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[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Lets do a summary of the state of AMD for the past 6 months

In the CPU side:

They released the 5800X3D in the first half of the year which gave Intel a run for their money in gaming because of the fact that you didn't need to do an expensive platform upgrade to get similar results in gaming averages. But then AMD announced and released Zen 4 which required an expensive platform upgrade while only being 5-10% faster in gaming. While productivity performance was good, the cost of a motherboard with pci-e gen 5 was crazy high along with ddr5 and with GPUs these days supporting more and more productivity apps, we saw poor sales. AMD eventually had to discount zen 4 massively which goofed over early adopters because they were being flanked on both sides by 5800X3D + AM4 and Raptor Lake + Z690. So while not all bad since they are still making money from Zen 3, it's not good when your new product has been sitting on shelves collecting dust not to mention the motherboard companies are likely unhappy.

In the GPU side:

When I got my 4090 and saw the driver crashes and such, I posted the issues I had on my review of it. And I genuinely was starting to believe that perhaps the tables were turning. But with the launch of RDNA 3, I had forgotten that Radeon has an internal slogan that says anything Nvidia can do, we can do worse. When you look at all the driver issues that reviews are experiencing such as black screens, multimonitor issues, slow boot times, crashes, buggy software, VR headsets not working and etc... Yea I'll take Nvidia's driver crashes that got a temp fix by googling and a perm fix within 1-2 weeks over Radeons drivers any day. And that is not to mention all the potential issues surrounding the games. RDNA 3 is likely under-performing in various games against the 4080 but no one should be spending $1000 to be beta testers for a product with the hopes that it will get better. Not to mention, RDNA 3 is pretty inefficient compared to Lovelace and Reference models are likely not to improve too much as they are power limited.

The light at the end of the tunnel:

There is hope however and AMD won't go down without a fight. X3D versions are rumoured to come to both their 8 cores and 16 cores. Motherboard prices will be coming down by the time those get out and the non X3D should continue to get big discounts along with DDR5. Radeon should continue to improve on their drivers and even get a respin to fix hardware bugs on their refresh model. While AMD will continue to have a tough time against Nvidia as full AD102 hasn't come out yet, 2023 will look much better for team red.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 14 December 2022