Captain_Yuri said:

That does it, AMD wins easily in this one. With some OC magic, perhaps they can even make it 7000.

I'd say slightly slower than a 3090 or on par with SAM off. Pretty crazy gains from it though.

Captain_Yuri said:

Intel 10900K Gen flattens all of them easily!

Edit:

But nothing beats an 80486. The Motorola 68060 is the only thing that even comes close here

I modded my Radeon 6950's into 6970's... Actually remember doing a review and benchmark comparisons with those GPU's on this very forum back in the day.
I had 4x of them as I was running at 5760x1080 and later 7680x1440 (Higher than 4k!) resolutions.

They were actually pretty decent cards compared to nVidia at the time, but yeah, the drivers needed work... It wasn't until probably deep into the GCN era when AMD started to work on the frame pacing issue and fixed allot of bugs along the way that their drivers got solid again.

But for all intents and purposes I haven't had much drama with AMD's drivers outside of that.

Yeah, the performance of AMD cards back then was quite good. My old 1950 had some major artifact issues though, as I recall this was no longer an issue on the next gen of cards from them (I believe it was a driver issue). My main concern with AMD cards back in the day was overheating; ironically my PSU died in my 1950XTX rig and somehow fried the MB as well, so I never really got to see the longevity of it (I got an entire new rig instead).

I've got so many questions going on in my head about the pairing of their CPU+GPU. It's small gains for now, but what's going to happen when they have to pull off RT?.

Are AMD just going to forgo RT?, because so far we saw one reflections demo from them, and two games with seriously lacklustre RT shadows, and nothing more to those two games. It feels like they're just gonna let Nvidia show off their sparkle sparkle and then come out later on with RT, while they just gain from the market that wants raster perf.

Don't get me wrong, the non RT gains from them so far are great against the 3080/3090, but we're supposed to be doing RT for real now. Next gen is definitely wanting to dip their toes into RT, Nvidia's doing it as well, yet AMD is being stupidly secretive/hesitant to show us what they plan to do, outside of poorly implemented shadow RT (which isn't what the main focus is with RT so far (mostly on reflections, light sources, colours, than shadows).

I really want them to proper compete in that area. I don't want a "good gains for non RT" yet crap gains for actual RT, because that means the card is basically like a souped up 1080ti.

I'm apparently 430th in queue for an rtx3070, so it looks like I may not get one for a month or so, possibly longer.

Captain_Yuri said: Spoiler!

It took me a few seconds to catch on to what this image was doing, but once understood, it was pretty funny.

It will likely be the same issue that Tessellation once had, nVidia was just better.

Not sure why you worry at all. It's not like it's too hard to make your cards RT capable. Just slap on a few dedicated cores and you're done. There is zero chance that AMD won't go down the same path because RT is the future and is here to stay. In 10 years we will have to explain to young gamers how there ever were cards without hardware RT acceleration. Nvidia was extremely early with their implementation and some might argue this new generation is still too early, considering the massive performance hits. So AMD just focused on rasterizing, which is still way more important, especially when you have to catch up.

There is no chance that their next generation will not have acceptable RT performance.

I agree with this, they were way too quick with RT implementation, announcing the 1000 series as RT capable cards was a mouthful-and-a half. They've done the same with other, albeit more niche, features. I remember when I got my last rig (which I'm still using) and installed an EVGA 980Ti, I more or less built the rig for TW3 launch. TW3 had support for Nvidia Hairworks, so I tried it. My fps plummeted from a stable 70-75 @ 1440p with everything cranked to the max and down to an atrocious 30-35 instead simply due to Hairworks. Geralt's beard and hair was sexy but hardly worth it, rendering a Wella commercial has never hurt so much.

Nvidia sort of have a history of selling cards on features that they can't properly perform well on. To me, that greatly diminishes the value of those features, especially as selling points. This is more or less the reason why I've waited beyond the 1000 and 2000 series cards from Nvidia, I wanted something that can actually deliver 4K and decent RT.

The look on kids' faces when I tell about what PC gaming was like back in the day is priceless. Apparently, gaming on 320x200 is frowned upon today! No mouse-look? Of course, page-up and page-down are your friends. I remember the insanity of SVGA displays back in the day, my friend got Death Gate on PC (excellent game) and it was among the first games we played in the mighty 800x600 res. Good times.

Aw, hell. Now I've gone and put myself in retro mode. Off to play some Betrayal at Krondor again!