So today is the big day for Radeon team. AMD launched Zen 4 which was overpriced and is now selling similar to Rocket Lake numbers which is a CPU that launched in 2021. Meanwhile Zen 3 has the lead in sales while Intel's Alder/Raptor Lake is in second position thanks to the value the i5/i7 + cheap Z690 boards.
So their new CPU gen has largely been a flop, least until 7000X3D comes out. Now comes Radeon and Nvidia has largely played their cards which while the 4090 is very fast, we have seen tons of issues during launch such as driver problems and cable fires as well as a lack of DP 2.0. First two of the issues can/will be fixed so the important thing Radeon knows is the 4090 performance in every metric.
So for Radeon to win a generation so they can finally get above 20% market share, they need imo the 3 pillars that gamers want: Raster, Ray Tracing and Reflex.
Raster is the easiest one. They need to match Nvidia at a lower price. If they fall behind in Raster, Nvidia can come out with endless variants with lower prices to steal away any potential customers.
Ray Tracing is the hard one. Nvidia has proven for the past two generations that they are the leader in this category and they don't plan on losing it. Imo if AMD can come with in 15% while being 20% cheaper, they will be able to steal away market share.
Reflex is maybe the hardest one. The benefit of Reflex is to get a lower input latency at the same framerate. Based on hardware unboxes recent testing of DLSS 3, they did an input latency test. Without Reflex at Native resolution at 42 FPS, the total latency was 100ms which is what Radeon users are essentially experiencing as they don't have Reflex or an alternative. With Reflex, at the very same framerate and Native resolution, the total latency was 63ms. So just by turning on this feature in that test, the input latency was 40ms less at the same framerate and settings! The catch is Reflex needs to be implemented per game by the devs so an AMD alternative will need to do the same. As Nvidia has made Reflex mandatory part of DLSS 3, this means that on PC, Reflex adoption will be increased even more and adoption rate of Radeon features has been slower than Nvidia to say the least when you look at FSR.
So imo, they absolutely need the first two wins to succeed. If they aren't competitive in Raster, the price won't matter because Nvidia will come out with Ti versions and people are willing to pay a premium for Nvidia features. If they win the first but lag behind the second like they did with RDNA 2, same scenario. They can live without the third if they price their GPUs 20% lower than Nvidia counterparts which will be hard as they go down the stack. The ball's in their court.
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
