AMD can't beat the RTX 4090, but gamers should be careful
This is the third major GPU introduced this year. Watch the AMD Radeon 7000 Launch Event Live Stream. At this event, the GPU industry failure revealed two new GPUs, the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX.
It's a shame we don't see more expensive graphics cards at the show, but the price list here certainly looks promising.The flagship retails for $999 ($600 less than Nvidia's high-end RTX 4090), so we can expect more competitive pricing for mid-range GPUs like the expected RX 7700 XT.
It's good to say that they don't like the price hikes of Nvidia's main competitor, with new GPUs hitting homes with the cost of living crisis and constantly selling for up to twice the retail price. Intel has taken a similar step with its Arc GPUs, I prefer a more affordable card for 1080p gaming on the Arc A770 and A750.
AMD's reveal event is called "Together We Advance_Gaming". Pointless points aside, this is what game-changing gamer gamers really need: not a super powerful, ridiculously expensive GPU, but an arm and a leg that is cheap to get with an effective gaming solution.
The Red Team is going to war - and they have high morale.
The problem is that Nvidia is starting to feel like consumers don't care. I know that's a harsh opinion, but let's look at the evidence. As Nvidia is well aware, the RTX 4090 sold out almost instantly, so its ridiculously high retail price doesn't matter to the GPU giant.
Should Nvidia have created a lottery system first? almost yes Hopefully this will lead to better card distribution and less scalping on eBay, at least at launch. After Nvidia unveiled the $1,599 GPU to the world, we seemed to be watching people clamor for it.This also explains why they chose not to release the (slightly) more affordable RTX 4080. AMD will launch both new cards on December 13th.
Don't even tell me about the power issues behind the RTX 4090. The radio silence over the Nvidia card power adapter bug is bad enough, but the GPU draws a lot of power compared to the somewhat reasonable 355W and 300W claims for the new Radeon cards.
Meanwhile, AMD seems well entrenched on the gaming consumer side -- at least as much as any big company can. This applies to both your GPU and your CPU. The Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D are excellent processors for gaming platforms. While Nvidia is almost guaranteed to reach its cap,, no one needs an RTX 4090 to game, even at 4K. If AMD releases the $500 RX 7700 XT, it could be a new pick for midrange gaming.
Both software and hardware are the new frontier of this conflict.
With all the excitement surrounding the new graphics card, it's important not to miss the other things Team Red announced at their Advance_Gaming event. The most important of these was FSR 3.0. This is the third generation of AMD's superscale FidelityFX Super Resolution technology and competes with Nvidia's DLSS.
FSR isn't as popular as DLSS, but the next-gen software that works similarly and handles the latest version of DLSS 3 is a great addition. FSR 3.0 features the same image rendering capabilities that Nvidia used to upgrade its latest technology, aiming to improve performance up to 2x over FSR 2.0.
Even more interesting is a new feature called Hyper-RX. AMD has been a little hesitant with the details of this new addition to the Radeon Adrenalin software suite, but it looks like a graphics driver enhancement that can be activated with one click and also boosts performance by up to 85%. Reduces input lag by up to 66%.
It's unclear how Hyper-RX will work or how it will interact with FSR at this point, but it's a surprisingly ambitious offering on paper. It was designed to compete with Nvidia Reflex, Team Green's latency reduction tool. Oh, and one more thing: the new Radeon cards are the first consumer GPUs to use the new DisplayPort 2.1 connectors.
I'm eager to get my hands on these cards, to put it briefly.
Really, don't undervalue that new display interface. DisplayPort 2.1 can produce 4K at a mind-boggling 480Hz and 8K at a rate of 165Hz. Though there is no possibility the cards will achieve those framerates in the overwhelming majority of games, it is still a massive middle finger to Nvidia that the RTX 4090 is still constrained to DisplayPort 1.4, which has a maximum resolution of 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz.
Although it is now hard for us to accurately assess the RX 7900 XT and XTX's performance, AMD did give us some data from internal testing. We don't know if FSR or Hyper-RX were utilized for this, but the flagship card achieved 60 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 with the highest settings and ray tracing enabled, which is an outstanding performance.
The main line is that AMD doesn't actually need to outperform Nvidia in the ultra-performance market, even though it won't. The red threat just really has to outperform Nvidia in terms of price to performance, and it actually seems like it may. We could be in for another race in early 2023 if Nvidia doesn't release any less expensive RTX 4000 cards.
Last but not least, a pleasant little byproduct of the Radeon 7000 announcement is that we'll probably see some respectable price reductions for Radeon 5000 and 6000 GPUs come Black Friday. You should keep a look out for fantastic graphics card deals if you want to play games at 1080p and 1440p with some of these cards.