6900xt 6900xt vs 4070

[pscyhe]

Some points to note:
I don't care about dlss and ray tracing.
BUT I would like to stream on Youtube from time to time.
Also I would like to use this card for atleast 5 years (pairing with r5 7600) so confused as 6900xt is already almost 3 years old card.
Which one will be future proof.
Currently on 1080p but would like to aim 1440p in the future (probably not 4k)(play mostly competetive multiplayers right now but don't know what the future holds)

[RONOTHAN##]

The 6900 XT is faster, especially if you overclock the snot out of it, while the 4070 will have longer driver support, has a much better video encoder, significantly lower power consumption, and those features you said you don't care about. I'd be surprised if either had their driver support axed within 5 years, so I wouldn't necessarily count that against the 6900 XT, but depending on how much you pay in power and how good you want your streams to look you may want to go for the 4070 even though it's the slower card of the two. 

 

I'd personally go 6900 XT any day of the week just because of the performance, but I don't stream and AMD's H.264 encoder is really bad, so you will get a better stream quality from a Nvidia card instead. It really just depends on how serious you are about streaming, AMD's encoder will get you by but isn't really something you want in the long term if you're streaming, while Nvidia's will. 

[WereCat]

If you don't care about DLSS/RT the 6900XT performs better in raster. But it uses about twice as much power (if you care).

For streaming you can use x265 HEVC for YT which works really well on AMD cards. But if you want / need to use AVC x264 the AMD cards have quite bad visuals for the bitrates you'll be using for streaming in which case the NVIDIA card is better. (and only YT streaming supports HEVC as far as I'm aware, so if you want to stream to Twitch for example, you'll need to stick with x264 for now).

Also the new 4000 series NVIDIA cards have AV1 encoder (also 7000 series AMD and 300 series Intel cards) (which is not supported yet on most platforms) and has the best visuals at low bitrates.

[pscyhe]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

The 6900 XT is faster, especially if you overclock the snot out of it, while the 4070 will have longer driver support, has a much better video encoder, significantly lower power consumption, and those features you said you don't care about. I'd be surprised if either had their driver support axed within 5 years, so I wouldn't necessarily count that against the 6900 XT, but depending on how much you pay in power and how good you want your streams to look you may want to go for the 4070 even though it's the slower card of the two. 

 

I'd personally go 6900 XT any day of the week just because of the performance, but I don't stream and AMD's H.264 encoder is really bad, so you will get a better stream quality from a Nvidia card instead. It really just depends on how serious you are about streaming, AMD's encoder will get you by but isn't really something you want in the long term if you're streaming, while Nvidia's will. 

Which one will be more future proof? Driver support is alright but will 6900xt last for 5 years?
I'm also tilting towards AMD because I don't think I'll stream as much as I'm currently thinking I will. 

[pscyhe]

3 minutes ago, WereCat said:

For streaming you can use x265 HEVC for YT which works really well on AMD cards. But if you want / need to use AVC x264 the AMD cards have quite bad visuals for the bitrates you'll be using for streaming in which case the NVIDIA card is better.

I haven't researched a lot about streaming yet. Is x265 HEVC good on youtube?

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, pscyhe said:

Driver support is alright but will 6900xt last for 5 years?

I'd be surprised if it didn't, and because of how open the AMD drivers are it's not uncommon for the community to add card support, even when AMD removes it themselves (look at the NimeZ Drivers, the HD 7970 is still getting driver support from the community). 

 

3 minutes ago, pscyhe said:

Which one will be more future proof?

Answering that involves a crystal ball. At the moment, the 6900 XT has better raster performance and more VRAM, both of which would make it seem like it'll be the faster card in the future, but there might be some new games that take advantage of something that AMD cards handle terribly, and the 4070 will end up the faster card at that time. 

[Dedayog]

6 minutes ago, pscyhe said:

Which one will be more future proof? Driver support is alright but will 6900xt last for 5 years?
I'm also tilting towards AMD because I don't think I'll stream as much as I'm currently thinking I will. 

Then get the 6950XT, it's almost the same price as the 6900XT.

 

No need to make multiple posts.

[WereCat]

Just now, pscyhe said:

I haven't researched a lot about streaming yet. Is AVC x264 good on youtube?

AVC is really old. The issue is that most streaming platforms stick only to AVC because it's a cheap licence while HEVC has additional costs so despite it being better, it's usually not supported and you have to use x264.

But YT as far as I am aware allows people to use HEVC (x265) and even AV1 (experimental feature for now).

 

For Twitch, you're stuck with x264.

 

And to summarize the difference between those.

Basically you are limited with the bitrate when streaming (the amount of data you can use) and HEVC and AV1 will give you much better quality at the same bitrate vs x264.

What this means is that technically you can get similar quality with AV1 1440pp 120FPS than what you can do with x264 at 1080p 60FPS. Obviously, choosing codec is not be all and and all, there are more settings to tweak and there is also a difference between HW accelerated codecs on GPU and using the SW version with CPU (which is way more demanding and slower and not really suited for real time streaming at high refresh rates).

[pscyhe]

2 minutes ago, WereCat said:

But YT as far as I am aware allows people to use HEVC (x265) and even AV1 (experimental feature for now).

 

For Twitch, you're stuck with x264.

So what I can make of after reading this is:
I should get a 6900xt because I'm probably going to be streaming on YT only and 6900xt is alright for that. (HEVC) And gaming is superior on it.

And last thing, will it be more future proof than 4070 :') ??

[Dedayog]

1 minute ago, pscyhe said:

So what I can make of after reading this is:
I should get a 6900xt because I'm probably going to be streaming on YT only and 6900xt is alright for that. (HEVC) And gaming is superior on it.

And last thing, will it be more future proof than 4070 :') ??

No such thing, please don't use those words.  Future Proof.

 

Will it last longer?  Yes, about a year more use out of it.  4070 will be viable for 4 years, 6900xt for 5.

[pscyhe]

9 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Answering that involves a crystal ball. At the moment, the 6900 XT has better raster performance and more VRAM, both of which would make it seem like it'll be the faster card in the future, but there might be some new games that take advantage of something that AMD cards handle terribly, and the 4070 will end up the faster card at that time. 

Exactly my dilemma !!

[WereCat]

1 hour ago, pscyhe said:

I should get a 6900xt because I'm probably going to be streaming on YT only and 6900xt is alright for that. (HEVC) And gaming is superior on it.

And last thing, will it be more future proof than 4070 :') ??

For now yes. 

 

And I don't have a crystal ball so idk

 

But if you want/can wait for 7000 series then you may as well do it because of AV1 which will definitely gets more adopted in the future... Unless you can great a really good deal on a card right now.