Hey everyone, I'm back but still dealing with remnants of this irritating cold. I've been paying some attention to the new generation AMD GPU rumors and I figured I'd talk a little about that before we see what folks are playing around here.
So you may or may not know I'm more or less a red team guy so I'm looking quite forward to Navi 21 as we near that final quarter of the year. There's been a lot of speculation on what AMD is doing to create the "Big Navi" enthusiast level GPU that's supposed to compete not only with the current gen 20xx series from Nvidia, but also the upcoming 30xx Ampere GPU's. I've read from various sources, as I'm sure have lots of you out there, some pretty wild numbers: 16GB of GDDR6 and a core clock of 2100 Mhz performing something like 17.5 Teraflops. Teraflop is an arbitrary number, doesn't really mean anything but as a synthetic metric we've seen it used a lot in the past so it kind of still makes sense to mention it. There's also been rumor that will be a workstation grade "Big Navi" that uses HBM2 RAM for some serious compiling but the normal everyday PC gamer would not expect to be able to get ahold of one for use.
Rumors are just that though, rumors. Numbers change from day to day. I've seen it said that Navi 21 will be anywhere from 15 to 50 per cent faster than the current 2080ti, which on the high scale would be a huge deal because Nvidia has only claimed that it's newest iteration would be about 20 per cent faster. If true that would be a pretty incredible jump for AMD to make back into the high end GPU market. There's also talk about a 12 GB GDDR6 with fewer compute units as a second less expensive option. But, it's all rumors. I do think there will be actual competition again after the new releases. Do I think it's going to be the Nvidia killer people seem to be claiming? Not necessarily. I think it's going to be a genuinely high end graphics card that will hold its own in the market. I think it's entirely possible that we'll see a 16 GB version with RAM being so relatively inexpensive these days. But I don't know if I expect it to break the 2080ti ceiling.
I still use a Vega 64. There are plenty of folks out there who scoff at Vega and that's not entirely unfounded. Vega were actually good GPU's. The problem is that HBM is prohibitively expensive and difficult to make in large amounts. That made Vega pretty difficult to sell based on its performance since you could get a 1070ti for anywhere from $200 to $400 less depending on where you looked and it performed very similarly out of the box. We don't want to see that again with then next gen cards and I don't think it'll happen that way if the GDDR6 rumors turn out to be true. Though 16 GB isn't cheap it shouldn't be terrible in terms of pricing compared to an HBM model. In fact, I'm fairly certain we'll see some pretty affordable costs at release because I can bet that Nvidia will release Ampere around the same price point that they did Turing and we'll see a thousand dollar plus price point, and I'm also willing to bet that AMD undercuts that by a goodly amount. I think we'll see Navi 21 release around the eight hundred to eight fifty dollar price point and even if it doesn't fully compete with the 2080ti or the new Ampere cards, it will have a spot in the market and start chipping away at that enthusiast spot on the shelves. Hopefully it'll act like Ryzen did with Intel and start making waves. Then we'll see price drops across the board and actual competition again.
Okay I've rambled enough. What is the exact plan for gameplay this weekend?
Tru: Division 2, yoda0vgs got me into it and I'm loving it. I played the first one and it's bringing back all these memories. We actually met a really cool kid last night playing it. More Warframe. And I still need to try out the new Paper Mario.
AJ: More Animal Crossing: New Horizons and some Red Dead Redemption II.
Scroo: I'll be playing Horizon Zero Dawn on PC with my mouse and keyboard like nature intended. I'll also be mining caverns on Hoxxes 4 in Deep Rock Galactic because that game is still fun AF.
Greywolfe: magic, karateka and rayman origins. i decided that since i was done tackling a giant rpg-like game [ac: origins], i should play something smaller. except that rayman origins isn't smaller, because of the way it's structured. so...we'll see how long i last. i hhaaaaattteeee how floaty the controls are. and i hate that to do "perfect runs" of levels, you basically have to grab EVERY collectible [and there's just about enough on each level to make a "perfect" run. which is awful.] so, we'll see.
Yoda: Well litterally Just Finish Death Stranding and really dug it. Though I doubt I could have been ready for a lot of the end if I hadn't read every email and codex entry through the game. Even still it was very satisfying.This weekend will prolly be more division but I'll also be picking up HZD now that I can play it with a kb/m lol