In this new GPU mega benchmark we compare the Radeon RX 7900 XT against the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti in 50+ games, some of which were tested using multiple configurations, ray tracing and more.
https://www.techspot.com/review/2642-radeon-7900-xt-vs-geforce-rtx-4070-ti/
Both cards are 1000+ Euro......when I see prices without VAT in reviews is like they are making this for re-sellers not and users. End user price is what matters and both cards are shlt value at this point.
It's because the US doesn't put taxes in their prices.
It’s also pointless to specify gross prices, since each country has different VAT, ranging from 0% to 27%.
People will always whine about prices, and while prices are dumb today its not entirely the fault of nvidia/AMD. The price of everything is sky high today.
The thing is, VAT doesn't exist everywhere and where it does, it's never the same in two places. I don't even really bother looking at the pricing because USD means nothing to me. I just go look at Canadian prices on PCPartPicker to try and remain within my own reality. It sucks when I realise just how shite the Canadian Dollar is right now. Having to multiply every price I see by 1.37 is just painful (and not always accurate).
I couldn't agree more! Sure, $800USD is better than $900USD but it's still at least $200USD too high. The RX 7900 XT is the successor of the RX 6800 XT and the MSRP on that was $650 (which itself was pretty steep). The RX 7900XT should be no more than $600USD.
Yep, Jensen Huang essentially has a religion now of nVidia fanboys. He's not very original though because throughout history, several religions have demanded ram sacrifices from their devotees!
The only thing I'm sure of is that the 4070's margins are much higher than the 7900XT, less Vram, single smaller chip etc...
I completely agree with you about the pricing and ray-tracing being a gimmick. I did want to ask though, have you tried using FSR and if so, is there really that much difference between FSR and DLSS? I've never been able to tell from looking at reviews.
It's nothing to do with greed or stupidity. AMD simply had no choice. Its Gaming sector revenue for FY2022 was $6.8 billion, for an operating income of $0.95 billion -- that's an operating margin of just 14%.
Dr Su's main goal as CEO is to deliver a profitable company and value to shareholders first the same as any CEO. Now QE tap has been turned off the stock market in tech has dropped like a water balloon. So to add real value to the company to appease shareholders to stay with the company and not sell is to keep prices inflated with higher margins. I do think you're right though that AMD is not capitalising on their opportunity to basically take the entire DIY PC gaming market from intel and Nvidia completely and subsidising it with the margins they earn from Eypc. It's a hard balancing act but the company was worth $3 a share in 2016 so they've come a long way and I think their main focus is to stay relevant and to be financially secure over mass market sales especially as we're entering a recession where too low margins could wipe a company out like what's happening with intel who are going through a massive restructuring and investments to focus the company into profitability again."For this shootout we've got our hands on the massive PowerColor Hellhound Radeon 7900 XT which can currently be had for $830, which is actually $70 below the MSRP, so that's nice."
When I read "so that's nice." I can almost hear sarcasm in Steve's voice and it makes me laugh because if I were reviewing a card that was overpriced by $300USD at launch and they dropped it $100USD, I know that I'd be sarcastic if I said "so that's nice".
"In fact, quite a few 7900 XT's are now selling below MSRP with some as low as $800, which makes you wonder why AMD didn't just start at this more reasonable price point to begin with."
It's very, very simple. AMD's leadership has gone into full greedy-stupid mode. They get greedy and it causes them to do stupid things. Their greed made them over-hype RDNA3 which was stupid because they had to know that reviewers would spill the beans on the day it was available. They also overpriced the RX 7900 XT which was stupid because all it was good at for that price was gathering dust on store shelves.
If that wasn't enough, the CPU side was even worse. First, they overpriced the AM5 CPUs and motherboard chipsets which caused sale stagnation. Then they released nonsensical X3D versions of their R9 productivity CPUs while not producing an R5-7600X3D. The way that AMD is giving longevity to their platforms (like with AM4) means that they need to get as many people on board as possible early because that will guarantee CPU sales for them and will also deny CPU sales to Intel at the same time.
An R5-7600X3D would've guaranteed extremely high AM5 adoption rates among gamers and would've buried Intel. Instead, they're screwing around, trying to get as much money as possible per transaction (R9 X3D CPUs anyone?) and discovering that it doesn't matter how much profit they make per transaction if there are no transactions being done.
