Humbug

There will be an enthusiast tier. Navi is a big architectural leap. With the RDNA breakthroughs AMD is now able to get Vega 64 tier performance with the same number of compute units as Polaris. That performance uplift is way more than what can be explained by the clockspeed. I fully expect them to achieve 2080ti level performance from big Navi once they put 60+ compute units in there. But the question is when? The fact that they are keeping placeholders in the driver doesn't really indicate that a launch is imminent, just that they have left provision for it. We don't know if will be soon, or late as usual once Nvidia has already launched something faster and newer. In that case they will find themselves in the same position as with Radeon 7 where they caught up to the 1080ti only after the next gen Turing had launched. Also all the rumours suggest that Navi 5700 / 5700xt is a RDNA / GCN hybrid whereas the future launches will be fully RDNA based. It will be interesting to see if that shift improves the power efficiency. If not AMD will have to keep the clockspeeds modest and rely on going wide in order to hit high performance.

They would have continued to support Linux the same way they have all these years. Ubuntu is just one distro. It just happened to be the distro which they officially supported, tested and targetted. They would have switched their 'official' target and testing to a different distro. But effectively all the popular distros would continue to have steam the way they do right now, even if Ubuntu users have an extra step to go through...

Valve already has 64 bit steam client for Mac OSX. It's only a matter of time until it comes to windows and Linux. That was never the problem. The problem is there are thousands of old 32 bit games on steam which nobody is going to recompile. Valve has to maintain compatibility.

Valve will eventually make the Steam client 64 bit on windows and Linux like they did with Mac. That is not an issue. 64 bit OS and 64 bit steam client is all good but they want 32 bit software to still work. Because the problem is that they have sold thousands of old games from 3rd party devs which will never be converted to 64 bit, they don't want to break them. Not to mention the fact that they now even have most windows 32bit games working on Linux. In the case of Linux Valve has so many distro options to choose from as the 'official' distro. So rather than shipping the 32 bit libraries themselves they decided to just switch their official support and testing to a different distro which provides the functionality out of the box. This is LInux so the community will do what is needed to make sure Steam works well across all the popular distros (including Ubuntu) like it does at the moment.

I honestly don't know, could be the same or not much difference... My point was that for gaming performance you need far less RDNA cores to achieve the same result as GCN cores. So on a given manufacturing node RDNA is going to be lower die space for a particular gaming performance point. Unless the RDNA compute unit itself is a lot bigger...

For a given performance point it is a lot more compact. For example the RX 5700 has the same number of CUs as Polaris. But it is performing like a Vega 64. Even if we equalize the clockspeeds it doesn't come close to making up the difference of a 36 CU part performing like a 64 CU part... That's why AMD was promoting 25% greater performance per clock at the RDNA launch. It's a big architectural leap. On an APU with limited die space which fits only 10-20 compute units you would much rather those be RDNA based rather than GCN based in order to get maximum work done.

Seems almost criminal to use Vega when you have RDNA/navi which needs far less CUs and far less die space to achieve the same performance, especially in an APU.

Intel has resigned itself to losing the majority of high end desktop/workstation market share to AMD for now. However they will defend their laptop and server market share very hard. In the laptop market they still have competitive products and AMD is not as aggressive, they are taking their sweet time in launching good APUs with 7nm Zen2 cores + Navi graphics. In the server world I think AMD will get a few good percentage points of market share, which is big money for AMD.

RX 580 is a bit faster now and AMD provides a more reliable/polished experience than Nvidia with freesync monitors. Also more VRAM ages well.

Hopefully minimum for 4K 60fps lol.

If you see people as their ethnicity or other group identity first and as humans second, and you are perpetually trying to virtue signal by showing that you stand for the oppressed (in a condescending way) then you will always be offended... You will not be able to explore a beautiful fictional world and revel in the role playing experience.

It serves it's purpose as a refresh. Because the launch day reviews of Navi will show the AMD RX 5700xt slightly beating or tieing the RTX 2070 for a bit cheaper, and the RX 5700 beating the RTX 2060. So by providing 10% faster super parts shortly after, Nvidia is able to introduce models that they can keep selling at the same price points, while slightly cutting the prices of the existing models.

LOL, at one point the BBC interviewer asks Keanu is this helps legitimize video games. Then he realizes from Keanu's expression that it was a bad question because games do not need legitimizing.

