RTX 2080 or wait for Radeon VII?

[DrHax34]

Hi everyone,

 

So, I had an RX Vega 56 Air Boost from MSI that I had bought second-hand, which I regret fully because I came to know it was used brutally for mining, so the card didn't have much to live. Recently it broke down. Bummer. I RMA'd it and they basically returned the full money for it, which is almost enough for an RTX 2080 since the previous owner had bought it in the middle of the whole mining debacle.

 

Now, i prefer AMD cards and drivers, I love the Radeon Driver experience and I am waiting until the launch of the Radeon VII to check out prices here...

... but I'm starting to get bored and anxious because there is nothing in Portugal that indicates there's gonna be a pre-sale or anything like the RTX launch has done. And my gaming PC is stuck with the freaking Intel integrated graphics, so I can't play anything on it.

 

Before anyone says "Why won't you go for the RTX 2080 TI?", in short, I live in Portugal, and the RTX 2080 Ti is more than 1300€ here, which in the land of the free is about 1 474,52 US$. The price difference between the RTX 2080 and the Ti is more than 250€ (~300 US$). I can't pay that much.

 

So, what do you guys think? Should I hold my horses and keep hoping to check out the Radeon VII after the 7th of February or should I just pull the trigger on the RTX 2080?

[boey]

From what AMD had shown during CES, I am not too hopeful of the Radeon VII. Keep in mind they cherry-picked the benchmarks against the RTX 2080 and it still performed on par, it is possible it would lose out in other games. Similar to Vega 64 vs 1080, or Vega 56 vs 1070. If you really can't wait, then get the RTX 2080. If you can wait till mid-end February for 3rd party reviews to come out you can better choose between both cards. 

[Shimejii]

Honestly the Radeon VII looks to be a huge Dissapointment at the 700$ price point. It will flop and fail pretty hard just like Vega did and even IF you want it, availability probably wont be there for you in the EU. Overall if it was my choice, id invest in a Very good 1080ti used, as it will perform the same as a 2080 or better in most cases ( except 4k, but 4k is dumb to game at) 

 

If you HAVE to buy new, the 2080 should already be a better buy with discounts and such since it also didnt really fair all too well with the 700$ price. If you cant find any and you find the Radeon VII in stock magically, i suppose you could. But DO NOT PRE ORDER! You should see benchmark results first and make sure it is up to par

[Princess Luna]

There's nothing special with this Radeon 7... if you want an AMD card without feeling disappointed you should wait for Navi.

 

What do you mean loving "AMD's driver experience"? it used to be pretty bad  being honest compared to nVidia's and only recently they catch up so you're just used to it likely reason why you think it's any better.

 

Radeon 7 is not a competitor to the RTX 2080, because it features no Ray Tracing capacity at all, so it's actually a GTX 1080 Ti competitor and considering you can find those for much cheaper on the used market with better support for games and GameWorks and what not (also supports FreeSync now) I don't see any appeal what so ever for the Radeon 7.

[DrHax34]

1 hour ago, Princess Cadence said:

There's nothing special with this Radeon 7... if you want an AMD card without feeling disappointed you should wait for Navi.

 

What do you mean loving "AMD's driver experience"? it used to be pretty bad  being honest compared to nVidia's and only recently they catch up so you're just used to it likely reason why you think it's any better.

 

Radeon 7 is not a competitor to the RTX 2080, because it features no Ray Tracing capacity at all, so it's actually a GTX 1080 Ti competitor and considering you can find those for much cheaper on the used market with better support for games and GameWorks and what not (also supports FreeSync now) I don't see any appeal what so ever for the Radeon 7.

What I mean by AMD's driver experience is that since they made the Adrenaline and the new UI (post-Catalyst) it's been a lot better. I never liked Nvidia's Geforce Experience nor the control panel that looks straight out of Windows 98. Also, whenever I had to update the drivers for my GTX 1060, I had to DDU all the time, or else I would experience Frame drops in Overwatch and GTA V. That never happened to me with the Vega 56.

 

This doesn't mean I will never buy Nvidia, it just means I trust AMD's DirectX and Vulkan drivers more. (OpenGL is clearly Nvidia's win)

[ThePD]

I don't think it is a 'super amazing' graphics card by far. It is likely to perform better/worse in various titles than the 2080. The difference is the lack of ray tracing which isn't really a feature I would say makes the 2080 a 'better' card as RTX features are only in one game. I think either way for the average person the R7 and the 2080 are going to perform pretty identically with higher power usage from the R7.