auto makers release a ridiculous flagship car, everyone cheers it on and understands the purpose. When hardware makers release a flagship part, it seems everyone wants to criticize it for existing.
Besides all that, releasing "consumer" cards with such overly inefficient power consumption is just being tone-deaf at a time where half of the Western world is facing rapidly rising electricity bills.
https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-e...
https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founders-e...
in contrast to the breathless rumors, those power numbers look incredibly reasonable... it's less than the 3090 pulled last gen, and it's 1.7x the perf/w of a 3080 or 2x the efficiency of a 3090. 3090 was always known to be pushed a little far, but, there is an easy 70% uplift in efficiency here, and none of the power-creep stuff ended up actually happening.
4090 Ti will eventually happen, and will pull about the same as 3090 Ti. Which, if it gets 1.7-2x the perf/w, sounds fine.
I think you're right. I imagine a lot of people don't like the feeling that something faster exists outside of their budget.
Ironically, I suspect these people would be happier if the faster cards simply didn't exist and the GPU lineup topped out at something like a 3060. It's funny that people get angry that faster parts simply exist.
These new GPUs and even CPUs are entirely about power and performance. The upfront cost is one thing, but the long term cost of the both the energy consumption and central air system having to handle the massive thermal load is getting out of hand, particularly in a hotter region.
It's severely overlooked or just lightly complained about as "this thing needs cooling" without really elaborating what that entails or means. It's one thing to cool down a large studio area with a commercial HVAC system for doing youtube videos, but it's another to try and cool a bedroom in a house with the normal central air system.
I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient, do more with less. You can always do more by consuming more, that's less impressive. And to go back to cars. Take a huge engine, and one half its size, both output the same power, but one uses a third as much of the same fuel. Which one is more impressive?
I understand flagship is the extreme edge. But when the power consumption of the flagships keep increasing, it normalizes the lower and mid ranges to also keep increasing. I just want to see a focus on efficiency, stop doing more with more. Do more with less instead.
Efficiency should be better than previous gens, at least this was the case for the CPUs I looked at (looking at their power efficiency ratings at full TDP they're hard to tell).
Marginal efficiency is lower when the power envelope is expanded to make these higher performance numbers achievable.
I'd wager that performance matched, these "power hungry" current gen GPUs/CPUs would show better efficiency than previous gens.
Flagship cars generally do get significantly worse gas mileage than mainstream cars.
But you're exaggerating the inefficiency of a 4090. In terms of performance-per-watt, it's not that far off from their lower level cards.
If low power is a primary driver, it's very easy to move a slider and reduce the power usage for any of these cards.
> I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient,
They do! Efficiency and performance are one in the same. They wouldn't be able to squeeze out this much performance if they didn't optimize the efficiency. More efficient parts result in higher performance for a given thermal envelope.
If you wanted the most efficiency, you would buy a 4090 and turn the power limit down to 50%. This is very easy to do. Reducing voltage and power limits is extremely common in small case builds.
I'm sorry you lost your sense of excitement and wonder, but this 4090 really looks quite great.
But seriously, unless you need PCIe Gen 5 or have a 240hz monitor, it's not that huge of a deal. Yes, it's a $1600 card, but what are you going to do? Buy AMD (which presumably won't have quite as good performance), or wait until next year?
Same for DisplayPort 2.0. These benchmarks show games exceeding 120fps at 4K already. Displays that support those higher rates and resolutions will be common in 5-6 years.
It's more of a question of "why not?" rather than "does it need it" at this price point.
Even if you screw very hard the wall part, the inner zone is still floating on its own weight
There are GPU support brackets for these behemoths.
Also known as ANTI-SAG brackets.
(No affiliation, I just clicked on the first search result)
http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/s100/h/hzinside.jpg
We could bring that back.
But you still can build the entire PC for $1600 and play most games well.
The Radeon RX 6650 XT is dipping below $300 and will run 1080p with great image quality settings.
Or spend $425 on a Radeon RX 6750 XT and play most games at 1440p with excellent image quality.
I have a big Steam library that I don't want to give up, but I could see being all in on future versions of Steam Deck.
Just because NVidia went bonkers with their flagship pricing during COVID isn't a reason to throw out the best gaming platform out with the bathwater.
> I could see being all in on future versions of Steam Deck.
Steam Deck is just a computer. You're still gaming on a PC.
