LooneyJuice

Yeah, it goes back to intimate knowledge of your applications. I could play plenty of my stuff on my old 7850s. Can I? Yes. Would I now? Hell no

Short answer. Because they can. Other than that, if you have no incentive to upgrade, economical or otherwise, you can get away with some pretty old hardware if you have intimate knowledge of your resource usage for the software you use. Then there's stuff like performance envelopes you wish to abide by (1080p/60hz/144hz etc). I have to stress though, that an R9 290 when brand new was a pretty damn good performer. So, for most games, you fell into the bracket of buying good now, and upgrading later. If you had something like an R9 270 or something, I believe you'd be singing a somewhat different tune. Sure, it can do the same things, but the difference is how it does it. There is also the matter of ease of use. Heftier performance generally nets you a more streamlined user experience without the need to tinker with your software or games to even things out. You just crank options up, max any presets, jump in and forget about it.

You just need the first line to be perfectly honest. You always need resolution and framerate. At the end of the day, isn't that all you're chasing when you're making these comparisons? If you're on a 60hz panel and you're drawing 300 frames, even if you're "bottlenecking" your GPU f.ex, you're still gaining no appreciable benefit. You could easily just cap the framerate to something high enough where the monitor scanning won't expose most of the tearing, benefit from the reduced input latency and call it a day. For most instances when it comes to 60-75hz and depending on the title (let's say AAA FPS games), you'd be surprised how low you can go and satisfy the 60hz criteria when it comes to CPUs. 144hz+ is really the only range where you should be more careful regarding CPU IPC and such.

Seriously, I'll just stick it in the sig at this point. A bottleneck is a metaphor for something impeding a certain flow rate. In the PC world, that flow rate or Point of Reference is your resolution and your intended gaming frame rate (1080p/1440p/2160p 60hz/75hz/144hz+). If X CPU and X GPU combo can satisfy your resolution and framerate criteria, you're golden. But you have to set a frame or reference and specify your software suite. Otherwise, the word means nothing at all. And this website means nothing at all. It doesn't even list resolution or framerate you wish to run at. Hypothetical scenario: Would you recommend someone with a 4790k a 1080 instead of a 1080ti when he may be "bottlenecked" by his CPU at 300 fps in a certain title? If so, then you're suggesting that someone with a budget for a 1080ti settle for something lesser "because reasons" even though he can satisfy his resolution/framerate criteria and crank the eyecandy up (and use the card for longer). Everything will reach a limit, and everything is always hindered by something, the point is to specify your target framerate and resolution. All this completely arbitrary talk about bottlenecking is hurting consumers and perpetuating this weird mythos and "intuition" regarding what CPU will bottleneck what GPU and vice versa.

Would be nice to know what the actual vendor/version it is. GB R9 390 G1? MSI R9 390? Sapphire Nitro?

Such a cool post, thanks OP. I love neatly laid out projects like these and the retrospectives and such they prompt. I only caught the tail-end of this stuff when I was a kid, but to me it's like shorter span archaeology almost (This is not me trying to call anyone old, I swear ). Kudos!

Oh not Vulkan again... Poor Doom has turned into another Ashes of the Benchmark for AMD. Even though it is an actual game, and an exceptional one at that. Not to mention, I'm not a fan of Blind Tests at all. IMO, it removes all the objectivity of painstakingly produced numbers from outlets such as GN and boils it down to a few soundbites. I could probably tailor certain games to run equally well between a 1070 and a 970 with no glaringly noticeable detriment to visuals at 1080p and have people praise one or the other. Also, seriously, if it's still dodgy to base your purchase on DX12 implementation, how prudent is it to base it off Vulkan?

*cough* Clear formatting for Night Theme *cough* *cough* please *cough*

It is true, sadly, which is why absolutely everyone and their dog is doing it. I really can't fault them if the content is still up to snuff. Hell, if you have no choice, might as well go apeshit and have some fun with it too while you're at it. The kind of fun Luke had when he was puking a punch of CPUs no one knew how he stashed.

I have to say, for everyone commenting so passionately on this subject, on a supposed hot topic, this thread, in roughly a day has amassed a grand total of 56 posts. Including this one. How many views does an LTT video amass in 20 hours? How many likes/dislikes? How many viewers who may genuinely appreciate the content? Would you invalidate their input according to some sort of criteria? Youtube is progressively making it harder and harder to live off of, even resorting to baked-in ad spamming. Some channels have even noticed a declining trend in visits to old videos. Not to mention all the stuff I and many other people don't know about regarding what's going on under the hood. And I can't find a reason to believe the video on this kerfuffle wasn't genuine. It was backed by numbers, demographic stats, you name it. Constructive input is always nice, but vehemently expressing an opinion on this subject expecting a few tens of posts to change the course of an entire media entity is a bit, ambitious methinks.

I'd suggest trying other games to determine whether or not this is a Doom-specific issue if you haven't already. Because 20 fps specifically sounds like some weird frame capping, especially regarding the menu which isn't resource demanding at all. If you wish to do so, you could completely delete your NV or iGPU drivers using DDU and reinstalling. But, if it's just specific to Doom, it may hint at something else, and may be worth reporting.

That's kinda funny. Does it run as well in Fullscreen? Bear in mind Vulkan was pretty finicky when it came to dedicated fullscreen, so your mileage may vary between OpenGL and Vulkan.

I'll echo the "YES" comments when it comes to snake oil. There are very few somewhat "legit" applications, but they work similar to how W10 game mode does. Meaning that, if you're one of those users who can't keep a cap on background processes, and keeps piling on bloatware, or isn't informed enough to discern what's useful and what's not, they may provide a benefit by shutting down processes that shouldn't have been running in the first place. For everyone else who can maintain a half-decent optimally running OS, they're absolutely useless. In fact, they can be somewhat detrimental to performance (As lots of reviewers found out with W10 Game Mode) as these applications are sometimes scanning for processes to shut down in regular intervals (like your AV software). TL;DR: W10 Game mode and a few of these applications may do something for people with terribly bloated OS installs, but for everyone else, it's just another background application to run. And yes, most of them are the snakiest of snake oil.

That is a strange one. The menus have no reason to be capped at 20fps. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a framerate cap you stuck on by mistake with something like MSI Afterburner (More specifically Riva Tuner Statistics Server that comes with it). Additionally, make sure you're running dedicated fullscreen. The latter shouldn't make or break your framerate, but gotta start somewhere.

Forgive my ignorance, but where exactly were those specs listed?