Video Cards

I'm really just waiting on news of a B770-equivalent. Or an affordable RTX 5070Ti, although recent history tells me that's absolutely not going to happen. The latest thing out of the rumor mill is that AMD is going to make a 9080XTX or something simply because there's now a proven market and clear goodwill for it.

My personal interest in graphics hardware stops about the time new cards hit $700 and honestly I'd rather have a two slot $300 card that doesn't need more power than my CPU to operate and scrape the right-hand side of my full ATX desktop chassis as I put one in.
 
I did end up getting an rtx 5080FE on Friday. A buddy of mine works at Nvidia and was able to snag one and at a mild discount ($900) which is small bonus. It's working nicely in my older rig but I probably won't get all it's performance until I finally upgrade everything else.
 
It appears that there are no plans to release any higher end Battlemage GPUs. Intel didn't bring it up at all during its Tech Conference earlier in the week and I'm assuming that's not good news. A faster GPU die DOES exist and there's speculation it might be used for workstation hardware but it's not going anything mere mortals will be able to buy. Maybe a $500 16GB RTX 5060 won't be so bad.
 
It is much easier for leadership to say GPUs are the problem than to admit they are having fundamental failures in their fabrication processes.
 
ddrueding said:
It is much easier for leadership to say GPUs are the problem than to admit they are having fundamental failures in their fabrication processes.
Click to expand...

I think Intel has already admitted that fabrication is a huge issue. They're pretty open that they're second rate, much like AMD did when they spun off Global Foundries. Not everyone needs 3nm TSMC wafers and not everybody can even compete to buy them. Intel has moved its fabs to a separate business unit that I think will get sold off sooner or later.

sedrosken said:
I figured Intel would be exiting the DGPU market again after how badly Alchemist performed. They have to do some belt tightening anyway.
Click to expand...

Alchemist wasn't great for gamers, but it was actually a win for OEMs and Integrators who were able to sell systems on the basis of having a dGPU at all for anything like a reasonable price when, if you're remember, five year old GTX 1060s were getting sold for $300.

The A7x0 cards are definitely a lot better now than they were at launch and Intel updates its drivers for Windows about twice a month. They are still taking the process seriously. Remember that they're going to be building these graphics cores regardless, because the underlying tech is important as a commitment to AI. Once the cores exist, scaling them to discrete hardware isn't that difficult.
 
They're 8GB and don't trace any rays, but RX 5700XTs are unicorn hardware right now because they can be found secondhand for under $100 and are fantastic for 1080p gaming. I bought a couple so I never have to spend $250 on a 3050 again and honestly they're kind of perfectly positioned to tide someone over for the fateful day when we can go back to buying something that isn't stupid for under $500.
These guys clock in around 15% slower than an RTX 3060, but they're also $200 cheaper right now even for used cards.
 
What's the plan for when AMD inevitably drops driver support for them at the worst possible time? I know Polaris has to be next on the chopping block, but they dropped support for the R9 2/3xx range during the last GPU shortage. I'm honestly shocked they still support Polaris, even, and that nVidia still supports Pascal in turn.
 
I've been helping a friend on a budget look for a 1440 gaming card to pair with a 9600X CPU his current thoughts are 9070>5070>B580, though I suspect that the Intel card will be most likely to be available near MSRP.
 
sedrosken said:
What's the plan for when AMD inevitably drops driver support for them at the worst possible time? I know Polaris has to be next on the chopping block, but they dropped support for the R9 2/3xx range during the last GPU shortage. I'm honestly shocked they still support Polaris, even, and that nVidia still supports Pascal in turn.
Click to expand...

I've been able to find volunteer led efforts to get drivers for "unsupported" GPUs years after official support ended. This is most often an annoyance for old notebooks where support vanishes at the drop of a hat about 40 seconds after the last system using that hardware goes out of warranty, but it's not usually a huge issue to dig them up. I was able to find working drivers for a GTX 980 for a ~2012 Mac Pro last year, although that was more of a "because we can" than anything anyone needed to do.

Beyond that, if somebody is really dead set on gaming and newer cheap hardware truly isn't an option, they can install Bazzite or Mint or whatever and Steam to their heart's content. The GTX 1080 (Ti) is another good option but they're a lot harder to get, need more power and usually cost more like $150 - $175 than sub-$100.

ddrueding said:
B580
Click to expand...

The A770 is technically still faster and they're actually easier to find. My local Microcenter had a few out on the shelves last time I was there. I've never seen a B580 and I've been trying to get one since December of last year. I also saw a 12GB RTX 5070. One, at least. I'm not paying $700 for a 12GB card though.

Yes, Intel Arc cards are spectacularly unpopular, but the "nVidia at all costs" attitude is keeping a lot of people from being able to, you know, actually play games on their computers.
 
I had to make a trip to Micro Center this morning for a couple CPUs and as luck would have it, I was able to get a Gigabyte 16GB 5060Ti at MSRP. There were a half dozen 5070s and scads of 8GB 5060 Tis, but there was only one other 5060Ti 16GB, an Asus factory overclocked model for $130 more than the one I bought. The cheapest 9070XT was $839 although they did have models from several OEMs.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, but as much as I wanted to wait for an Intel B770, the 5060Ti is relatively low TDP and it has the same video encoding that drew me to Intel in the first place, and it was there for me to buy today. At least I can look forward to my workstation being less of a space heater.
 
The 5060Ti more than doubled my boot time versus either Intel or AMD. I'm talking about a 9950X with a Crucial PCIe 5 boot drive. This is not a computer that should take nearly an entire minute to get to a login prompt. I think it's all BIOS boot time given how long my system sits with no display. I don't reboot all that often, but I think I went from about 25 seconds total to 58.

Gigabyte's cooling solution really is quiet. This is a two-fan card that only uses 8 lanes of PCIe and I can just barely hear it ramp up if I do something involving the GPU. I also can't feel a hot spot against the side of my chassis, which is a big change from either the Radeon or Arc cards I've had installed recently.

I've just barely messed with it for gaming, to the point that I haven't even looked for where the frame generation and raytracing settings are in the weird new nVidia app, but I'm going to shrug and say that it's fine. I think my Radeon is better gaming hardware, but that's why I put it in the gaming computer. Low noise/low power balances the nVidia tax well enough that I'm happy with this thing overall.
 
The Windows drivers for the Blackwell GPU are super weird around multiple displays; nVidia doesn't automatically output to an HDMI monitor. I have to go in to the nVidia control panel and enable the HDMI monitor every time I make changes to the displays on that PC, even for something as simple as swapping the cables between the three screens I have connected.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top