But I mean if you only care about games which are available on console, if you prefer a gamepad, sure buy a console.
Just like a console is a computer, just with a different OS and form factor.
But basically at this point, any platform's hardware should be able to play any game in existence.
Consoles have been the better value for a long time.
That said, it's a mistake to look at $1600 flagship cards and AAA titles and think that's the only way to game on a PC. Even entry-level cards in the $200-300 range can play modern games at 1080p or even 1440p as long as you're not trying to max out the settings (max PC settings aren't available on consoles anyway)
The real upshot to PC gaming, IMO, is that there are hundreds of highly-rated PC titles over released over the past decade that you can access with a few clicks.
> Nowadays, I don't want to fiddle with Windows (which insists on forcing updates when I do power my PC up to play with friends),
Ironically, this was my experience with consoles. Since I play infrequently, I'd often be stuck on forced console software updates whenever I turned it on. AAA console games also need to be updated frequently, some times with 10s of gigabytes to download before I can play. Updates aren't exclusive to PCs any more.
...but I already needed a computer. My desktop PC is my workhorse and still performs better than any laptop at a similar price point. I just look at that $700 GPU as a $500 upgrade to a more basic option - similar to a PC without a nice GPU plus a dedicated game box.
Doesn't hurt that I can also make use of it in photo/video/animation/etc applications as well as in games.
Still, I imagine that if you don't do anything that can't be done on an $800-900 laptop, it might just be simpler to buy that and an Xbox.
A $700 GPU needs expensive fussy cooling too, and it's hard to get peak performance from it, and it really doesn't add much value to the gameplay.
That GPU is plenty fast for most gaming, unless you're trying to push 4K or very high framerates at 1440p.
Nobody needs a $700 GPU to play video games. Look at the averaged charts: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html An RX 6600 still puts out over 100fps at 1080p medium settings on their 8-game average.
I always found it funny that PC gamers seem to think console gamers don't own a computer. We do, we've simply found that for the price of building a gaming PC, one can buy a decent laptop AND a console, and run them both without needing further upgrades for a decade. This has a huge bang for buck. I should know, I've done this twice with the x360 and PS4, paired with a mid range dell laptop. Both are flawless for their respective niche.
I'm probably building a PC next year, but even I acknowledge that I'm going pretty far out into diminishing returns of enjoyment curve to do so.
But console generations are long, and after a couple years, even low end PC components will catch up and exceed console performance.
The PC component industry honestly does a great job of selling people things they largely don't need. Games mostly have to work on console, so it doesn't generally make a huge difference to have a GPU for instance which is 5-10x as powerful as the consoles, since the games are optimized for the consoles anyway.
Yes you can go for high resolution or high frame-rates, but how much would you really miss it if you didn't have it?
But to be fair, like cars from the 80s to now, they do a lot more these days. I never installed a Physx processor for Crysis but now that's on the GPU.
$1000 on a new machine will get you running basically any new release at 1080p 60fps with only a little tweaking in the settings. I usually do 4k @ 60fps with medium/high graphics on my now nearly 4 year old rig, and it's FINE.
Don't buy these stupidly overpriced cards unless you have a really compelling use case (as in - you're using these commercially) or you're overflowing with cash.
And that will run games at 4K.
The 4090 clocks in at an incredible 80tflops. Compared to the 10tflops of the PS5's GPU. Now compare that to a Nintendo Switch at about 1tflop if we are being generous.
Still I wish it wasn't so large or hot.
Is it 80x as fun to play games on the 4090 than the switch? Or 5.5x as fun, if we go by price?
It's pay-to-win though.
I know you're probably joking, but I see this sentiment spoken seriously over on PCMR, and it's so cringe. Graphics quality between PC and console are so close now that the only people who care spend all their time pixel peeping at 4x zoom.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60yFji_GKak
Unfortunately consoles have become normal PCs in this regard - if you wanna play online you'll be forced to update the console OS and applyvgame patches.
Anyway, so new laptop is HP "Victus" for $1100. It includes Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti, so now she can play Stray. It seems like a good deal: 512 GB SSD, Core i7, 16 GB RAM.
The laptop is all fan :-) She discovered that it quickly overheats if you put it on the bed (blocks the vents on the bottom). Also the battery drains real-fast when using the GPU. Also the power brick is larger.
