Radeon Thread

[majestic]

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat, AMD is as bad as Intel and nVidia when afforded the opportunity? You don't say. I thought Lisa Su is my lord and saviour?

[Zoraptor]

Lisa Su is AMD's lord and saviour, not the general publics'.

Hard to see how AMD could be 'artificially' keeping prices high in the GPU sphere though. Nowhere near enough market share relative to nVidia and if they're just aping nVidia's prices... well you wouldn't blame Suzuki for overpriced cars if Toyota was doing the same because Toyota sells four times as many units and a lot of people buy their cars because they're Toyota and just work. Things are a lot closer in the CPU sphere though, and AMD has dropped prices a decent amount on 7000 series since they were selling embarrassingly badly.

It will be interesting to see if TSMC's pretty hefty price cuts to get volume uptake will get passed along (or taken up even, hard to see if they're still going to charge for unused capacity on old nodes)- and they're probably the most guilty of price gouging a near monopoly of anyone, including peak Intel and nVidia.

[Keyrock]

Turns out businesses gonna do business things, which is to say be as cutthroat and greedy as they can get away with. The key is to have multiple businesses competing in the same sector to (somewhat) keep each other in check. This is why we need Intel to get their GPUs up to snuff soon.

[Keyrock]

FSR 2.2 is out. The main talking point in the release notes is a reduction in ghosting that's sometimes present with upscaling of fast moving objects.

[Bokishi]

I know FSR 3 going to get frame generation. It's a game changer in Hogwarts and Cyberpunk

[majestic]

Heh.

[Keyrock]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

Heh.

It looks like someone vomited a rainbow onto a GPU.

[Zoraptor]

Said it before, will say it again, I'd 100% buy a Yeston card if they were available here. It'd be like a little ray of sunshine peeking out of my case.

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, those Sakura cards have been around for a few generations now, I think. Have seen near endless mocking them. The actual color scheme on that purple-teal-pink one isn't that terrible if you're into that sort of thing, kinda almost Outrun-looking, but...

Edited March 9, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

Ultimately, I don't much care what the GPU looks like, where my case sits on the ground you can't really see inside it anyway. The bigger issue is paying a premium above the reference card in exchange for -0.5% performance.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Keyrock

[Zoraptor]

Oh no, 597fps in TF2 instead of 600! and I don't even play TF2. I'd say can't put a price on happiness but that is of course incorrect as I'd have to buy a new PSU and a new case as well.

Nearly 200USD under MSRP on an XFX 7900XT Speedster Merc here now. If it weren't for the above I'd be severely tempted since it's only just above my upper ceiling on price. May have been an awful value proposition at launch but knocking a quarter off the price- and that for a pretty decent AIB- makes it look so much better. Which may well have been the idea of the high initial price, of course.

Suppose I could take an angle grinder to my case, not like I've actually used any 3.5" bays...

[majestic]

Fun with pricing here in Central Yurop, anyone want to buy 10% less performance for a 30% price hike? 

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: 889,90€
AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT: 689,00€

Retailers have gone completely insane. So far this was limited to strange pricing vis-a-vis the new generation (7900 XTs are cheaper than the 6900 XTs, for instance), but this is new. Eh, guess that is what happens when AI models set prices based on stock and moved units.  

[majestic]

That went about as well as expected, as the leaks were pretty much on spot. The price drop semi-justifies the card, but Steve's recommendation is right. Either get a 6700 (XT) now while they're still available, or wait how the 4060 turns out. Last minute price drop seem to give credence to the rumors of the RTX 4060 being on par with the RX 7600 for what was possibly the same targeted MSRP.

Well, the other recommendation would be to roll the dice and get an ARC for considerably less than the 7600. When it works well it's on par or better, but Intel still has some driver issues, but Intel dropped the ARC 750 to 200$, so if it a budget card you're after with only 8 GB of VRAM, then that should be the go-to one, really.

On a purely technical side the specs on the 7600 once again show that RDNA3 isn't performing as expected, or the specs are just wrong. Also, a 90° hot spot on a card like that? Really? Good job. 7600 will probably end up in low end computers with bad thermals, so that's going to be toasty.

[ComradeYellow]

On 2/2/2023 at 3:54 PM, Keyrock said:

Turns out businesses gonna do business things, which is to say be as cutthroat and greedy as they can get away with.