All that the leadership at AMD have managed to do since 2023 began is screw themselves over left and right. This is not the AMD of 2017-2022, this is an entirely different animal with an increased appetite and a much lower IQ.
Oh...you've opened the wrong door with that post. Now prepare for the novel that you deserve!
Like what? For example Asus have two motherboards that are pretty much carbon copies Except one support Intel and another AMD:
rog.asus.com
rog.asus.com
I agree with everything that you've said. Of course they have to do that. What drives me insane is the way that they're trying to do it. It's never a good idea to try to mislead people with your marketing, especially when there will be reviewers taking you to task for it on the day that the product is available. AMD's core base has always been enthusiasts because non-enthusiasts tend to buy "brand-in-a-box" PCs like Dell, Acer or HP.
It is completely their fault. They are both constricting production to keep supply low which pushes prices up. They aren't competing (you know, capitalism) they are price fixing.
I live in a US state that has zero sales tax. Don't blame Nvidia and AMD for your country's insane VAT.
Oh...you've opened the wrong door with that post. Now prepare for the novel that you deserve!
None of what you just said changes the fact that an R5-7600X3D would dramatically increase the adoption rate of the AM5 platform. With the way that AMD keeps its platforms around (just look at how much they benefitted from AM4), once a customer is on that platform, the logical upgrade path is all-AMD. That means anyone on AM5 (just like AM4) is part of a captive market and is quite happy to be so because they're not spending money on new motherboards. This was demonstrated with AM4 all too well and is indisputable.
AM4 brought AMD back from the brink to being a serious player in the market, serious in a way that they hadn't seen since the Athlon 64. Sure, Zen was a big part of that, but there's no question that being on the AM4 platform was a boon to both AMD and consumers because it ensured brand-loyalty through drop-in upgrades. That meant more AMD CPU sales and consumers being delighted to not have to buy new motherboards. Just as much as it was a boon to AMD, it was a gut-punch to Intel. After all, nobody in their right mind would pay an extra $120-odd dollars to switch from AM4 to LGA 1151 when they could just add the cost difference to get a faster AMD CPU. This essentially denied Intel of any customer who was on AM4. The same would be true with AM5 and the more consumers that AMD can entice, the better it will be for them and the worse it will be for Intel.
It's a simple case of "Pay a little now to get a lot later." and all AMD had to do was this. In their situation, marketshare should be their top priority because despite all of their recent success, they're nowhere near parity with their competitors in either the CPU or GPU spaces. So what do they do? They release productivity CPUs with 3D cache that actually hurts multi-threaded performance. Sure, it increases the gaming prowess of said CPUs but the R9-7950X was already a fantastic gaming CPU so there's no value to be had there.
They could have easily released RX 7000 parts at the same prices as the RX 6000 parts and made tremendous headway in the GPU space while making a killing in the process. They had an opening when nVidia decided to increase their video card prices into the stratosphere and they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because they didn't think that they'd make enough money. Meanwhile, historical data shows this to be patently false. It's exactly what they'd done for years and they're still here so it can't have been that bad. Instead, they decided to follow nVidia's anti-consumer practices and jacked the prices of their video cards. Of course, it wasn't to the same degree, but people who buy nVidia cards don't do so for value. If they cared a lot about value (like I do), they wouldn't touch nVidia (like I don't).
The thing is that nVidia customers do care about value, just not to a big degree. They're similar to Apple customers in that manner. However, if AMD had decided to repeat with the same pricing as RX 6000, there's no question that a lot of people would switch and those who didn't wouldn't have switched anyway so they lost nothing there. There's no question that AMD also made a killing over the past couple of years and so they have the money behind them to do this without pain. They didn't and that's called GREED.
