SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO gets listed at a price of 732 and 839 euros

i have uqhd monitor and both RT and DLSS are in the practical basket

 

Assuming the info is correct about a hardware blocker and insufficient cache memory that only was resolved with the Navi10 GPU and RDNA changes that would explain why AMD's dragged on 11.1 driver command list functionality and ... unfortunately the performance gains NVIDIA advertised with their D3D11 optimization driver for I think it was 40% "up-to" fits in really well with the gains you get through DXVK or at times even more which would make for a solid case on AMD now finally implementing this.
(Would be nice to have had it already but the driver state going by my own experiences at least as a early 5700XT GPU user yeah that first year was resolving and stabilizing a lot of problems there was little else that could be prioritized and there's still issues that would ideally need to be resolved ASAP.)

EDIT: Mostly used DXVK for the stability and GPU smoothness it provides in how it operates under Vulkan (And D3D12) but the performance benefits have been nice and sometimes even incredibly impressive for what should be a similar performance result unless constrained like with the D3D9 API but a higher CPU workload from the wrapper.

Which would have been acceptable too with how the GPU operates better and was more stable through some of the earlier drivers and issues though much of that has since been resolved even if's taken time and even using the AMD GPU users and community to improve and fix some of it.

EDIT: Impressive in turn how the GPU's competed and kept up even with GCN and it's utilization problems.
https://www.sapphirenation.net/the-last-gcn-and-the-age-of-rdna-and-cdna

Kinda explains the "gains" AMD has for Vulkan and D3D12 the driver and GPU hardware is operating as it should or at least a lot closer and better utilization and even against this penalty and problems AMD managed to compete with some of the mid to high end NVIDIA cards although not enough for the enthusiast model that's faster overall regardless.

Somewhat impressive yet the performance gap that could be from supporting the driver and code better yeah that's less impressive put mildly.
(Still has improved though, caught up to the 2070Ti within a 5% margin or so at times so that's a thing.)


EDIT:
All that out of the way will be interesting to see what RDNA2 can deliver these custom editions or just the stock versions, tomorrow will be fun.
(Probably going to be selling out fast and then these customs are planned for launch afterwards likely going fast too but eh seeing the reviews will be very interesting.)

 

You get to pay, then.

 

If people refuse to buy GPUs with the current prices, Nvidia and AMD will have no alternative but to drop prices. But we both know that is not going to happen, so they will set their prices as ahigh as possible in order to make more money.

Personally, i think current GPUs are expensive as hell but i have no illusions and i don´t expect them to drop in the near future, specially with these shortages...

 

i will, buying AMD have no sense at all without DLSS equivalent

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/Call-of-Duty-Black-Ops-Cold-War-Nvidia-DLSS-performance-boost/

 

But will you be playing that game for more than 15 minutes? Or 4 hours, however long the campaign is.

 

so I guess you want to buy 6800 xt and play a game for 15 min than watch netflix

why do you buy a £600+ GPU he?

 

For me personally, VR.
I have 1080p screen, for fast refresh rates in online shooters, so atm 2080s is overkill (not always tho). But VR is killing this card. More than 4k res, 90hz minimum is 3080/6800xt(I hope) area.
So even if RT will suck at AMD, I will buy it anyway.
And, so far, using 2080s I was not impressed. Mainly is bollocks, could be in many cases in old rendering pipeline, dlss is no go for 1080p, and tbh, fells like cheating from Nvidia side, not the first time I may add.
I still remember my 3dmark missing flaying dragon body, and driver just soaring high with 2 separate dragon wings....
Edit: forgot to add, that performance hit is unacceptable, so RT game or not, it goes disabled. One glance, and bum, fokof, standard render on.

 

Im sure amd will have their own dlss. Not at launch but with the omega driver next month.

 

You want the best stuff, you've gotta pay up. This applies to most things in life. If you don't like the prices, then, there's always waiting and the secondhand market.

I think it's time we all booked ourselves in to sort this ocd out lol.

