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EricHiggin on 03 September 2020
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JEMC said:
EricHiggin said:

I wouldn't expect a Radeon 3080(Ti) competitor to go blow for blow with it's direct GeForce competition, but that's not to say it couldn't be better in some aspects while worse in others.

A 3070 Ti wouldn't be as warranted based on the pricing layout, but considering a Ti version is the norm, it's not entirely unexpected. Having a Ti/Super edition out sooner than later would make it even tougher on AMD though. This perhaps is a stronger indicator of where Nvidia thinks the top tier Radeon cards will land, so flood those tiers with reasonably priced models, price gaped for up sale at that, to try and keep people from buying AMD. If correct, this would mean AMD mostly has to rely on cheaper pricing if it wants to gain market share.

RTG's silence really does make me wonder, as explained below.

So you're like haxxiy and think that AMD could potentially beat Nvidia's Ampere in pure rasterization but lose in RT and the like. We'll see.

In any case, in order to present some battle, AMD needs to be competitive in both performance and also price. The 5700 series were very competitive against Nvidia cards but, given that they were priced very close, Nvidia still managed to sell more units because of brand name.

EricHiggin said:

Didn't AMD get sued over this not all that long ago, for marketing more CPU cores than those chips 'legitimately had'?

Yeah, they got sued for Bulldozer and had to pay 12 million dollars: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14804/amd-settlement

More along those lines, yes. I'd be highly surprised if Big Navi comes close to Ampere's higher tier RT capabilities.

That's something I've also worried about. The 5700 wasn't exactly cheap, without RT, and if Big Navi is supposed to be AMD going for the performance crown, then should people really expect them to undercut Ampere by much if at all? That's why I suggested 3080Ti and 3070Ti levels of performance in general, for 3080 and 3070 pricing. The Navi 3080Ti level card for example, may only give you, say, 3060/3070 level RT perhaps, but that may be enough for AMD to gain some market share, considering it'll be their first RT cards. It wouldn't lead to them crushing Ampere or anything like that though, but it would be considered quite competitive overall. Assuming their drivers are also much improved, which it seems they're improving more recently, and is rumored to be part of the reason AMD is taking some extra time before unveiling and releasing Big Navi, to make sure the drivers are worthy by launch.

Hmm. 12 mil? That's it? Even if Nvidia got sued for Ampere and had to pay 10's of millions, it would just be pocket change in comparison to profits, so how much would they really care at that point?