Final Thoughts
AMD is in a very interesting position right now. Both their new cards are poised to really take the market by storm. Firstly, they’re without a doubt going to be the fastest AMD graphics cards ever to hit the market. They’re also likely to offer some stiff competition for both the current Nvidia RTX 4080 and the upcoming Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, both in terms of pure rasterisation performance and in terms of price. Nobody is expecting it to lead in terms of Ray Tracing, given that Nvidia was first to market with that technology and is effectively a generation ahead.
Of course, Radeon has its own suite of rival technologies, and DLSS is facing stiff competition from AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technologies. Those technologies are under constant development too, so while DLSS 3.0 is here, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 3.1 follow in the near future and AMD continue to counter that with updates to their super-resolution technologies.
Both these cards are easily classed as high-end, with 20GB and 24GB of GDDR6 memory respectively, they’re certain to be capable 4K gaming cards. The core configuration, clock speeds and everything else mean that we should see big frame rates even at demanding settings. Albeit, I should bloody hope so on hardware that costs the best part of a grand, if not more.
I think the strongest competition here is ergonomics and power. Nvidia requires you to buy a new PSU, or use adaptors with your existing PSU. Even then, the overall power requirements of the AMD cards are lower than what Nvidia require. Most important of all though, with the XT and XTX both using 2 x 8pin GPU PSU connectors, they’re effectively just plug-and-play in modest gaming PC setups. They’re also drastically more compact, 287mm for the XTX, and 276mm for the XT with a 2.5 slot design, while an RTX 4080 Founders is 310mm with a triple slot design.
Tell me More!
I’d love to talk about performance, but while I’m writing this, our team is at the other side of the office benchmarking the cards. We’ll report back in just a few day’s time!
