I don't think going with x8 PCIe 5.0 lanes will limnit it too much. The 8GB of VRAM over a 128-bit bus may, but we'll have to wait and see. For me, the biggest problem is the price. $399-$499 for an intentionally limited, tier 3 card is a big F U.

At this rate, I may start paying more attention to consoles and skip PC gaming until it eventually crashes due to these unsustainable high prices.

True, it might not make that much of an impact on performance though little cut backs like that may make the card cheaper (yeah, I wish!). The other things I'm not too keen on and will most likely restrict this to only a 1440P card despite it being capable of more. It just feels numbed down for the sake of segmentation but AMD are taking a bit too far. Like i wouldn't mind for this for a 6 series line but a mid range card shouldn't be held back like that especially for the cost they are going to sell for.

I'm too am not a fan of the pricing tiers going up gen on gen. Though, if this gen is anything to come by people (unfortunately) are willing to spend more on this hobby than ever. I remember back in the day buying a ATI HD 4850 for £130! Times have changed a lot since lol. Paid like £310 for my GTX 1070 and its still going strong. Saying that I do need an update so will keep to my usual mid-high end cards.. but yeah consoles are much better for value for money atm, assuming you have one or can get hold of one.

I payed less than 400 € for my GTX 1070 thanks to a Black Friday deal. Nowadays, I could only get, in theory, a 3060, although in practice it'd be more like a 3050 because of the f*cking crypto. And it looks like the new cards will only get even more expensive. It's insane.

I'll have to change my CPU soon (and I'll probably end going with Intel), but the GPU will stay the same for the time being. And when it dies... only God knows what will happen.

As for being able to find a console, I'm not in a hurry. I could buy a second hand PS4 for cheap and there are lots of used PS4 games fairly cheap as well.

Lol I hope it's not true but I wouldn't doubt AMD continuing down it's greed path next gen. We have seen x8 affecting performance of low end cards already if they use PCi-E gen 3 and many people are on PCI-E gen 4 that I doubt will be upgrading anytime soon. So putting x8 on a 6900XT performance class will absolutely hamper performance for many people that are using PCI-E gen 4. Ironically if you buy Alder Lake S as those come with Gen 5 PCI-E, it will be a better pairing than getting Zen 3 assuming the rumour is true and you want to get RDNA 3. Not to mention, who knows how Direct Storage will interact with it as well.

But this is the new AMD, where it's margins first, customers later. You want the privilege of being able to use the full potential of your GPU? Upgrade to Zen 4 or pay more to get a x16 GPU! I'd love to hear the excuses that AMD fans will make then. Ray Tracing? Who needs that? DLSS? Gimmick af, rebranding existing tech and calling it FSR is good enough! PCI-E lanes? Don't worry about it! Shat memory bus? Infinity Cache is good enough! Terrible Encoder? No one streams anyway! RTX Voice? Who uses voice chat? Hardware acceleration for Pro software? Just buy Apple instead! As long as I have my Vram and power efficiency, that's all I need!

I think we seen the biggest weakness of PC gaming which is the fact that due to it's openness, when a certain tech starts to boom really hard like Crypto, there isn't much anyone else can do to stop it. And considering the major governments are no longer considering banning crypto but instead, regulating it, it will be something that we will have to live with. Even mining is legal if you pay taxes...

With that being said, I do think that if you time it right, you can get a PC gaming GPU for a good price. Like we are almost at a point where GPUs are about to reach their 2020 MSRP and for $400, you can get a 3060 Ti which would last you an entire gen. The question then becomes, do you commit or wait and see for Lovelace? The theoretical performance uplift should be huge but unlike Ampere launch, a lot of people will be ready this time so it may be harder to get one. And those that won't be able to get one will remember what happened with Ampere and buy a 3000 GPU instead and those will be harder to get. Thus the cycle continues.

Personally speaking, if you are on Pascal or earlier and you can't commit to time to be that is required to find a new GPU, buying Ampere even when Lovelace is around the corner really isn't the worst thing in the world. Because while you might be able to get a better GPU for the same price if you are fast enough for Lovelace, it's also better to have a RTX GPU now than to have your GPU stop working at the worst time possible and pay scalper prices.

Just to be clear, when I wrote that you could only get a 3050 for that price, I meant it.

I did a quick search and right now, you can only get a 3050 for 400 € or slightly less here in Spain. The cheapest 3060 I've found is around 430 €, a Gainward Ghost card, and when it comes to the 3060Ti, it's impossible to find for less than 540 €. And the situation isn't any better with AMD.

If I have to wait until they reach MSRP, it will be the day before Ada/RDNA3 launch.

Yeah, its not a good look tbh. Its like they intentionally gimped it to upsell for the their new stuff (Zen 4+mobos). And AMD fans will still suck it up. Despite 'only' losing a few percent performance from going x8 on PCI-E 4 motherboard its still a shitty move.

Honestly leaves a bad taste in consumers mouths and doesn't help AMD's reputation in the GPU front. They are already way behind Nvidia in market share and its easy to see why. So many feature sets completely missing or way behind the competition.. as we get inferior cards from AMD on top of being more pricey. I digress. Their CPU department has also made questionable choices, with only now them releasing low end CPU's for Zen 3 when they're being demolished by Intel from Alderlake. It just reeks of greed and complacency when they have competitive products available.

Should this be true I really want Lovelace to completely destroy this in Raytracing and the next generation of DLSS because this shit is depressing after a crap couple of years of GPU shortages and well the pandemic we're still getting shat upon lol.

I mean 8GB, X8 PCI-e just isn't good enough for a mid range card in 2022. Never mind the egregious pricing going on nowadays.

Chrono Cross Remaster: PS5/Switch Tested - A Classic Returns... With Worse Performance Than PS1

It's not a PC video but it's worth posting because holy fuck, what happened SE???

Like did they hire GTA Trilogy devs or what? wtf

Yea their budget CPUs are the worst of the bunch. Like you legit, cannot pair their budget CPU with their budget GPU this gen otherwise you will get slaughtered. Imagine pairing a 5500 CPU which has PCI-E Gen 3 with a 6500XT GPU which has 4 lanes and 4GB of Vram. The irony is pairing a 6500XT with an 12400 and pairing a 5500 with a 3050 will give you the best combination (Not that anyone should ever buy a 6500XT). I remember when AMD introduced PCI-E gen 4 over two years ahead of Intel. Two years!!! Yet here we are in 2022 where Intel is giving their budget users PCI-E gen 4 and AMD is stuck in PCI-E gen 3...

It's insane how the tables have turned. Like there's margins and then there's penny pinching. It's sad to see what happens when the "underdog" is at the top.

I'm too used to having that extra spare VRAm, so going back to 8gb and the price, along with that "similar" RT performance sounds like a bit of a joke. 

If this is what their "lower than mid-range" card is going to be like, what is their high end going to be like, slightly better than their current gen and not by much?, I hope not, because they should be bringing their A game at this point.

Tired of waiting for them to promise us better and then not fully delivering again. Last time it was raster and by then we were already on RT and Nvidia was on it's 2nd gen.