AMD Navi

PUBG is the only game there that might run badly. But that's because it's a poorly optimized game. Not because it's some graphical powerhouse. It looks like crap actually. Everything else there could be maxed out easily on a cheap card at 1080p or even 1440p. A lot of those games would probably even run fine at 4K.

Yeah times are changing. Microtransaction heavy multiplayer games are what all the kids are playing. AAA single player games not as much.

 

The 1050 and 1050 Ti are really weak too. Almost more like previous gen cards in performance. I understand their popularity though. During the cryptocraze they were often all you could get. Also they don't need external power. So you can just throw them into whatever hunk of junk Dell you're running without a power supply upgrade. They're cheap trash, but they will run e-sports games just fine.

Tech reviewers focus so much on the high-end bleeding edge cards, but most people buy something in the $100 to $300 range. It's easy to see why the RTX cards struggled to catch on and why NV had to come out with the GTX 16xx series. Most people just don't spend what they are charging for the RTX cards. You get much over about $350 and the market for video cards really shrinks to almost nothing.

The 970 and 1060 were big sellers for a long time. The 970 was the #1 card on Steam for several years until it was overtaken by the 1060. But they were often right around $250. I remember my brother got his GTX 970 as a refurb for $250.

It's unfortunate that what you can get for performance in the sub $300 segment hasn't changed that much. The 1660 Ti/Super were the first big performance jumps in that segment in a long time. But that's what lack of competition from AMD and lingering cryptocraze inflation has caused.

 

My daughter has a 4GB 1050 ti, it does fine for the 1080p needs of an 11 year old. Was going to put something bigger in but she doesn't play many AAA games, mostly indie so wasn't really needed. Shes been running it fine for 18 months or so. If she ever wants something more beefy I will probably go with a 16xx at the moment.

She has an 8th Gen i5, 16GB RAM and an NVMe PCI-E SSD paired with it and is happy enough.

 

Yeah it seems like a perfectly fine card if you just need something basic to run low spec e-sports games or minecraft. I definitely understand why it's so popular.

 

5600XT performs somewhere between a 1070 and vanilla 2060 for $280. NV responded by dropping the price of the vanilla 2060 to $300. Apparently there's some last minute bios update that makes the 5600XT a bit more competitive with the vanilla 2060, but it probably won't come installed on most of the cards.

 

It makes it seem like they deliberately gimped the card to hit a certain price and performance point, which is kinda weird with all the competition they have. I think nVidia will move quite a few vanilla 2060 cards after the price drop. I wonder how his will do. Budget 1440p is a crowded segment that the 1070, 1660Ti, 1660S, Vega 56, and vanilla 2060 already had covered.

 

In my opinion they felt safer running the memory on the cards at 12Gbps because they knew each chip could deffo handle it. MSI have already come out and said not all 5600XTs will be able to hit 14Gbps and so if AMD thought they were safer running at 12 and being the performance king in that price point for 1080p/60 I don't blame them.

Like when Zen launched, AMD haven't really been competitive for a long time when it comes to price/performance and so better to start off slowly and undercut the competition than to go all out and price yourself out of making any headroom. Remember although Zen 1 was good it still wasn't quite up to Intel standards at launch, they built themselves a market share, got some money to throw at R&D and then come out with Zen 2 and pretty much outclass Intel in everything but AI in Adobe products.

 

I hope so. The only way prices will go back down in a big way is if AMD is very competitive at the high-end. When nVidia feels threatened at the high-end they really start slashing prices and coming out with incredible bang for the buck type cards. The last time we saw that was when AMD came out with the R9 290, a $400 card that beat the $750 GTX 780 Ti. The result was the GTX 970, a card that outperformed the R9 290 for $329. We could have cards like that again, but AMD has to be really competitive at the high-end again.

When there's no competition at the high-end you get $400 entry level cards and $600 midrange cards like we saw with RTX at launch. You also start seeing performance stagnation from generation over generation, like how the vanilla RTX card weren't much better than the 10 series.

Anyway this whole bios thing with the 5600XT is a friggin debacle. It makes AMD look like they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

 

Forget about the 5700 XT THICC. It's time for the 5700 XT WAIFU. Your Waifu is hot.

I love how he looks absolutely disgusted when reviewing this thing.

 

Availability of cards from AIB partners with better cooling will make or break this card. That seems to be where AMD always falls down lately.

 

Looks like a very solid improvement with no worries about miners taking them all. I'm going to assume the numbers mildly underestimate the abilities of the card until drivers are sorted. Don't all of these new AMD cards have 16 GB of VRAM? It will probably be the better option for high resolution gaming. 10 GB in Ampere is pretty questionable in my view.

I'd definitely shop carefully for a non-reference model, probably a Nitro+ from Sapphire or IceQ from HIS.