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Could AMD retreating to mid-range & Nvidia becoming out of affordability scope help optimization?

willhub

willhub

willhub

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As title, could the fact AMD is now focusing on mid-range cards at more "reasonable" price and Nvidia becoming more "premium" and out of scope of affordability for many in the higher end, as well as Nvidia focusing on A.I, could this create more demand on mid-range cards, lower performance improvements and as such mean to ensure progression as far as graphical quality goes there may be a need to focus on optimizing games more, and potentially be even more reliant on DLSS/FG (But that can only go so far).
 
SpudMaster said:
Personally I wouldnt be surprised if the invention of frame gen, FSR and DLSS has been the reason for a lack of optimisation
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The lack of optimisation has always been in the PC space, it's a decades old problem at this point, it's not just because upscalings arrived.

If anything, upscalings (in this regard)beneficial as it helps run unoptimised titles before they're patched rather than being totally unplayable at launch.
 
SpudMaster said:
Personally I wouldnt be surprised if the invention of frame gen, FSR and DLSS has been the reason for a lack of optimisation
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I agree with this. Thinking back before frame gen and upscaling, I don't think I had a problem gaming. I don't recall ever going "OMG I can't play this game". What used to happen is Ultra settings were a no go until a new card came out and you just played on lower settings, then you would revist said game and play again on Ultra. Now it seems like the horsepower just isn't there because "they" can work around it. And I seem to think that recent game titles have been poorly optimised, lots of delays, pushed deadlines, then day 1 patches required. Going slightly OTT I know but it feels like it is getting worse (or the norm). But yeah, lower performance improvements because of frame gen etc, totally, yep. If AMD want to / were to ever focus on more mid range and reasonably priced cards that gets my vote.
 
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tommybhoy said:
The lack of optimisation has always been in the PC space, it's a decades old problem at this point, it's not just because upscalings arrived.

If anything, upscalings (in this regard)beneficial as it helps run unoptimised titles before they're patched rather than being totally unplayable at launch.
Click to expand...

The lack of optimisation has always been there to some extent but you can't deny its got worse over recent years.
 
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I think optimisation has got worse over the years, in line with the general collapse in ethics by game developers (suits not front-line devs) and publishers.
 
Joxeon said:
AMD are dropping high end cards but keeping high end prices.
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Will @Nexus18 and @TNA be joining you shortly to also give us their daily anti-AMD comment. :p Honestly, your post has nothing to do with the thread title. I'll post it again for you to help.

Could AMD retreating to mid-range & Nvidia becoming out of affordability scope help optimization?​

 
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Only next gen will tell, but it honestly desn't look good for AMD.
Mid-range for next-gen should be where 7900xt(x)/4070ti/4080 is now. Heck, if this was back in the day, mid-range would be similar to previous gen's top dog, aka 4090. I remember the days when a £300 GTX 970 would compete with previous gen's £1k Titan.

But from the few bits and pieces of rumours, AMD might not even target 7900XT performance with their next slew of mid-range GPUs, if they even use new dies. I'm concerned that this could be a R9 200 series -> R9 300 series or RX 400 series -> RX 500 series generation where it's almost the same product for almost the same price. I.e. stagnation. AMD have done it before, if Nvidia takes the mickey at mid-range next gen, that could be AMD's excuse to do the same again.

For AMD to do mid-range well, they need to make and sell 7900XT(X) perf products at sub £500, or better yet (but very unlikely) sub-£400. New tech should make it more cheaper, more energy efficient and more performance on same die size like we used to always get. I'm honestly not sure what Nvidia will do, but thinking about it, it's not entirely unreasonable that a sub-£500 5060ti could be on the level of today's 4070ti. But recently I've been seeing the improvements get worse each gen for Nvidia too. This gen's 4070 can't keep up with last gen's full die 3090ti.

But I've just realised that another potential cause for the stagnation is due to approaching the limits of silicon. Not sure how TSMC's progress is going for shrinking transistors, but it is getting a bit slower and more expensive. It's getting harder to get more transistors from the same silicon wafer, thereby slowing progress.

Perhaps AMD's slow process is due to them working on multi-part GPUs, like how they have multiple CCX on Ryzen. I'd love to see AMD pull a Ryzen moment in the GPU space, but my expectations and excitement for anything GPU related is rock-bottom.
 