 

Naturally you're not wrong, if you don't buy GPUs, at some point they will get cheaper. See what Nvidia did with Ampere's pricing of the 3080, or tried to make us think, depending on the opinion. But the thing is, they will never reach the levels we had in my opinion. People did buy 800€ top dog Nvidia GPUs too when the last gen cost 700€, and because of that, people will be buying 2000$ GPUs at some point, when the 3090 right now costs 1800€+ in Austria. Inflation is a thing too, but there's enough graphs and statistics out there clearly showing, it's not at fault for the prices rising. It's just companies maximizing their profits.

If I recall correctly, in market theory, there's a relation to how many units sold at each price point. 100 people will buy a product for 100€, but 110 for 90€, 90 people will buy at 110€. So all a company has to do to maximize their earnings, is to find the point in relation to price and expected units sold which maximizes either sales or product price. And not so surprisingly, the cheap units selling the most will not always produce the most revenue. Cheap price is often working against a constant relation, and occasionally, you will sell more units with a higher price than with a lower price, because the product might be perceived as inferior, just because it's priced lower. That's where market psychology kicks in, foiling the straight out belief, cheaper prices are better for the company.

And that's where even AMD can't do much but offer their top product at a higher price. Simply to feed a growth orientated business strategy, as the most basic idea behind any modern company in a capitalistic system. Nvidia is just quicker to up the price, partially because they had little competition lately. But at the same time, we might just be on the rising side of a wave function. Prices might even drop again, but they will never reach the low levels they once had. At least that's my expectation.


That said, I'm still more drawn towards a 1000€ Radeon GPU that performs allegedly close to a 1800€ Geforce GPU. In relation between the two, 1000€ looks like a bargain. And having bought a 2080TI, I have already spent more than 1000€ on a GPU, so this card would be even cheaper than my last one.
And if I buy a Radeon 6900 for my next upgrade, I'd probably prefer a Sapphire card. I used to have a X800 Nitro, and besides it running hot as hell, it was pretty decent for the money.

 

So the only thing that was fixed by the hardware changes was the significant decline in performance as tesselation factors went past 32, the DX11(And OpenGL) performance concerns are purely software origin.

 

Hmm thought there was more to it, curious but good to know.
Could have sworn AMD dabbled with this for some updates back with the Fury GPU getting it mostly resolved with Polaris and then Vega had the performance to get tessellation results mostly good without capping the max multiplier factor.

Actually that may have been at a lower level still thinking a bit more on it as 16x was recommended frequently back then even if it introduced visual anomalies or glitches then up to 32x on newer hardware from AMD, yes I think I'm mixing up the really bad tessellation performance with the improved and then much improved ones that came later here.
(Also in part related to cache memory of what I recall.)

EDIT: More reading required at least there were a lot of changes in RDNA1 and then how RDNA2 will develop from this.

Might not be quite on the level of what Tera Scale or GCN saw from the very first iteration to the next but could be promising, still a lot that hinges on the software though and the drivers and this is a uncertainty I'm particularly worried about as to how things will go and how AMD will handle any eventual problems this time.

In addition to support and performance issues from earlier.

EDIT: Infinity fabric on a smaller bus width too as another curious design here.
Really would have been interesting to see a type of the 6900XT on a bigger full 512-bit bus for what best of both results could have been here.

Maybe something for RDNA3 or maybe that will have other changes entirely.

Still the big thing is the software and drivers here not thinking about possible what-ifs of some change to the hardware or future developments this early on.

 

Well, I don't watch Netflix on my PC, I have a Chromecast in my TV for that. The games I've played most recently have been Stardew Valley and Zombie Army Trilogy - and I guess I played an hour or so of that kind of bad DLC for Doom Eternal - for a total of 5 hours over the last 4 weeks. So mostly my hardware sits at idle clocks. If it's even powered on.

I won't be buying a 6800XT or a RTX 3080. At the current moment in time, there is nothing that makes those things interesting to own for me. My 5700XT that I bought during a time where my playing games was quite a lot more than it is now is plenty powerful to run anything. I had a good time playing through The Witcher 3 on it for the first time this summer. I might wait 5 years to play Cyberpunk too. There's plenty of games to enjoy.

Especially considering that I also just bought a Oculus Quest 2. Which is also sitting and gathering dust more than it is being used. But I'll get around to using it more when the November update drops and enables full resolution streaming.