Are we? Seems like GPUs are not available on launch, or even after a long while. Scalpers are at it again. Should I not wait and look into the used market?
Are we? Seems like GPUs are not available on launch, or even after a long while. Scalpers are at it again. Should I not wait and look into the used market?
I dont fanboy, I chase value. My house is a mix of AMD/Nvidia/Intel/ARM and I use the right architecture wherever I can.
If im guilty of anything its Hopeium but honestly all the leaks I have been following show suggest that the 9070 and 9070 XT will offer same or better performance vs 5070 class cards at prices far below street cost. Nvidia’s MSRPs are a lie and the market shows that. NO AIB can produce these cards for the prices Nvidia has them selling at without rebates on the back end. Thats why you saw a very small number of MSRP models and no plans to restock. Everything else out there on the market is over MSRP.
We know AMD has stock in back rooms and warehouses, we have the pictures and confirmation from rank and file staff at places like Microcenter. We also know that AMD’s Instinct MI series is not selling as well as Nvidia so they are not as incentivized to divert silicon to higher margin products.
So, yeah it might be another round of shitty nvidia prices and stock, but we wont see the same scalping for AMD, and the value offered by AMD will embarrass nvidia once you turn off DLSS. Why else would they lie and say the 5070 matches 4090 performance other than to try to sell as much as they can before the 9070 forces them to drop prices.
That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I’m… mildly impressed.
AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they’re pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia’s MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD’s new dates. Because both of these companies suck.
On the plus side for consumers, there’s some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won’t underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We’ll see what reviews have to say about it.
Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia’s aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that’s not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they’re easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.
I’m also very confused about why you’d “turn off DLSS”. Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That’s a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn’t exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn’t tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.
See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a “matter of opinion”. It doesn’t even need to be on purpose, it’s just easier to produce than to counter.
Aaaand now I made myself sad.
In any case, here’s hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They’ve apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I’ll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.
I dont think this is misinformation, just a difference of opinion and interpretation of what is known. I also openly admit that I have a tint on this release because I am really hoping that AMD does it right with reasonable pricing and performance.
As for DLSS/FSR I prefer not to use either because where I actually want faster frames and benefit the added latancy is not worth it, and where I dont care about the extra frames I prefer higher quality details. I find both framegen tech to be a poor service to the end user and thats why I dislike Nvidia’s marketing of the 5070 as equivalent to a 4090 when turning on DLSS. I also dislike their texture compression as an excuse to keep vram artificially low to prevent people from using consumer GPUs for running LLMs.
Ah, so you meant DLSS to mean specifically “DLSS Frame Generation”. I agree that the fact that both upscaling and frame gen share the same brand name is confusing, but when I hear DLSS I typically think upscaling (which would actually improve your latency, all else being equal).
Frame gen is only useful in specific use cases, and I agree that when measuring performance you shouldn’t do so with it on by default, particularly for anything below 100-ish fps. It certainly doesn’t make a 5070 run like a 5090, no matter how many intermediate frames you generate.
But again, you keep going off on these conspiracy tangents on things that don’t need a conspiracy to suck. Nvidia isn’t keeping vram artificially low as a ploy to keep people from running LLMs, they’re keeping vram low for cost cutting. You can run chatbots just fine on 16, let alone on 24 or 32 gigs for the halo tier cards, and there are (rather slow) ways around hard vram limits for larger models these days.
You don’t need some weird conspiracy to keep local AI away from the masses. They just… want money and have people that will pay them more for all that fast ram elsewhere while the gaming bros will still shell out cash for the gaming GPUs with the lower RAM. Reality isn’t any better than your take on it, it’s just… more straightforward and boring.