It's more surprising given that they had two playtests where people could try the game, and the performance complains were already raised then.

But well, some are too anxious to play a game to wait even a couple of days to see what people say about it before jumping right into it.

I had the hope that the comparisons with the 7900GRE were due to not only being a card that both 9070 would beat, unlike the XT and XTX models, but also because AMD would launch the new cards around that price, which was $549. But I had very little hope about it.

In the end, I was kind of right, but as I said, the $50 gap between both cards is too small to make sense and will hurt the 9070 during the reviews and also in sales. Which sucks but, given that both cards us the exact same parts, but one chip being a cut down version, I guess AMD will make a bit more money from the 9070XT and it0s going to prioritize that.

I have nop doubts that some AIB will try to push things to the limit, just like they're doing with the 5000 series. After all, if they can get away with it on Nvidia cards, they can do the same with the AMD ones, right? Plus AMD cards sell less and the more they can charge for them, the more they'll make to get back the marketing and designing costs.

At the same time, AMD is more generous with the profit margins AIBs have than Nvidia (they have no other option with their sales being far less than team green), so the partners aren't is such need to inflate prices.

Plus, there's the supply issue which, if AMD has managed to build enough stock, will face less pressure and will keep those price gouging tactics more in check, as there'll always be a cheaper card from another brand, And while a small price increase may not be a problem for die-hards of certain brands, if that difference starts to grow, so will the number loyal customers that will buy your overpriced product. It's the whole "the market regulates itself" idea that sometimes work but, admittedly, others don't.

We'll see how it goes.

Can we please stop putting cable sockets anywhere near the hotspots, that'd be grand. 

The general idea is to put them further away from the mass of heated steel/copper. 

People seem to have this weird fantasy fever dream that Capcom's engine is magically going to advance lightyears into the future where it will magically run open world games.

Yeah I'm sitting here since the engine dropped with REmake 2 and that still has yet to happen, and DD2 still hasn't been vastly improved in it's perf woes either. I'm fully expecting the same with MHW, which is why I've not only avoided DD2, but will also avoid MHW as well. There's no point in buying a game that's just going to suffer from engine teething issues for years on end. 

Also I've yet to see a large publisher refine an engine, that then allows them to go back to an older game and go "hey customers who bought this game years ago, have this free performance boost!". I've only ever seen indie devs do this with unity updates, like with Subnautica, but I've never seen this happen with larger games like DD2/Battlefield franchise. Cyberpunk, etc.

Also MHW looks to be another case where you're still going to end up relying on AI tomfoolery, instead or raster/brute forcing. 

Correct. The A.I Acceleration on RDNA3/2/1 are all done on the shader pipelines.
So whenever you do A.I tasks on those GPU's it takes away from Ray Tracing, it takes away from Rasterization, you are consuming cache, you are consuming resources, you will always have some contention.

nVidia did manage to get around this somewhat with Turing by allowing concurrent FP and INT operations on a CUDA core, but it just makes the core larger and less efficient overall as it's a jack of all trades, master of none with a duplication of some parts of the pipeline, so it's better to just have an optimized core dedicated to the task instead.
AMD Tried the VLIW approach.

All those issues goes away with RDNA4.

There is technically zero reason why FSR4 couldn't be "back-ported" to older RDNA and non-AMD hardware by translating it to bfloat, but the performance hit would not be worth the effort outside of just trying to maintain compatibility.

***************

The pricing of the 9070XT is good, it could have been an extra $50-$100 cheaper, but I am sure that will happen in a couple of months anyway... But we won't get those MSRP prices at retail, not a dog chance in hell.
The vanilla 9070 needed to be $499 to be a real win.

Depending where the 9070XT and 9070 falls in terms of retailer price here in Australia, it will definitely be my next GPU next month to tie me over for the next couple of years.
It's "good enough" from a performance perspective.

AMD wasn't allowed to screw up the 9070XT/9070 launch from a pricing point and they haven't for the most part, now hopefully they can claw back some marketshare and apply pressure to nVidia.

AMD also has the potential for better pricing in the long term...
The Navi 48 for the 9070XT chip will house 53.9 billion transistors in a 356.5 mm^2 die.
Nvidia's GB203 for 5070 Ti contains 45.6 billion transistors in a 378 mm^2 die.

AMD has the smaller and potentially equivalent/faster chip with cheaper RAM and is likely a fair bit cheaper to manufacture compared to the 5070Ti. (Just need real benchmarks to see how the cards fall).

It's a new month, and that means...

*** NEW COMPETITION***

Win 1 of 2 Sapphire Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards
https://www.club386.com/win-1-of-2-sapphire-radeon-rx-9000-series-graphics-cards/
or https://gleam.io/5f3Km/win-1-of-2-sapphire-radeon-rx-9000-series-graphics-cards

The winner will get a Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the runner-up will get a Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9070.

This contest is GLOBAL.

Good luck!

A few more things I wanted to mention about RDNA 4 that I found interesting.

