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For gaming, AMD GPUs are generally better bang for buck than Nvidia - notably, they tend to be about the same bang for less buck, at least on the high end and s

For gaming, AMD GPUs are generally better bang for buck than Nvidia - notably, they tend to be about the same bang for less buck, at least on the high end and some of the middle tier. The notable exception is ray tracing but that's still pretty niche. If AMD gets their act together and get the AI tooling for their GPUs to be as accessible as Nvidia's they have a good chance to become the winners there as you can get more VRAM bang for, again, less buck. In a market where they have similar performance and everything minus ray tracing for somewhere between 50% and 70% of the competitor's prices it will be pretty easy to choose AMD GPUs. They already have the best CPUs for gaming and really are positioning themselves to have the best GPUs overall as well.

causality0 3y ago
Specifically modern "normal" gaming. Once you get outside that comfort zone AMD has problems again. My 7900XTX has noticeably worse performance than the 1070 I replaced when it comes to Yuzu and Xenia.
wincy 3y ago
If you’re building a midlife crisis gaming PC the 4090 is the only good choice right now. 4K gaming with all the bells and whistles turned on is a reality with that GPU.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Yup, just did this. Still way cheaper than a convertible or whatever
  - kristianp 3y ago
    Especially when most convertibles are slower than a Tesla.
- trevyn 3y ago
  PSA: GeForce Now Ultimate is a great way to check this out. You get a 4080 equivalent that can stream 4K 120Hz. If you have good Internet in the continental US or most of Europe, it’s surprisingly lag-free.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  The 4090 is also upwards of $2k. This is more that what i spent on my entire computer that's a few years old and is still very powerful. We used to rag on people buying titans for gaming, but since Nvidia did the whole marketing switcheroo now titans are just *090 cards and they appear as reasonable cards. My point is that Nvidia has the absolute highest end, but it's ridiculous to suggest that anyone with a budget less than the GDP of Botswana should consider the 4090 as an option at all. For actually reasonable offers, AMD delivers the most performance per dollar most of the time.
- throwaway_08932 3y ago
  Someone really should market a PC directly as a "midlife crisis gaming PC." I laughed so hard at that.
roenxi 3y ago
I also think something important here is AMD's strategy with APU has been small to large. Something that really stood out to me over the last few years is that NVidia was capturing the AI market with big and powerful GPU while AMD's efforts were all going into APU research at the low end. My belief is that they were preparing for a mobile-heavy future where small, capable all-purpose chips would have a big edge. They might even be right. One of the potential advantages of the APU approach is if they GPU can be absorbed into the CPU with shared memory, a lot of the memory management of CUDA would be obsoleted and it becomes not that interesting any more. AMD are competent, they just have sucky crash-prone GPU drivers.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  > AMD are competent, they just have sucky crash-prone GPU drivers. I have an AMD GPU on my desktop PC and I also have a Steam Deck which uses an AMD APU. Never had a driver crash on me on either system.
  - skirmish 3y ago
    When I run a LLM (llama.cpp ROCm) or stable diffusion models (Automatic1111 ROCm) on my 7900XTX under Linux, and it runs out of VRAM, it messes up the driver or hardware so badly that without a reboot all subsequent runs fail.
  - cmplxconjugate 3y ago
    I have had a RX580, RX590, 6600XT, and 7900XT using Linux with minimal issues. My partner has had a RX590, 7700XT on Windows and she's had so many issues it's infuriating.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    You're probably using it for graphics though; the graphics drivers are great. I refuse to buy a Nvidia card just because I don't want to put up with closed source drivers. The issue is when using ROCm. Or more accurately when preparing to crash the system by attempting to use ROCm. Although in fairness as the other commenter notes it is probably a VRAM issue so I've been starting to suspect maybe the real culprit might be X [0]. But it presumably doesn't happen with CUDA and it is a major blocker to using their platform for casual things like multiplying matricies. But if CPU and GPU share a memory space or it happens automatically behind the scenes, then the problem neatly disappears. I'd imagine that was what AMD was aiming for and why they tolerated the low quality of the experience to start with in ROCm. [0] I really don't know, there is a lot going on and I'm not sure what tools I'm supposed to be using to debug that sort of locked system. Might be the drivers, might be X responding really badly to some sort of OOM. I lean towards it being a driver bug.
lmm 3y ago
AMD tend to have better paper specs but worse drivers/software; it's been like that for decades. At least they're now acknowledging that the state of their software is the problem, but I haven't seen anything to give me confidence that they're actually going to fix it this time.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  I'm pretty much all the time on Linux. Have used Windows on my gaming computer mostly to compare performance, out of curiosity. Generally the performance is at least as good on Linux so I stay there. Never had a driver issue.