Probably an off-topic tangent but here goes:

Businesses are unfortunately crucial for society, they are one of the 4 necessary evils to keep society afloat along with the military/defense, cultural/family values, and university/education/research.  It's also noteworthy that all 4 pillars have to act in unison to keep society functioning properly and that is why you see both the American military and the American business community becoming more "woke" in recent years because the academic and the cultural spheres of society have already been quite "woke" for a long time.  Will it all work out in the end?  I dunno, but I would say that trying to keep society consistent is probably the better course of action than having it fractured. 

More on topic:

I will have to agree with @majestic that if mid-range is now your bag than Intel is probably your best bet at this moment in time (subject to change).  There's some consistency issues with Arc but it's only a matter of time before they iron them out.  I really don't see much point in Radeon GPU's at this moment unless you have lots of disposable income and want to buy one just to say you did.

 

[majestic]

JayzTwoCents is really weird recently. Yesterday they pulled their 4060 TI review because they did not get the memo that the card needs to be trashed and whoever reviewed it (as Jay himself is recovering from surgery) actually thought it was a fine card and had a video thumbnail saying "The new mid-range king?" - which was hilarious, because there's no way to justify that 399$ price point for the 4060 TI - and today they released an RX 7600 review video called "AMD slams nVidia" with the thumbnail reading "AMD's tiny powerhouse".

That review video has been since renamed to Another GPU you'll probably just hate on anyway. I'm finding that really hilarious. The other cards in their charts were picked to make the 7600 look better than it is by virtue of only comparing it to the RTX 3060, the RTX 3050, the ARC 750 and the RX 6750 XT. Now they're getting dunked on in the comments too, and probably don't quite understand why, I mean, why... change the title to something that petulant.

Also, not sure why I am doing this:

1 hour ago, ComradeYellow said:

I will have to agree with @majestic that if mid-range is now your bag than Intel is probably your best bet at this moment in time (subject to change).  There's some consistency issues with Arc but it's only a matter of time before they iron them out.

The RX 7600 is a joke, and outside of a view outliers that seems to be the consensus among reviewers, although somewhat tempered by the fact that it is less of a joke than the RTX 4060 TI. It does have a decent price to performance ratio, but that is because it is the only new generation card below $400. That this card could even be considered mid-range just shows how ridiculous pricing has become. Remember, it was supposed to launch at 299 dollars until AMD panicked in the face of not being able to fight off the upcoming RTX 4060* at the same price point.

Hardware Unboxed said it plainly, the only reason he's not ripping AMD as big a new one as nVidia is because the RX 7600 has an MSRP of 269 dollars. Which, as they state over and over again, does not make the card good value. It is just better value than an RTX 4060 TI. Heh. Congratulations. So, nothing has changed. nVidia doesn't want to compete, and AMD apparently can't. Man, if Intel could just get their sh*t together...

1 hour ago, ComradeYellow said:

I really don't see much point in Radeon GPU's at this moment unless you have lots of disposable income and want to buy one just to say you did.

While this is certainly true for the entire generation, it is better AMD's offerings than for nVidia's, outside of the 4090, which while overpriced is also a flagship product. Looking at the launch MSRPs, yeah, no, but at their current going rates the 7900 XT is actually a pretty decent card, but here it was pricier than the RTX 4070 TI for a long time (they're both equal in price now) - although the 7900 XT comes with more VRAM, it is not really worth shelling out signficantly more than what an RTX 4070 TI costs. On the flip side the power draw of the 7900 XT is ridiculous for the performance it offers, and if you have more than one screen the idle power draw of the card is going to cost you an arm and a leg at the current energy prices here.

*Speculation, but based on the same leaks that predicted the 7600 to be at or around a 6650 XT level of performance, and lo, it is exactly that. An RDNA3 variant of a 6650 XT.

[Zoraptor]

6650XT, with about 10% lower clocks (excluding boost, which isn't sustained) and 10% less draw. Which would be fine (ish), if it were the 7500XT as it 'should' be and 50 bucks cheaper, as it should be since it's on an older node as well. Dropping the XT but still calling it a 7600 doesn't really cut it.

Looks like the rumours of something Going Wrong with RDNA3* are pretty much borne out now. Very little improvement either in terms of efficiency or computing power.

*even taking into account it not being 'proper' RDNA3.

