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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

We really need more competition in the GPU space. Nvidia's release strategy seems designed to exploit the mid-tier gamers.

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AMD seems to be providing good alternatives. Arguably the 6600XT or the 6700XT are better value than the 4060. And the 6800XT is a good alternative to the 16GB 4060Ti. And AMD's cards are actually purchaseable right now.

6750 XT was on sale a few weeks ago for $330 - $20 rebate and came with a copy of The Last of Us.

Guessing it'll be a while before we see similar deals on Nvidia cards since so many people are determined to buy Nvidia over AMD for reasons I don't understand.

Yes the raytracing performance is better, but not enough to justify what they're charging.

Just using the card for gaming? Absolutely go with AMD. But most of the ML libraries and tooling is built on top of CUDA, so getting things to work with an AMD card can be annoying and have worse performance despite better hardware specs on paper.

And yet the Steam hardware survey has Nvidia at 76% compared to AMD at 15%. Most of that isn't because of ML performance.

Yeah, a lot of that is inertia. Most people don't upgrade video cards all that frequently which explains the popularity of the GTX 1650 (2019), GTX 1060 and 1070 (2016), etc. Those cards still work reasonably well for people who don't need bleeding edge performance or ray tracing. I'd expect their market share to improve over the next couple years as some of those cards age out of circulation.

Availability is a huge problem for ati cards. There weren’t that many out there in the last 2 years where nvida vendors at least had a bunch of overpriced options

DLSS, NVENC, CUDA, better drivers(windows) and more. I use a 6700xt, and I enjoy its better support on Linux, but absolutely not how its not suoported by ROCm, while a 3050 is fully supported by Cuda and can run any AI or professional program.

There are many reasons not to get an AMD card.

Is there a power difference?

That's my concern as well. Though if I'm honest I don't game for more than a few hours a week, tops.

Intel is trying, specifically at the mid-tier. These look good though as long as availability doesn't become a problem.

> as long as availability doesn't become a problem

And you know it will, within minutes of release.

Intel has worse drivers than ati hence the discount

These are the latest generation, not mid-tier. Mid-tier is your 3060 IMO, and will probably become 3080 with the release of these new cards. That mid-tier 3060 gives you 4k gaming or HD gaming at 60+Hz refresh. I think the release strategy seems to mostly work, keeping mid-tier gaming rigs on par or better with latest gen consoles and about a 3-5 year lifespan. PC gaming would not exist if the pricing was exploitive, because the bulk of the market would switch to consoles even though the games themselves are more expensive.

According to Steam hardware, the majority of gamers are running their games at 1080p.

The graphics card distribution pretty spread out across a number of generations.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

A lot of gamers chase FPS to go with their high refresh rate monitors, and 1080p is a sweet spot for that right now.

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