causality0 3y ago

Specifically modern "normal" gaming. Once you get outside that comfort zone AMD has problems again. My 7900XTX has noticeably worse performance than the 1070 I replaced when it comes to Yuzu and Xenia.

wincy 3y ago

If you’re building a midlife crisis gaming PC the 4090 is the only good choice right now. 4K gaming with all the bells and whistles turned on is a reality with that GPU.

IggleSniggle 3y ago
Yup, just did this. Still way cheaper than a convertible or whatever
- kristianp 3y ago
  Especially when most convertibles are slower than a Tesla.
trevyn 3y ago
PSA: GeForce Now Ultimate is a great way to check this out. You get a 4080 equivalent that can stream 4K 120Hz. If you have good Internet in the continental US or most of Europe, it’s surprisingly lag-free.
themoonisachees 3y ago
The 4090 is also upwards of $2k. This is more that what i spent on my entire computer that's a few years old and is still very powerful. We used to rag on people buying titans for gaming, but since Nvidia did the whole marketing switcheroo now titans are just *090 cards and they appear as reasonable cards. My point is that Nvidia has the absolute highest end, but it's ridiculous to suggest that anyone with a budget less than the GDP of Botswana should consider the 4090 as an option at all. For actually reasonable offers, AMD delivers the most performance per dollar most of the time.
throwaway_08932 3y ago
Someone really should market a PC directly as a "midlife crisis gaming PC." I laughed so hard at that.

roenxi 3y ago

I also think something important here is AMD's strategy with APU has been small to large. Something that really stood out to me over the last few years is that NVidia was capturing the AI market with big and powerful GPU while AMD's efforts were all going into APU research at the low end. My belief is that they were preparing for a mobile-heavy future where small, capable all-purpose chips would have a big edge. They might even be right. One of the potential advantages of the APU approach is if they GPU can be absorbed into the CPU with shared memory, a lot of the memory management of CUDA would be obsoleted and it becomes not that interesting any more. AMD are competent, they just have sucky crash-prone GPU drivers.

cassianoleal 3y ago
> AMD are competent, they just have sucky crash-prone GPU drivers. I have an AMD GPU on my desktop PC and I also have a Steam Deck which uses an AMD APU. Never had a driver crash on me on either system.
- skirmish 3y ago
  When I run a LLM (llama.cpp ROCm) or stable diffusion models (Automatic1111 ROCm) on my 7900XTX under Linux, and it runs out of VRAM, it messes up the driver or hardware so badly that without a reboot all subsequent runs fail.
- cmplxconjugate 3y ago
  I have had a RX580, RX590, 6600XT, and 7900XT using Linux with minimal issues. My partner has had a RX590, 7700XT on Windows and she's had so many issues it's infuriating.
- roenxi 3y ago
  You're probably using it for graphics though; the graphics drivers are great. I refuse to buy a Nvidia card just because I don't want to put up with closed source drivers. The issue is when using ROCm. Or more accurately when preparing to crash the system by attempting to use ROCm. Although in fairness as the other commenter notes it is probably a VRAM issue so I've been starting to suspect maybe the real culprit might be X [0]. But it presumably doesn't happen with CUDA and it is a major blocker to using their platform for casual things like multiplying matricies. But if CPU and GPU share a memory space or it happens automatically behind the scenes, then the problem neatly disappears. I'd imagine that was what AMD was aiming for and why they tolerated the low quality of the experience to start with in ROCm. [0] I really don't know, there is a lot going on and I'm not sure what tools I'm supposed to be using to debug that sort of locked system. Might be the drivers, might be X responding really badly to some sort of OOM. I lean towards it being a driver bug.

lmm 3y ago

AMD tend to have better paper specs but worse drivers/software; it's been like that for decades. At least they're now acknowledging that the state of their software is the problem, but I haven't seen anything to give me confidence that they're actually going to fix it this time.

cassianoleal 3y ago
I'm pretty much all the time on Linux. Have used Windows on my gaming computer mostly to compare performance, out of curiosity. Generally the performance is at least as good on Linux so I stay there. Never had a driver issue.