6800 XT is a great choice! Great bang for the buck in the mid-end.

2007 belongs in S tier. Otherwise mostly agree for S tier especially with 1998 and 2004 with the latter being the greatest over the past 25 years.

Agree Robocop was a surprise. I was also surprised for Cyberpunk and it's expansion. CD Projekt Red righted a wrong. Was surprised they added a 3rd ending. I was somewhat disappointed with ending of CP.

No. We want competition and better prices. Why is wanting competition for consumers on both the mid-end and high-end a bad thing and see what AMD needs to improve?

That's good to hear that intel is doing good in Ray Tracing. I thought it was a smart move to use the method intel uses with XeSS. They basically hired the guy who developed DLSS for XeSS. That was a smart move. No wonder it's beating FSR in the image quality department. It's going to a tough hill to climb with all the driver optimizations needed especially with older games. Apparently they increased the performance of Assassins Creed Unity by like 100% but that was a game like from 10 years ago. Goes to show how much they have to do with going back to games from over 10 - 12+ years go. I was really looking towards A770 when it released because it was the first time in 20+ years ago that I felt we would have a viable competitor after 3DFX's demise.

Looking forward to what intel has for Battlemage. My suggestion is to have one-die like AMD had for example when they launched the HD 4800 series initially with HD 4850/4870. Release one die and heavily focus on optimizations and double down on the drivers. Do, that for Celestial and then go for the high end with Druid. This will help intel focus on one chip at a time instead of multiple chips.

Can't believe I am rooting for intel. :P

Sending engineers to AAA developers is something that has been bothering me from AMD of their reluctance to do so and this goes back 15 - 20 years ago. It's like nVIDIA really cares about their customers and are bending over backwards to make sure games runs the best on their hardware. I was surprised to find 3-4 Nvidia guys in the credits to No One Lives Forever 2 vs 1 guy from ATI when I finished NOLF 2. That was 20 years ago! This means Nvidia is providing whatever resources to developers to make sure AAA games work the best on their GPUs. I even read about NVIDIA sending engineers to help Crytek to make the Crysis looks the best. That's what I call commitment! I don't think pricing is necessarily bad but working with AAA developers from the beginning instead of trying to fix it later with driver updates is another example where NVIDIA is one step ahead of AMD.

Good question. Let me explain. Before I can get a Radeon HD 4870, which was my first ATI/AMD GPU. I can get close 70-75% performance of nVIDIA for half the price. With my last AMD GPU, R9 390X I can get close to GTX 980 with less money and the same image quality.

Now, after jumping to 4K I don't really have another alternative option with respect to getting the performance AND image quality. Before AMD could get away with being "good enough" because image quality wasn't a factor as it was as good if not better than nVIDIA in mage quality.

Now, with Ray Tracing and max 4K Game settings we really need something like DLSS to play games with Ray Tracing and AMD's FSR 3 lags behind of DLSS with respect to performance and image quality. If AMD matched the picture quality, with FSR 3 I would more than willing to save the $500 bucks and go with 7900 XTX vs RTX 4090. But that isn't the case.

I agree with you to a certain extent that as long as they are profitable and showing growth, it's fine. But I think as nVidia is winning generation after generation and especially with their features such as frame generation and DLSS, and other features like Shadowplay it's hurting AMD's growth even though AMD may be competitive in the mid-end like with HD 7800 XT.

Back in the 4850/4870 not getting the performance crown, AMD still grew. Market share jumped to 40% now AMD has like 17% which is half then what they were 15 years ago. And still the same after 8 years. Consecutive generations of getting the performance is hurting their image I would argue, especially with the feature set that nVidia is offering.

Lastly, "winning the crown" has a psychological affect on consumers. They perceive that it's the "better" brand even if that may not be 100% true which equals to better sales and market share. We saw that with the 9700/9800 generation 20 years ago. ATI started to change their perception of playing second fiddle to NVIDIA. In the next generation after the 9700/9800 with the X800 XT PE vs the GeForce 6800 Ultra which was released in 2004 close to 20 years ago is when we had a lot of PC gamers finally switch to ATI. In fact that's whey AMD crossed the 50% threshold mark and actually took over the market share and became the #1 GPU maker in the world.