Coming of age during the golden age of GoldSrc modding may have something to do with this. From Minecraft mods to Rimworld, or Elder Scrolls, Factorio, Fallout. Even tweaking rules.ini in older Command & Conquer games. I love modding and don't want to give it up by going to the walled garden of a console.
and there's still a backlog of older games which you can max out for not a lot.
Steam will still self update which is annoying but usually fairly quick. But otherwise, keeping linux up to date is pretty easy and something you can control. With Manjaro, I run a "yay" once a week or so and it takes 10 minutes or so maximum and everything is up to date.
It’s just that their product line has a more or less linear CUDA core to price best line of fit.[1]
There’s a dip specifically at the RTX 3080 Ti, where you’re getting more cores for the money than elsewhere on the best line of fit.
Not sure what trade offs there are there except less VRAM and in one instance I read that cooling wasn’t as good.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MHTVDAyU7i8oXYAlmGPE...
There's also been quite a bit of inflation since the days of the 1660 Super...
So 10x 4090 cuda cores are as powerful as 10x 2060 cores?
A graph that plots price per core and power usage per core would be awesome.
Google Sheets is so amazing, it just works and I can watch how somebody edits the document and collaboration is dimensions ahead of every service I know.
[1]: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
Why is there no 3090ti in there, which should be the top of the line card from the previous "generation"? Current generations top should be compared with previous generations top rather than third-to-top, otherwise it seems a bit disingenuous.
Are there any better comparisons out there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9vC9NBL8zo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U both include the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT.
See 13 game average at https://youtu.be/aQklDR8nv8U?t=888
https://www.techspot.com/review/2544-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090...
13-game average (4K): https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2544/bench/Average...
> The GeForce RTX 4090 is on average 59% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti and 71% faster than the 6950 XT at 4K gaming.
The Steam survey shows the GTX1060 is still the most popular card so even the most recent games need to perform adequately with that in mind.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I still use a GTX1070 for playing at 1080p or 4K at 60fps for older or non-demanding games and it's still absolutely fine.
On the other hand, if you're doing other things with your GPU than just gaming, this might be a very well-worth card, depending on how much AI/ML/video encoding/3d rendering/physics simulations/X you do.
Personally I'm waiting for some benchmarks related to CUDA and particularly Stable Diffusion to come out before I decide.
And I don't game that much anymore, maybe some hours per month at maximum. But I'm using my GPU a lot for video encoding and 3D rendering, so still interested in GPU development.
If you observe NVIDIA movements and actions, you'll see that they are starting to focus a lot more on B2B than they ever did before. Almost like their B2C is not the main focus anymore, just a good PR piece for them.
I'd be very surprised if gaming didn't represented the majority of Nvidia's revenue of selling GPUs.
[1] https://webtribunal.net/blog/gpu-market-share/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Going by public information(https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...), "graphics" is still the majority of their income at about 58% (other part being "Compute & Networking" at 42%). However, "graphics" also include "the Quadro/NVIDIA RTX GPUs for enterprise design, GRID software for cloud-based visual and virtual computing, and automotive platforms for infotainment systems.", none of which are gaming use cases. Question is if those represent more than 10% of the "graphics" revenue or not.
My guess is yes. And even if 1% of consumer graphic cards are being sold for the non-gaming use cases, it seems pretty clear that the demand in the non-gaming use cases seems even bigger than gaming ones.
Also note that from the press release linked above, there are only a few lines dedicated to gaming. The rest is all about non-gaming use cases.
Overall looking very promising for the next 5-10 years, and Im hoping any potential recession doesn’t cause Intel or AMD to take their foot off the pedal, or in the worst case (more likely for Intel), even scrap the product lines.
Count me in as bearish, at least for aftermarket discrete GPUs. Desktops' share continues to slowly deflate as a percentage of PC shipments. Fewer and fewer consumers upgrade their built-in GPU, whether discrete or integrated. The GPU "middle class" is disappearing between "whatever came with my computer" and behemoths like the RTX 4090.
> When a standalone GPU is as large as a modern video gaming console—it's nearly identical in total volume to the Xbox Series S and more than double the size of a Nintendo Switch—it's hard not to laugh incredulously at the thing.
I wonder what allowance 3rd parties have to detune these cards, and perhaps produce a 4090 with a more modest cooling solution suited to a ~300W power level, maybe making a 2 or 2.5 slot size card, rather than the current monster cards we're seeing.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60yFji_GKak
Maybe #novidia or #novidya as a hashtag.