Hope AMD can deliver a competative and cheaper alternative. I picked up my RX570 4Gb on Black Friday two years ago for $108 and it has been running great. It has played all my games perfectly and i'm very happy with it. I hope to keep it for another 5 years before upgrading to another budget AMD card. I support AMD because they always offer better gaming value.

I generally agree that immersion goes far beyond eye-candy, but for some of that stuff the real "bottleneck" to accomplishing it has never really been GPU limited. Eg, take number of NPC's on screen at once in Skyrim. In the city of Whiterun, you have say 80x named NPC's plus a couple of dozen guards for a total of 100 or so. Out of those, perhaps around 20 have unique voices / motion-cap body movements / character artists, and the devs will design them so the ones closest to each will be different whilst the ones that get reused will be further apart so the cut & paste "Greetings, Citizen!" is not too noticeable.

But if you squeeze in say 1,000x people in the same space, you'll end up with either:-

1. An army of clones where 10x more people will share the same voice actor / mo-cap actor / clothing and all start talking / moving / looking the same way at once like a clone army, massively breaking immersion

2. They massively scale up spending on 10x the character writers, voice & mo-cap actors and character artists making each one unique to avoid 1, but then end up cutting out something to compensate (eg, one less city or faction or a shorter story) due to development time / money constraints, or

3. The devs cheap out by adding a few extra mo-cap actors & artists but then make 90% of the 10x larger population mute & non-interactable "placeholders", which to some will also break immersion given the Elder Scrolls has been about being able to talk to anyone.

Likewise with making cities 10x physically larger, it isn't GPU draw-distance limitations that's the big issue but the fact the devs are going to have to make the equivalent work of designing 60x Skyrim sized cities for 6x ten times bigger Super-cities, making 10x the buildings (and doing so without breaking immersion through too much cut & pasting of interiors or "cheapening out" again by making 9 out of 10 buildings non-interactable art (think of some early FPS's where you see a street but only 1 out of every 10 buildings have real interiors to fake 'scale').

^ Stuff like this is why I only buy mid-range GPU's these days and have long ditched the naive teenage belief I once had of "all we have to do is buy 2x more powerful GPU's and devs will start making games twice as better!" ;-)

amd is the best :P

You make good points. It's funny too since I'm the first one to complain that Witcher 3's huge and well populated streets are just pretty background with zero depth, compared to a Skyrim where almost everything has a purpose. For Skyrim I was honestly thinking more of infinite LOD distances though, no more castles and ground details popping in as you walk, and cities being designed more openly rather than as mazes to some degree to reduce what's on screen.

For something like Assassin's Creed though, I think the crowd size and whatnot comes into play. AC: Unity is well known for pushing that stuff too far when the PS4 generation started and creating a mess of a performer. The games after that had much more barren streets. Hopefully with the new consoles having better CPUs, they can go back to the Unity feel. More RAM means larger areas without loading breaks (Dishonored vs. Dishonored 2 for example). Things like that are where I enjoy technology advancements most.

AMD just presented their new 6000 generation of graphics cards, "Big Navi". So who is in trouble now?

Now to wait for independent tests and reviews and then see if any early problems pop up from the early adopters. Thank you people who test new hardware so we mortal ones may buy working products a bit later.

AMD pricing their cards below Nvidia has me wondering why when the benchmarks they did show were so favourable.

This is an effect from the strength of nvidias brand, for the masses they will just look and see Nvidia then buy it, it does not help either that many people had drivers issues (not that nvidia is anywhere free from this), their lack of an answer to an DLSS like feature like DirectML which will only get more and more support over time, DirectML will probably come later some time as a driver update perhaps and no mention of raytracing in their announcement.

All these are things that will Nvidia will push hard in their marketing and also users talking about their experience giving the illusion that nvidia has no issues, hopefully people who are more into this stuff will look at the features and decide for themselves if DLSS and RTX for the few games that currently support it are worth it for them.
For people who just want high rast performance then AMD is now a viable choice.

AMD RX 6800 will sell the most i assume and is not priced lower without the same feature set, will it hurt the card ? who knows.

I have cards from both manufacturers and rarely experience any issues personally,

4k with 2xDSR or would that be 16k?

Alternatively, 4k VR.

These do support ray tracing but with it being new for AMD, I would wait for more tests to see how it performs. I am sure raytracing will now be added to a lot of the games coming out so even if there are only like forty games now, there will be a hundred more in a year.

Yes i know they have raytracing but it was not present in the announcement, i have a feeling the lack of an DLSS like feature is something some people will be unhappy about, we will just have to wait and see how AMDs approach to raytracing will work compared to Nvidia but i expect it to be a good bit behind.

There is potential here but the announcement was very surface level sadly and much info has been left out, Vram is in AMDs favor though.

They did talk about ray tracing in the context of DX12 Ultimate, and there's "Super Resolution", whatever that may be, to compete with DLSS.

Hmm must have missed that part, thx.

The AMD tech response to DLSS is DirectML (Direct Machine Learning). Not sure if the video explains it since I haven't watched it. But basically it's the DX12 Ultimate version of DLSS. It will take some time to catch up to DLSS no doubt, but being built into DX12 and the new Xbox consoles and Microsoft having the largest machine learning capacity in the world...it may not take as long as expected. I suspect there's no reason nVidia cards would not also be able to use DirectML, eventually leading to developers preferring one solution across both brands of card and Xbox rather than using DLSS just for nVidia.

I already mentioned DirectML in my first post and yes i expect it to be decent in time but i wouldn't be suprised if Nvidia blocked AMD raytracing and ML in their games sort of like how GameWorks did it, both Nvidia and AMD use the DX12 API for RTX so it's definately possible for both to be viable in the same games but i'm sleptical and expect some anti competitive measures.

DirectML isn't an AMD tech though, it's a Microsoft one. They will probably use it, but it isn't anywhere near definitive that they will and if they do it will come at a cost.

Frankly, C2077 already gives clear evidence of exclusivity deals already being made. Not so much for AMD PC, but it's clear that raytrace capable devkits were given to those who asked for them. I don't see any credible reason for it not being supported on console except for C2077 being festooned with nVidia marketing. Contrast with, say, Watch Dogs Legion which was also a nVidia title but has RT enabled for both nextgen consoles.Not exactly a niche game from a niche developer, except perhaps when compared to C2077's hype and expectations.

Super Resolution is interesting but that will go in the same boat as MS ML probably if Nvidia decides, i don't really care about any single game when it comes to raytracing and if you ask me, RTX still isn't really where it needs to be yet for me to buy into it.

GOG however seem to attract quite as few RTX supported titles with Control, Metro Exodus, Ghostrunner etc and a lot more coming. AMD however is completely up in the air but it doesn't really matter to me, i just dislike all this damn exclusive bullshit in games.

Ubisoft i certainly don't care about, if they would have their way we would only be playing cloud streaming shit at this point. They would jump in bed with Amazon and Google without a moments notice, i'm even more aware about this after reading up on their trackmania serie shitshow.