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Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

> The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080

I guess it depends on what benchmark you care about but for AMD to compete with a 3080, which is 70-100% faster than a 2080, which is 10-20% faster than AMD's current flagship, they need to do a lot better than +50%.

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Some of the leaked benchmarks for the 3080 put it more in the range of 30-50% better than the 2080 series:

"30% Faster Than The RTX 2080 Ti & 50% Faster Than the RTX 2080 SUPER on Average"

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-b...

AND those early benchmarks were from Nvidia on very specific DLSS and RTX workloads that may not have been representative to many games people play.

Does it really matter for gaming?

Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts.

DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high resolution, or high framerates) and DLSS 2 would help you achieve either.

RTX is nice, Minecraft RTX has done a lot for marketing it. Probably still a coin-flip on whether a gamer would eat the performance hit for the quality improvement.

[1]: https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4

DLSS and RTX are still game specific, with very few games that have developed for them. It has been a generation, if there was going to be a big flood of DLSS and RTX titles, it would have happened already.

RT is here to stay, both next gen consoles have it.

> DLSS and RTX are still game specific

Note that DLSS 2.0's model is not game specific ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-... )

DLSS support is still game specific as it needs additional data beyond just the color buffer to do the up-scaling, such as motion vectors, but it at least doesn't need the expensive part that put it out of reach of eg. indie games.

So it's now on the "if unity & unreal support it, you'll see everyone have it in a few years" trajectory. Probably, anyway, similar to things like TXAA & FXAA.

> 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards

Those are $1200+ monitors at any decent resolution.

EDIT: by resolution I mean the horizontal dimension of the monitor, where pc enthusiasts typically go for 27+ inches in width which are more expensive as you scale in size, add a curve, etc.

And you're talking about $600-$1200 GPUs, plus similar or higher for CPU+MB+RAM. People who buy these things are willing to pay for maximum performance.

You can get a real good quality 4k60 for $400, or one with shitty color for much less. The LG 27gn950 is 4k144 + full DCI-P3 for $800, but unfortunately has been sold out everywhere since it was released a week or two ago.

I bought this 4k/60 monitor for $500 3 years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SHZSXVI/ref=asin_title?...

No gsync/freesync, but I wasn't intending to game on it anyway.

the resolution is specified, do you mean image quality? gamers tend to sacrifice that for refresh speed and low input latency.

There appears to be no FPS performance gain going from 144hz to 240hz though so you don't have to get crazy.

I meant the dimensions of the monitor i.e. 27in, 32in, etc. 27 inches seems to be one of the most popular dimensions.

Depends on price. Nvidia might have owned the tippity top with their 20xx series but the 5700xt was a very strong card for medium priced builds and as a pc building enthusiast would’ve been the card for my next build alongside an amdR5 3600 cpu. At launch it had driver issues but they were cleaned up and at $350 it was a total steal compared to a 2070 at $650 for similar performance.

I agree. They don't need to beat the 3080, they just need to match or beat the 3070 at a competitive price. I would say the majority of the market does not have $700 to blow on a GPU. Having compelling options under $500 would be enough of a win.

That's what AMD has been doing and it hasn't really worked out. While all the market sales are at the mid range price point, all the youtubers & lust worthy builds that drive mind-share are not. And marketing works, it's why you'll see basically nothing but Nvidia on the steam stats page despite how competitive the 5700 (xt) was.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

The chart toppers are the mid range cards (1060, 1050 Ti, 1050), exactly as you'd expect. But what you then might not expect is that the 1070 and 1080 are both still higher than any AMD offering. There's almost as many 2070 SUPER's ($600) as there are RX 580s ($230 @ launch, currently sub-$200), AMD's most popular GPU among Steam users.

Ah, apologies the linked stories and videos go into more detail. The “50 percent jump” is from Instructions per cycle alone with process node improvements and better cache architecture also contributing gains.

Final perf numbers are being speculated as being “close to 3080” in the chip forums, but I’d take that with a grain of salt since those are rumors alone.

Isn't the Nvidia flagship the RTX 3090? The overclockers uk website has the most expensive 3090 (Asus one) at ~1600gbp. On paper this should destroy everything else available atm.

It's also well over $1000. I imagine that's not the competition that AMD is going after this iteration. They probably want to compete with the graphics card people will actually buy.

In the kitchen keynote, their CEO positioned the 3080 as the flagship card and the 3090 as the Titan replacement(higher vram for things like large model runs)

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