According to techpowerup, FSR4 needs an AI acceleration throughput of 779 AI TOPS. RX 9070 has around 1200 TOPS, RX 9070 XT has around 1500 TOPS. PS5 Pro has around 300 TOPs for reference but supposedly FSR4 is using a different implementation than Sony and Nvidia to achieve it's Ai upscaling. Frame Generation is the same as FSR 3 so it's not Ai generated but honestly, the Ai generation part of Nvidia's Frame Gen hasn't impressed me anyway. At the end of the day though, the proof will be in the pudding.

The new Radiance 2 Display Engine comes with major hardware updates that reduce GPU idle power draw in multi-monitor setups. The engine also comes with hardware flip-metering support (something NVIDIA also introduced with Blackwell, and which enables Multi-Frame Gen on the RTX 50-series). So Ai generated frames and MFG should be possible if they were to implement it in the future.

They also made improvements to their video encoders. With RDNA 3, their H264 was terrible unless you used the highest bitrates which streaming sites like Twitch would not allow for any company. So if you had RDNA 3 or older and you wanted to stream, it would look significantly worse compared to Nvidia GPUs, even from Maxwell generation. While RDNA 3 had AV1 encoding support that would fix H264 low bitrate issues, streaming sites like Twitch still only supports H264. So hopefully with RDNA 4, they have finally caught up with Nvidia as streaming is a big deal these days.

Anti-Lag 2 is now officially supported in... Drum roll please... 4 games! Meanwhile Reflex reached 100 games supported back in January 17... of 2024! Someone from Radeon team needs to get on that as not even Marvel Rivals supports Anti-Lag 2.

RDNA 4 also only supports 54 Gbps through it's Display Port interface similar to RDNA 3 (according to Linus) while RTX 5000 series supports the full 80Gbps bandwidth through display port. Keep in mind that DSC does wonders so it doesn't matter much regardless. 4090 at 4k 240hz using DSC is impossible to tell the difference despite using DP1.4a with DSC.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-9070-series-technical-deep-dive/4.html

https://youtu.be/gKJJycCTeuU?si=GqYZUE5YMK2SHATP&t=360

Also credit where credit is due, Radeon handheld RDNA 4 launch very nicely despite the delays which arguably worked in their favor. They shot down nonsense rumours like $1000 msrp or 32GB versions. They kept peoples expectations in check and they did native comparisons without upscaling/FG unlike Nvidia. Well done really.

AMD using native resolution benchmarks instead of the BS we sometimes see and that Nvidia brought to a new level with Blackwell was certainly a nice touch.

The two 9070 cards seem to have more than enough power for FSR4, but of couse, that min. requirement is there for the otehr two card, especially the 9060 non-XT. And regarding FSR4, if it manages to deliver a quality similar to DLSS3, I'd be very impressed with it. Imho, matching DLSS4 is asking too much.

Doing my first full new build after over 10 years (I delayed a few years after buying a new smart TV). Nvidia was always a no-brainer for graphics cards (when I built this PC so was Intel for CPUs), but my God the market is like an alternate reality. $2000 NZD on average for a 5070 Ti. I'm pretty sure that was the price of a Titan way back when, and the 5070 Ti is a mid-range card with minimal improvements. Absurd.

With the supposed MSRP of 9070 XT $100 USD less than a PS5 Pro which generally goes for around $1300 NZD, if I can simply get the 9070 XT for that or lower and not worry about cables burning they will have me. Unfortunately way down here we're destined to be an afterthought even if AMD manages to come through everywhere else.

If the 9070 XT is also averaging near $2000 I'm just going to pay the extra for a 5080. I really only wanted to spend $4000 ideally for the overall build and maybe go to $5000 for a higher card if they seemed better value, but now that's closer to $6000 or $10000 if you want a flagship burn-your-savings graphics card. Yes, mainstream PC builds have hit 5 figures in our country.

The prices all make me want to vomit, but my PC is inching towards Death's door every day so I can't really avoid it. Maybe I can just pray to make it another year or so since I don't need a PC for modern gaming right now. I just don't see when the market will actually improve.

People can blame bad guy Nvidia all they like, and there's no excusing them. I just don't see much difference from this current scenario and the original launch of XSX and PS5 during Covid, with it being a scalper's haven and retailers marking up prices with a bunch of useless junk no one wanted. But that didn't stop the demand for the producs raging forward and consumers lapping them all up for years. The consumers are at least as culpable for feeding into the greed of Nvidia and these other multi-corps. They wouldn't keep pushing for these anti-consumer practices if they didn't believe they could get away with them. Only the consumers can prove them wrong, so it's on them now.

You should be able to import from Australia really easily as we have free travel and trade between us, but not sure if the dollar conversion would ruin it?

The comparison will be with the 7900GRE which came in at about $800-$900 AUD.

If things aren't great market-wise on Kiwi island, hit me up and I can help organize something to be sent over... But no way would $2000 be appropriate (Your currency has typically been about 70cents to our dollar), you would be better tasked looking at something like the 7800XT.

And yes. These are nVidia TITAN levels of pricing or even more (Ignoring inflation), such is the reality of profit-growth when you can't grow a mature market.