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New computer video card advice
MadBomber13
Member UncommonPosts: 133
in Hardware
Finally buying a new computer after 8 years. I have everything figured out but I'm torn between video cards. In my price range and availability are a AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. Roughly the same price although the 3070 is $80 more expensive. I looked at reviews and articles online but they tend to be in the lines of both good, 6800 XT slightly better depending on the games in question, 3070 Ti better longevity before needing to upgrade. Any thoughts or advice would be welcome.
Thanks in advance!
Thanks in advance!
Comments
If they were same price, one could raise a question on whether 3070 TI's ray-tracing and DLSS2 capabilities are enough to offset that the card is otherwise less powerful. But since RX 6800 XT is cheaper, imho there's no real question, go with RX 6800 XT.
This is written assuming that both of the models you're thinking about have about equal cooling.
If you're constantly upgrading and playing games that use the latest features that are limited to the latest cards, then maybe you can squint and see a case that you might keep the GeForce card for two years and the Radeon for one. If longevity to you means hoping that you'll keep a card for eight years instead of six, then the only things on the market today that matter are DirectX 12, Vulkan, and which vendor is more likely to port future features back to older hardware.
Grab the 6800 and save the $80 or use it to move up to the next tier CPU, grab some extra ram or a bigger hard drive. Spend it on something that will extend the life of your pc, not ray tracing.
They just should not be given too much importance. When AMD option is both faster and cheaper (as long as those special techniques aren't used), then AMD's option is better.
Whatever GPU you buy today, if you plan to use it for 6+ years it's likely that manufacturers add some new hardware that can do some new tech. Both NVidia and AMD do this. But normally any tech requiring new hardware is added just as an option alongside support for the old tech, and everyone tries their best to keep backward compatibility so that game devs would get game sales on all the older hardware that's still in use.
As it is, RX 6800 XT has hardware and software for FSR support, whereas RTX 3070 TI has hardware and software for both FSR and DLSS support (excluding the ability to generate frames without CPU help). So that's a win for NVidia - just not so important that you should pick NVidia over AMD card that's otherwise faster and cheaper.
EDIT: Also when comparing DLSS and FSR we should remember that they are not equal. DLSS is better than FSR.
And how likely do you think it is that Nvidia will port those newer versions back to older hardware? Even if DLSS 5.0 is the greatest thing ever, it won't matter if the 3070 Ti doesn't support it. And it probably won't. Nvidia generally wants people to buy new hardware rather than sticking with their old and will often decline to implement new features on older hardware even if they readily could do so.
While DLSS and FSR aren't equal, I don't think it's far to say that DLSS is better. DLSS carries some major drawbacks that FSR doesn't. The details are complicated, but I explained it here:
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/499212/the-trouble-with-dlss-and-related-algorithms
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
If you can wait until January with the purchase, then it might be good idea to wait. But getting AMD's next gen parts before Christmas is looking uncertain.
FIrst off - DLSS requires game support - not every game has it, and not even every new game today has it. So it's a long shot to assume that all, or even many, future games will continue to use it. I'm sure they will as long as nVidia continues to pay them to use it.
But AMD also has FSR, which is nearly equivalent, and cross-platform. It's also per-game, like DLSS, but I think this fight is going to go kinda like how GeSync / Freesync ended up going. Sure, GeSync is still a thing, but it's not a selling point any more because Freesync and open VRR standards pretty much took over and made it meaningless.
So, if anything, the up-sampling argument is a draw with respect to longevity, and either of them require some willingness to predict the future.
And to throw more FUD at that argument: nVidia just locked DLSS 3 behind the 4000 series, meaning if you want to use it you have to upgrade your card anyway. FSR support right now is both cross platform, and goes back a couple of generations. That isn't to say that AMD won't also lock future revisions behind hardware upgrades; but they have went out of their way to be as inclusive as possible so far.
DLSS 3, and probably future revisions, aren't going to work on a 3070. FSR will, though, but it will work ~better~ on the cheaper 6800.
Raytracing, on either - nah, wouldn't consider that a longevity issue on either. THe 3070 will do RT faster, but it will do most everything else slower. And titles, as they come out in the future, would require more of it, rather than less of it, making a card you buy today pretty worthless for RT in games that come won't come out in 2-3-5-8 years from now.
Sources, in case you want to know what I'm talking about:
https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/gddr/gddr6/
https://product.skhynix.com/products/dram/gddr/gddr6.go
https://www.micron.com/products/ultra-bandwidth-solutions/gddr6/part-catalog
There aren't any other major memory vendors capable of manufacturing comparably advanced DRAM chips.
For what it's worth, I made the same call on the launch of the GTX 1080, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 for the same reasons, and in all of those cases, it took several months after launch for supplies to stabilize. I don't think any of those cards were widely available at MSRP within six months of their official launch.
I'm hoping that AMD will have heavy volume of their new generation sooner than that, but if they need 20 Gbps GDDR6, then it's out of their hands, as they're waiting on Samsung or Hynix. If 20 Gbps GDDR6 is delayed, then AMD might launch lower end parts with 18 Gbps GDDR6, which is already available from Samsung--and already used on the RX 6950X.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Mostly been using NVIDIA video cards for the last two decades so AMD products are a bit of a mystery to me. I really don't need the latest cutting edge tech out there since mostly playing not to graphic intensive titles lately (GW2, TF2, Farthest Frontier, Medieval Dynasty and the like).
Think I will go with the AMD card and save a nickel or two.
Nvidia doesn't have this problem because they're using 21 Gbps GDDR6X from Micron, which has been in mass production for quite some time now.
To me its like a Chinese Battery. What capacity do you want to write on the side of the low capacity battery? It just makes you hit the target FPS regardless of the image/motion degradation.
Raytracing isn't ready for prime time.
To me the biggest feature of nVidia is their ability to change rendering paths for an old game. But that technology hasn't been released yet.
Bloody awesome tech!