re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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Guilty as charged. Although, a 7900x around 700 would be very tempting. It's still 100 too high at 799.

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BURN THE FANBOY!!!



Jokes aside, to give my own personal opinion instead of discussing market trends generally, I think whether the premium is worth it depends heavily on where in the stack you're buying into. I'll use myself as an example. I game in 3440x1440 playing big, sexy single player titles. All four (I'm ignoring the 4090, because halo cards never really belong in a value discussion) relevant cards, the 4070ti and 4080 from Nvidia and the 7900xt and xtx from AMD, will give me functionally equivalent gaming experiences at my resolution in pure raster. Will they all give different actual framerates? Of course. Will I notice the difference between 120fps and 150fps? Almost certainly not. Then again, I probably wouldn't notice the difference between any of them and my current 3080. That's why I've been pushing "budget" gamers towards the 6800 from last gen, as it's really great from a price to performance perspective, and fits neatly at the bottom of the mass of cards that will give "can't really notice the difference" levels of performance below 4k in pure raster. And at that performance level, worrying about things like RT is just silly.

But with all of that said, if you are going to buy into the top of the stack, all of a sudden, features matter a ton. Because if you can't tell the difference in pure raster, the differences in pure raster simply stop mattering. All of a sudden, it's "well, if I'm going to spend this much money, I at least want the option of fricking around in RT; if I'm spending this much money, I want the best upscaling tech to make sure I'm not getting smudging/ghosting", etc, etc.

The reality is that we're reaching the point with GPU tech that unless you play at 4k, use RT, or both, there's flat out no reason to be buying near the top of the stack. I'm actually genuinely curious to see how gamer sentiment shifts in the next few years as people start to slowly realize that, as reviewer benchmarks start creeping upwards into CS:GO territory as far as framerate. I'm also very curious to see how the GPU producers handle it.

As always these days, we live in interesting times