If Navi is solely GCN based, then it's going to have an uphill battle against Pascal even at 7nm, cheap or not. Odds are good though that Navi will be another step passed Vega's GCN/NCU, which was already a step passed Polaris' GCN. Sales of Ryzen have been strong since launch and much of that is probably being spent on the Radeon division. Ryzen pretty much has everything it needs in place, it just needs those pieces put together over time, with tweaks along the way, so AMD can focus more so on Radeon now. If Vega did suffer because of Navi, then this fits into place nicely.

I don't think Keller had much to do with Radeon, as his job was to produce both an x86 and an ARM CPU. He may have worked with Radeon somewhat if they had planned for GPU to be part of infinity fabric back then, but it seems unlikely at this point since AMD has said they weren't sure if it could be done and that they are looking into it. They could be bluffing though. AMD also picked up a Manager and Engineer with plenty of experience and history with Nvidia and ATI to lead Radeon forward.

AMD is using very smart marketing. Not only are they pushing the 7nm 'benefit', but they apparently are going to align Navi with Ryzen so both will be 3000 series which is a fantastic marketing decision. Whoever decided to change the model numbers to that is brilliant, because it will also give casual consumers the idea that the Radeon series of cards will always be ahead or better than the Nvidia counterparts, since you will have Nvidia RTX 2000 vs Radeon RX 3000. If your buying an AMD 3000 CPU, you might as well buy an AMD 3000 GPU. While Intel's 10nm should be on par if not exceeding 7nm, AMD doesn't have to worry about that for a year or two in the consumer market.

To be frank, AMD's graphics division, ever since the beginning of the decade, reminds me of Ferrari in F1. Both are sort of fast, but simply can't keep up with development. Their newer stuff ends up being misguided sidesteps or downgrades, and then they take the "L" home and are back to zero, rinse and repeat the next year.

What I'm expecting, while sincerely hoping to be wrong, is some 7 nm designs who might sort of match Turing's power consumption and performance, which are solidly beaten in turn by Nvidia's next generation GPUs just a few months later. AMD counters with their rebranded and overclocked, more power hungry chips, AMD fans claim it's a victory since "no casual gamer cares about power consumption anyway" and cue Nvidia walking away with 95% of dGPU marketshare again.

True. But unlike Origin with EA, Epic has a lot of money to waste on its store to help it gain traction. Plus the fact that a lot of people already have installed the store because of Fortnite.

Hm, Rage 2 does have some of Borderlands vibe for me as well, though I can't say that for Outer Worlds - it kinda looks like Fallout somewhat mixed with Mass Effect and Bioshock.

As I already said, not to happy about the setting, though from what I've seen this will be proper action-RPG with lot of different ways to handle quests and lot of the sillines and dark themes intertwined, just like original Fallouts, so I'm looking forward to it.

Well, to be honest, the Borderlands feel I get from Outer Worlds is mostly because of the bright colours and the futuristic but with a wild west approach setting. And yes, I know that they used the same settings with New Vegas, for example.

So, my GPU has died. Which is kind of amazing since today it's exactly four *years since I've built it.

I've just installed the integrated graphics drivers so at least I can still use my PC.

It sucks because I was expecting it to hold on until the 7 nm cards, so I could upgrade. I wonder what I'll do now.

How old was your GPU?

I take it as years not days? Otherwise it would still be in warranty and you could get a new one.

What will you do? Wait or get a new one as soon as possible?

Yeah, four years, I've edited it, sorry. I'll have to get a new one I guess, though nothing exceptional, just a stop-gap solution.

There's some RX 570s for $149 at Newegg, so perhaps that would be a good choice? Since it was a GTX 970 who broke, I'd be OK with a sidestep for $149.

Don't buy a Ryzen notebook then... Some OEM's are still only pushing out drivers made 12 months ago and won't support anything newer.
I had to get "creative" and work around that bullshit.

On the Desktop... I feel AMD's drivers are fairly solid... The UI on the other hand is fantastic. - Every-time I hop over to the nVidia rig and open up the drivers I feel like I am stuck in 1995, they are archaic.

RX 470 is $110. - Same GPU, just lower clocks. Nothing overclocking can't fix.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1DW-0003-000D5&Description=RX%20470&cm_re=RX_470-_-1DW-0003-000D5-_-Product