Firegod said:
Will @Nexus18 and @TNA be joining you shortly to also give us their daily anti-AMD comment. :p Honestly, your post has nothing to do with the thread title. I'll post it again for you to help.

Could AMD retreating to mid-range & Nvidia becoming out of affordability scope help optimization?​

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I think my post perfectly sums AMD up the situation, 7900XT releasing for a $900 MSRP confirms that.
 
Firegod said:
Will @Nexus18 and @TNA be joining you shortly to also give us their daily anti-AMD comment. :p Honestly, your post has nothing to do with the thread title. I'll post it again for you to help.

Could AMD retreating to mid-range & Nvidia becoming out of affordability scope help optimization?​

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Oi! Check my sig, I have a AMD CPU and probably had more AMD GPU's than you have ;)
 
tommybhoy said:
The lack of optimisation has always been in the PC space, it's a decades old problem at this point, it's not just because upscalings arrived.

If anything, upscalings (in this regard)beneficial as it helps run unoptimised titles before they're patched rather than being totally unplayable at launch.
Click to expand...
Or... since with the upscaler's help the poorly optimised, half-finished title is playable or at least almost playable... do the publisher actually have to release a patch at all?

Rather suspect that is far more likely :(

Or imagine this: rushed title is out.

The dev team have a long list of things they could optimise.

In the age of upscalers - the publisher's bean counters look at the lists and decide that only the top 3 things (in terms of dev cost/result) get worked on.

Before upscalers said bean counter might have reluctantly conceded that the top 10 of things needed doing.

Results of upscalers: worse optimisation.
 
Joxeon said:
I think my post perfectly sums AMD up the situation, 7900XT releasing for a $900 MSRP confirms that.
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Maybe so but still not relevant to the thread title.

henry hoov3r said:
Is it confirmed that AMD are not releasing enthusiast level cards anymore or is this just rumors?
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Nothing is confirmed as far as I'm aware. Not really been following recently but the last rumour I read was that AMD's high end RDNA4 card has been scrapped as it wasn't giving the performance they were hoping for and are instead looking towards high end cards with the following gen, presumably RDNA5 so they are just concentrating on midrange for RDNA4.
 
SpudMaster said:
Maybe so but still not relevant to the thread title
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The point I’m making is that while AMD continue to price match Nvidia at the mid range then people will just buy Nvidia for the better features, OP talks about AMD having a more reasonable price but that isn’t really true as Nvidia have similar performing cards to AMD at each price price point aside from maybe the 7700XT which outclasses the 4060ti.

Will most games be optimised for mid range AMD GPUs? Not likely as only 1 in 10 buy an AMD GPU, if anything games will become more reliant on features like FG / FMF to run at a decent level which is a shame as when your paying a lot of money for hardware you shouldn’t need to rely on gimmicky software solutions to get a playable gaming experience.
 
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@SpudMaster

@KompuKare

Steady now, I said it's not just because upscalings arrived.:p

Upscalling can be added as another reason/excuse/moan for unoptimised games is what I'm saying.

gamerant.com

10 Great Games That Launched In Unoptimized States

These games could have been incredible, but pressure to launch them too soon led to bugs, crashes, and other issues.
gamerant.com gamerant.com

OG ARK is another good comparison, it ran like **** pre upscaling and it's replacement runs like **** with upscalling.

It's got worse, but historically there never used to be multi platform releases at launch, you mostly got console release, with a post launch PC port and they still needed optimised with patches, it's always been the case that nearly every game launched needs patching or maybe there's AAA games out there still running release build?

AAA games used to launch on two hardware configs in XB/PS, then they turned their attention to PC-add higher IQ, most recent tiles have been coded for-PS4/PS4pro/PS5/XB1/XBs/XBx/PC arguably add Steam Deck/Handhelds.

Covid was a thing, games getting larger and larger, you might have to implement Nv or AMD's tech into your game-which does not equate to flicking an upscaling toggle in UE engine, they're literally getting instructed by their bosses to implement RT/PT'ing tech that absolutely requires upscaling to run in the first place.

Devs clearly don't test for performance to get a title out the door, they test and remove as much game breaking bugs they can find for launch-factoring in, gpu performance is going nowhere, vram is pathetic imo as it would free up dev time to do other stuff, which leaves them with the prority of making sure it can run on their lowest spec requirement upwards.
 
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