Also, shouldn't AMD offer something to Gamers like me who made the jump to 4K and want's to play every new game maxed out at 4K? I know I may be in the niche from going from mid-end so it may not matter to AMD. But as someone who supported AMD for nearly 10 years, shouldn't AMD provide something for someone like me?

Now, it's more than ever needed for AMD. NVIDIA is running away with almost 80% market share for the reasons above and many more. Look what happened to AMD once they started to take away the "performance crown" from intel with Ryzen. A lot of gamers switched to AMD. Which brought significant influx of cash to AMD.

True. There was a lot of pent up games to be released or got delayed.

Good right up. :)

Agreed on the first point. They need to work with developers and bring other apps up to par. I have heard of so many stories where people WANT to get AMD but X, Y,Z program doesn't work as well due to lack of particular support. I am not necessarily talking about gaming also, For example, a recent AI developer had people who wanted to use AMD hardware for AI but apparently AMD's OWN programming language ROCm which is similar to CUDA doesn't even support some AMD GPUs. Like WTF? Where as you can pretty much pick up any NVIDIA GPU and can get CUDA to run. That's lost sale or sales of someone who may wanted to game and use their GPU for development work.

And definitely right about on the high end. People will easily spend extra $200+ on $1000+ GPUs if they get better quality image with DLSS 3.5, and other features. And speaking of features I know first hand when recording game play I had to download 3rd party bulls*** software like Raptr to run in the background and set it up to record gameplay. When I switched to NVIDIA with GTX 1060 6GB I only press a couple of button and bam shadowplay starts recording. A lot of YT streamers didn't want to switch to AMD but can't due to lack of Shadowplay like feature, that's another lost sales. With respect to upscaling AMD should have hired the guy who developed DLSS who intel hired and developed XeSS which is pretty good. They really need to double down ot get onto AI/ML based image upscaling. When you are spending over $1000 it's little things like that matters.

And don't get me started with their marketing. That's another joke itself. If you look at ATI's marketing back in the day 20 years ago with the 9700 Pro they were stellar and was able to really sell themselves. They were able to pivot the brand into an "enthusiast" brand 20 years ago. It has gone downhill over the last 10 years.

On the price point front. From what I hear AMD will not focus on the high end from RDNA 4. It will be mostly focused on the $200 - $400 (similar to RDNA 1). They apparently had a very ambitious architecture to compete with Blackwell but that got shelved to the side to focus on the mid to high end. The ambitious architecture will be used in RDNA 5 and by then they hope to reach parity with DLSS AI/ML image upscaling. Which to me makes sense, there is no point in releasing an expensive $1000 GPU when they still haven't fixed many of the image issues with FSR 3 and features. Gamers may still get Blackwell if AMD hasn't reached parity with DLSS 3.5 or 4 whatever NVIDIA comes with Blackwell.

I see nothing wrong with that. AMD did that with the HD 4800 series and captured the $200 - $300 price segment and that actually enabled them to grab market share. Reached up to 40% which is double what they have now. I mean why would I get something that costs 2X as much and I can get 70 - 75% of the performance at half the price.

From 2008-2013 AMD was killing it from the bottom to mid-end to high end. Only in the last 10 years they stagnated in the high end but was competitive in the mid-end.

Right now though I would add that they would need more than just being cheaper they need match features that match DLSS 3.5 with quality graphics that matches or get's "close" to NVIDIA on top of the price.

I don't understand why they aren't plain the price angle like they did with HD 4800 - HD 6000 series. It seems like Lisa Su want's to maintain "margin" but at the cost they are losing Gamers and in the long run and mind-share. How many of those users will switch back to AMD after they have been using NVIDIA for 10+ years?