Their actions with marketing and product line have also been anti-consumer with misleading hype and a deliberately-confusing nomenclature in their Radeon line. Calling both GPUs "RX 7900 <insert suffix here>" instead of RX 7900 XT and RX 7800 XT may have been smart if consumers who bought Radeon were fools, but we tend to not be. People who are ignorant are brand-loyal which means that ignorant people would almost always have nVidia cards. If someone makes the decision to buy a Radeon card, it usually means that they have some clue as to what's going on because it's not the "BIG NAME" in GPUs that most people already know. They had the same problem with Intel back in the day and they only exacerbated the problem when they dropped the well-known ATi branding from their GPUs. The fact that they can't figure out how to fix the very real problem of having little to no mindshare in the GPU space after they fixed that very same problem in the CPU space means that they're STUPID.
Perhaps you have a different definition of greed and stupidity and that's fine, you're perfectly within your rights to have one. However, this is my definition of greed and stupidity and that won't change. If AMD had taken the path that I believe they should have, they'd be hailed as pro-consumer and praised with great reviews. Instead, well, just look at what happened. Bad reviews (including from Techspot) that were justly deserved and their reputation among consumers has been badly tarnished.
AMD's profit margins aren't the issue because if they were, they'd still be on the brink of bankruptcy instead of where they are. AMD didn't learn anything from the profits that they made from Vega and RDNA. AMD admitted that RDNA wasn't going to be the nVidia-killer that some hoped for but that was ok because what people really wanted was a good gaming card that they could afford and the RX 5000-series delivered in spades.
Consumers were willing to give AMD a pass with RDNA because they didn't over-promise and under-perform like they did with Vega. With RDNA2, people were thrilled to see Radeons competing at the top again and this was reinforced by their honest marketing. It seemed like AMD had learnt their lesson from their Zen and RDNA marketing. It seemed that AMD decided a "no-BS" approach to marketing was the better path (and it is). It seemed like they realised that most consumers just want something good that they can afford (and we do).
The problem was that the cracks were already starting to show with AMD's pricing. The RX 6800 XT was only $50 below the RTX 3080 which only ensured that the RTX 3080 would sell like crazy while the RX 6800 XT wouldn't. People were more than willing to pay an extra $50 for a card that had the extra features, even if it was terribly low on VRAM. This was the first time that AMD really tried pricing their products according to what GeForce cards were selling at instead of what it was costing them to make and market.
Their margins couldn't have been unsustainably low. If they were, we wouldn't have seen RX 6000 cards dropping well below their MSRPs because there's no point in losing money on everything you sell. I guarantee you that AMD raked in a good amount of profit from the $525 ASRock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming D which means that the MSRP of $650 was way too high. AMD's leadership has to get it through their heads that their successes over the past six years have saved them from insolvency but they're not the leader in any of their markets. The smart business accepts lower margins to increase their market and mindshare and that's all that AMD had to do.
Most people who I have seen trash-talking Radeon cards have paradoxically never even owned one. (Yes, consumers are stupid too). ATi makes fine products and the only way for AMD to get consumers to realise this is to get them on board. The way to do get them on board is simply by offering consumers good products at a great price. This is not, nor has it ever been, rocket science and this is where AMD fell flat with their R9 X3D CPUs. Nobody asked for them because it makes no sense. I do know that a lot of people were interested in a 6-core X3D CPU but AMD refused to make one. AMD acted like they existed in a vacuum instead of the reality that they're still in Intel's massive shadow. That's just a bad (aka stupid) business decision to offer consumers what they never asked for and witholding what it is that they actually wanted.
With nVidia's margins in the stratosphere, AMD could've easily undercut them by $200 at each performance tier and used more "no-BS" marketing while still raking in profits by the bucketload. It would've increased consumer goodwill and it would have increased marketshare. On the GPU side, they're in a pretty uneasy position with Intel starting to gain traction in the GPU marketplace. This would've moved them a lot closer to parity with nVidia and away from the surging Intel. Just imagine how catastrophic for AMD it would be if Intel managed to surpass them in the GPU space. They should be pulling out all the stops to prevent this from happening but instead, they're screwing up left and right.
I want AMD to succeed because I want competition to exist. I want AMD to succeed because they give me a way to enjoy my favourite hobby of PC gaming without having to support two slimeball companies like Intel and nVidia. I have always wanted AMD to succeed to protect the integrity of the PC marketplace. When I see them making bone-headed mistakes like this, it drives me crazy.
You and a few others are like 0.01% of this planet, the rest of us "rednecks" have to live with this. Consider yourself a lucky guy.
