Why being a gamer is so difficult in Pakistan?
February 19, 2020
Year 2020 has been a year of many things. We witnessed the launch of the newer gen of Nvidia cards the RTX 30 series, which are claiming to give almost a 30% increase in performance from the previous gen. Lets see how Team Red faired against Team Green.
Team Red has always been playing catch up to Team Green. Which is why Nvidia has always had a monopoly in the GPU department. They set the price as they deemed fit. Lets consider the price point of the previous gen gaming king GPU, the 2080Ti. It was priced at a humongous $1000. The newer lineup, 30 series card RTX 3070 competes with it and beats it almost in every scenario. If Nvidia held the monopoly as before, the price of the 3070 would have been around $1000 or more.
However, Team Red aka AMD dethroned the processor king, Intel and broke its monopoly by launching Ryzen. Nvidia learned from that and wanting to stay ahead of the competition, released the newer RTX series at a very aggressive price point. RTX 3070 which precedes the 2080Ti is priced at $500. This just goes to show how Nvidia did their homework on AMD.
Meanwhile AMD, always beating its competition on price to performance ratio, closed the gap in the performance department as well. The initial graph AMD showed is very promising. It showed it was beating Nvidia cards in various gaming scenarios.
Pic Credit: AMD
Right now at the time of this writing, benchmarks from AMD have not come out in real world scenarios. Nonetheless, after AMD's recent keynote we saw the launch of the RX 6000 series again at a very competitive price to performance ratio. Moreover, the cards will support Ray tracing as well, which has been the main selling point of Nvidia ever since the launch of Nvidia's 20 series.
The 6800XT, which is the direct competitor of Nvidia's main selling flagship card RTX 3080, was launched at a price of $650. The RTX 3080 was launched at $700. While, the RTX 3080 card features a 10GB DDR6X, while the 6800XT feature a 16GB DDR6 VRAM.
All the cards AMD is launching this gen have a 16GB VRAM. Then comes the RX 6800 which is the direct competitor of 3070 and 2080Ti. The 3070 was launched at a price of $500 and features a 8GB G6X VRAM. While the RX 6800 is priced at $580 and features a 16GB GDDR6 VRAM.
This was supposed to be the expected lineup by AMD, but surprisingly AMD also showcased the 6900XT which is the direct competitor of RTX 3090. The 6900XT features a 16GB VRAM as mentioned above, and goes head to head with the 3090's 24GB in games at 4K. The price of the 6900XT is also a $1000 while the 3090 is priced at $1500.
This is real competition from AMD with the newer cards featuring the RDNA 2 architecture going up against Nvidia's Ampere Architecture.
Although we are yet to see Real-life benchmarks of AMD cards, if AMD claims are true then this is a win win situation for consumers. AMD has truly taken the fight to Nvidia this time and Nvidia will have to respond.Although, rumors are coming in that Nvidia is getting ready to release another two variants of 3070 and 3080 with 16 GB and 20GB VRAM respectively.
Finally the monopoly has been broken and now consumers can get tech for cheap. Last but not the least, both companies have brought their A-Game and 4K will become the standard for all gamers who buy the newer gen of cards be it AMD or Nvidia.
Pic credit : AMD
Nvidia had a shaky launch as well, there were capacitor issues from the AIB partners, driver issues as well. Which is quite the surprise considering its Nvidia and they are known for driver stability.
Moreover, Nvidia cards went quickly out of stock as well and its quite a hassle getting your hands on a RTX 30 series cards due to scalpers creating a vacuum of demand and supply.
We'll have to wait for AMD who are launching the cards in November and December. Hopefully, they are much better prepared for their launch and there won't be any stock or performance issues. Also, AMD has had driver issues in the past and we'll see them resolved as well with the newer gen of cards. This is just speculation at this point so take it with a grain of salt.
Which GPU are you looking to buy when they become available? Are you going with Team Green or Team Red? Let us know in the comment section below!