Honestly, I'm starting to like the idea of doing "full scene" ray tracing in the cloud because right now with Nvidia's RTX implementation we have to settle with 'hybrid' ray tracing where only a couple of effects such as AO, shadows, reflections, or GI can be turned on at any given moment ... 

Cloud gaming has tons of potential to deliver technical settings higher than PC's highest settings AND at a lower cost too! 

If cloud gaming service providers can price their subscription just right such as been able to rent a slice of 4 GPUs for $10 a month which equates to just $600 over a 5 year period then it sure beats having to personally spend a lot more for hardware upgrades to get the same high-end experience ... 

Each to their own. I prefer a more localized approach that doesn't rely on a cloud implementation which can be cancelled/shut down at a later date.

Having dedicated access to hardware feels great but for PC gamers who don't use GoG much have to stop kidding themselves that they aren't in under any mercy because that's absolutely not true since many of the digital PC retailers practice DRM and if they go down so too do the purchases from customers as well ... 

At the end of the day PC gamers don't have many options for preservation regardless of whether they own their hardware or not ... 

Probably medium for a stable 60. I don't have a 1440p monitor to test it on though. 

Having decided to look into the cards the more I have decided they are a little shit. The power draw is the interesting one, if the XT is drawing 225W at 40 CU, what is it going to be at lets say 50 or 60? A higher spec card could hit over 300W, and at a lower power draw would probably match it with a 1660 TI.

Another thing is these boost clocks or was it opportunistic clocks, are these numbers shown against a 2070 accurate for out the box retail cards? Let us not forget the fudged numbers AMD produced for Fury which ended up being a load of bullshit.

What? If Steam gets shut down, I can just crack my steam library and continue on.

My games still function offline with all the graphics bells and whistles.

Preservation is certainly always an option... Especially on PC, it's generally where game preservation actually happens for all platforms.

Can't really compare TDP across manufacturers.
Hence you can't even compare TDP sometimes with the one manufacturer... They are calculated differently.

In regards to Navi though, it seems to be total board power, not just chip, clocks will obviously settle below the peak boost clock, but sit higher than the base clock.

Really ? I don't think I've heard of anyone being able to circumvent Valve's DRM system. Even if that is the case, how do you suppose we'll be able to do that with all of the other growing digital retailers out there ? Valve also makes no promise that they'll make sure that your library of games will work offline in perpetuity without authentication for new systems if they shut down as well ... 

It used to be true that PC was all about preservation but that hasn't been the case in large part today because the biggest game publishers keep perverting their games with online DRM ... 

PC gamers don't have as many options as they think anymore when they keep subscribing to the likes of Battle.net, Origin, UPlay, and EGS so they don't have much moral grounds to chide about preservation as a downside against cloud gaming when both are under the mercy of online DRM at the end of the day ... 

There are cracks for Steam games available which makes your entire argument pretty much redundant.

Something tells me AMD is going to equip higher end cards with HBM2, which uses considerable less energy then GDDR6.

50-60 CU's? hehe, rumor has it the high end Navi will have 80CU with HBM memory and it will use tsmc 7nm+, will have ray tracing hardware too. HBM and 7nm+ should save some power and AMD can just lower the clock slightly if needed.

Also I don't think AMD will call the card Navi, look at their roadmap, it says Navi 2019 and next-gen 2020 with 7nm+. A different name is certained.