Edited May 24, 2023 by Zoraptor

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Zoraptor said:

Looks like the rumours of something Going Wrong with RDNA3* are pretty much borne out now. Very little improvement either in terms of efficiency or computing power.

Yeah, comparing the RX 6650 XT's Navi 23 with the Navi 33 configuration of the RX 7600, they're pretty similar outside of Navi 33 clocking slightly slower and having a little more memory bandwith. That's not exactly impressive. The generational boost over the RX 6600 seems to come from adding shaders and compute units more than improvements in the architecture. Basically just what they did with the 6650 XT anyway, to similar results.

Guess those additional TFLOPS AMD boasts on the spec sheet over the 6650 XT were all stuffed into the AI accelerators.

Level1Tech put the reference model RX 7600 into a small form factor case, which results in the hotspot of the card getting to a toasty 103° C. The reference coolers are, again, not really good. Nothing new here though.

Edited May 24, 2023 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

i'm never gonna be able to justify buying another mid-range gpu in my life, am i? once upon a time, mid-range cards did a decent enough job and only cost $200 and not $400...

[majestic]

6 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

i'm never gonna be able to justify buying another mid-range gpu in my life, am i? once upon a time, mid-range cards did a decent enough job and only cost $200 and not $400...

Nope, looking at generational increases, actual mid-range perfomance moved to the $600 point with the RXT 4070, a card that should cost $400 and be called RTX 4060 (maybe TI) and would be an amazing deal for that prize. Although, with nVidia's and AMD's marketing campaign for the Intel ARC kicking into full gear, perhaps Intel can convince their shareholders to let them continue making discrete graphics cards. If, uhm, it is not too late already. So perhaps that'll come down in the future.

Even so, the A750 for $199 looks like a decent enough deal, but it does still have driver issues with older games.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Even so, the A750 for $199 looks like a decent enough deal, but it does still have driver issues with older games.

which is definitely untenable for me, given the kinds of games i (don't) play

although in reality, given the games that i (don't) play, i could probably just go pick up an rtx 2060 for $100 and call it a day, or wait another year until the rtx 3060 is thereabouts the same place

[majestic]

57 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

which is definitely untenable for me, given the kinds of games i (don't) play

although in reality, given the games that i (don't) play, i could probably just go pick up an rtx 2060 for $100 and call it a day, or wait another year until the rtx 3060 is thereabouts the same place

Well, just to expand that a little, having "issues" with older games basically just means sub-par performance in certain titles while it can match or surpass much pricier cards (including the RX 7600) in others, but we're almost always talking about more than playable performance in 1080p. Well, outside of turning on every bell and whistle in current console ports, but those choke an RX 7600 to death just as much.

There are some really strange outliers like Rainbow Six: Siege where the RX 7600 pulls 60% ahead of the ARC 750, but we're talking about 230 vs. 400fps here. Kinda pointless.

Edit: Intel's first attempt at ray tracing also beats even RDNA3's capabilities. Not that this in particular would matter in your use cases, but it just adds to the Intel outing being a pretty good first attempt, majorly hamstrung by software.

Edited May 25, 2023 by majestic

[Zoraptor]

The Intel cards also need resizable BAR, or you leave ~ a quarter of their performance on the table. Though I'd suspect most people have a resizable BAR capable motherboard nowadays.

[majestic]

The RX 7600 reference models apparently cannot be used with some of the 6+2 PCI-E cables. They can still be plugged in enough to work, but not fully. Yeah, they'll probably not burn off like not properly pluged in 12VHPWR cables, but it is something to keep in mind if someone would want to buy one.

Not sure why anyone would want that, though - the 6650 XT is clearly better in price/performance, and getting a decent deal on a 6700 (XT) will last a good while longer.

[majestic]

Cross post to keep things in their own threads, from:

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

i use this specific example because it's literally me

Heads up, because I just checked the specs, the RX 7600 is no better in that regard. It also only uses 8 PCIE 4.0 lanes. Score one for cards that were supposed to be mid-range upgrade paths for older computers. As if anyone needed another reason to just get a cheaper 6650 XT instead, or spend a bit more on a 6700 (XT) to have a card that'll last a bit longer.

Eh, perhaps you should really look at an ARC card if you have ReBAR support.

[Humanoid]

Wonder if AMD are regretting letting Sapphire release that oddball 10GB 6700 non-XT, because geez that card fills a really wide sweet spot right now. And for such a limited-release product, availability for it has been great.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Humanoid