I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. I am still rocking my Vega 56 and realized some time last year that it was time to retire it. I don’t wanna buy nVidia, so I was pretty close to pulling the trigger on the 7900 GRE. Decided to wait a bit longer because I figured that the 7000 series was more or less a 4 year old design and that it would be better to see if there was some decent progress with the 9000 series cards.
The way I’m currently looking at it is that AMD was going to offer upper midrange chips as their fastest models and ride the coattails of nVidia who, after Covid and more crypto mining demand, established insane price levels. I remember reading reviews of the Titan cards and thinking “4-figures for a GPU? That’s crazy!”. That is not expensive nowadays and I don’t like it. When I got my Vega and money was tighter than it is now, it felt like a big splurge to me. To be fair, the card is still doing fine (has been watercooled since 2018) and has been worth its money but still. I could afford a RTX 5080 or even the 5090, but I have other hobbies as well and I am just not willing to spend more than 500-600 Euros on a new graphics card.
The fact that retailers are already sitting on RX 9070s while AMD pretends to be working on software for what was always going to be an affordable new generation smells fishy. I’m sure they can improve drivers and features a bit more, but it’s pretty obvious they were in fact targeting an MSRP at the higher end of triple digits and now realize that that is not going to happen.
If I can’t find an AMD card that’s within my budget, I may just put Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on my pile of shame and see what Intel comes up with some time this year. I’ll enjoy a new bicycle in the meantime.
I was actually considering stretching my budget to get one of the remaining 7900 XTs. Should have enough raw (rasterizing) oomph and 20 GB memory to last a while. I don’t really wanna buy a card that was released in 2022, but it would be a huge upgrade for sure.