The Discrete GPU Market and Where we're Heading... (about supply and demand)

Today, I wanted to do some light coverage and analysis of Tom's Hardware's reporting of Jon Peddie Research's report on GPU shipments over the same time period contrasted with Canalys' report on the size of the PC gaming market and how that's likely to affect not only GPU availability but also GPU pricing going forward...

The Relative Value of GPUs Over The Last 10 Years...

 

Original by Sergei Tokmakov

There's been a comparison that I've been wanting to do for a long time but I just didn't have the time or the energy to take it on. Finally, I had a bit of a break from work and recharged enough to be able to sit down and focus on this to get it done. 

Below, I'll explore the historic pricing versus the relative performance of each generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia over the period of 2010 - 2020*. From that, I will draw out the generational leaps per performance tier and the relative value of each of those jumps as well as the value within each generation. This will also help us try and understand how the price/performance strategy has changed per generation for both companies.

*Yes, I'm aware that the last ten years are technically 2011 - 2021... but the current generation started in 2020, and some data I would need for 2021 doesn't exist yet!

The Uncertain Future of PC Gaming... (plus my opinion on Valve's Steam Deck)

 

Three things occurred today that kickstarted my thought processes and got me a little worried about the future of PC gaming. First off, I listened to a really good episode of the TECHonomics podcast. The second thing was that AMD pre-released FSR, along with some documentation. Finally, Valve released the Steam Deck for preorder.  Now I'm feeling very uncertain about the future of PC gaming...

Fidelity FX Super Resolution's dirty secret... (Updated)

 

AMD have showcased their FSR (Fidelity FX Super Resolution) upscaling technology very briefly this morning to much critical acclaim. It's coming earlier than I had predicted, given AMD's comments at the beginning of the year, and I am optimistic that this will give a boost to AMD's performance in future titles. However, I'm not as bullish on the implementation as others are for two reasons... I believe Paul over at NotAnAppleFan when he says that FSR "has a catch", and I believe that FSR needs driver implementation from the platform vendors. 

Analyse This: The Relative Efficiency of Nvidia Architectures...

 

For the last year, I've been looking at the predicted performance and efficiency of the RDNA architecture(s) as those were what I was most familiar with and most interested in due to their presence in the now current gen consoles. I determined early on that there was no IPC improvement between RDNA 1 and 2 and that it was merely* a clockspeed bump that was dictating any performance increase per compute unit (CU). However, in the back of my mind I was asking myself how Nvidia's architectures stack up against one another in a similar comparison but I knew that you can't normally directly compare between architectural designs except when the comparison is abstracted via different metrics. 

*I say "merely" but I still think it's impressive how far AMD were able to push the working frequency of their chips.

Luckily for me, this is exactly what I did for the final RDNA analysis - I used real world benchmarks  in games and actively used frequency (performed by TechPowerUp) to inform the relationship between performance and architectural aspects. While I wasn't able to pull as much information due to the differences in architecture, I was still able to compare and contrast between AMD's and Nvidia's respective approaches to graphics card design and I'll try and take a look into the future to see what we might expect next, as I always do...