Hopefully CD Projekt Red will do a better job of this than what they did with hairworks on the Witcher 3. You can't have both ray tracing and high frame-rates. It's one or the other for now.

Tell me about it. I still use my 5 year old Sapphire R9 290 vapor-x. It's only 20% slower than a GTX 1060. Things have really slowed down in the midrange, while the high end moves out of reach of us. I see more and more posts like yours in various forums and comments sections. Thing is that as Nvidia and AMD make PC gaming unattractive... AMD is going to not get hit, because they get the business anyway whether people shift to consoles, or shift to stadia, and now it looks like they are even selling RDNA designs to mobile. But longterm Nvidia is really shooting themselves in the foot with this strategy by making PC gaming look so bad.

Source? Yep. Now they both deserve flak. This isn't about nvidia vs AMD anymore. This trend is now a huge threat to PC gaming on the whole. Until recently pc gaming has been growing despite the rest of the pc ecosystem declining. This continious price escalation will make it more niche and elitist and push people towards alternatives.

JediFragger will be happy to buy you one. ?

The other thing that will be interesting to watch is the driver maturation process. Vega, Polaris etc all gained performance in the following year after release. But this time the driver gains could potentially end up being even more significant over time, because of all the RDNA architectural changes opening up opportunities for new driver optimizations. Yep it looks like the RX 5700 vs RTX 2060 is going to be a no contest. Nvidia has to cut prices or use their new super cards to compete with the RX 5700. It will be best value Navi card for now. It will actually perform very close to the RTX 2070 for a lot less money.

I think most of them would have just bought geforce anyway. Talking about the average PC gamer here which is the majority of this market, not the people who hang out on tech forums.

I don't have an issue with them comparing to it's competitor. But the problem is as you said that they are always late. The recent success of the CPU department is partly due to the successful implementation of their strategy of having leapfrogging design teams in order to iterate from Zen 1 to Zen 2 to Zen 3 etc... They are delivering consistently and predictably on new products, they set the trends now. Whereas on the GPU front they are always chasing Nvidia. Always delays and always playing catch up and launching half way through Nvidia's generation. And when they do launch it is never a complete line up either. Never high end and mid range launching close together. They just don't execute reliably on their GPU roadmap. The products are always competitive but never trendsetting. Hopefully with Lisa Su confirming they have been expanding the GPU design teams and the company's new found profitability things may change.

Why do you buy so many GPUs with similar performance?

On the GPU front they have realized that even when they had a superior product at superior pricing most people still mindlessly bought Nvidia. So they have decided there is no point anymore and they may as well reap higher margins and settle for lower volume. On the desktop CPU front it's different. Whenever they had a good product at a good price, whether it's Athlon XP, Athlon 64 or Ryzen the gamer and enthusiast market has rewarded them by buying it up. Now they are moving further upmarket too with more high end products. But they did the same with Athlon 64 too. The CPU market is healthier.

?? Nvidia would not promote an RTX 2060 by comparing it to the Radeon 7 either. Products compete within price brackets. Is your issue that they made a 40 CU part before going for the high end 64 CU version to challenge the top?

cj09beira is correct. The fastest API for each GPU even if that means dx11 for Nvidia vs Vulkan for AMD. Confirmation below.

Radeon 7 runs cool https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_vii_16_gb_review,7.html None of us would be complaining about the stock blower cool if there were also 3rd party models available at launch. But there aren't. AMD has spent millions of dollars of R&D and countless engineering man-hours for the last few years to create this new architecture. That was the difficult part. What a shame after doing all that to sabotage your launch day reviews by having the cards run hotter and louder than Nvidia cards. Something that could easily be solved with a good cooler design. AMD does all the hard work and screws up the easy part. Gamers and enthusiasts do care about keeping their GPUs cool. Furthermore it often has a direct impact on performance as sustained boost clocks are tied to temperature. They have been criticized for this countless times but they do not learn. My Sapphire R9 290 vapor-x is way cooler, quieter and noticeably faster than the reference model. AMD should be giving themselves every chance they can to make a great first impression. Rather than launching a blower cool and allowing Nvidia to respond before the after model cards show up months later. This launch is already late and they should have had enough time to get everything sorted with their partners or if they couldn't at least make sure the stock cooler was similar to the Radeon 7.