Switching to AMD - 6 Months Later

6 months ago I put my money where my mouth is I gave up the RTX lifestyle and switched to radon selling my mang old 8 GB RTX 3070 and upgrading to an equally old 16 GB RX 6900 XT I knew at the time I was making a compromise I was gaining a more powerful GPU with lower driver overhead that will be harder to bottleneck in my CP review and that wouldn't run out of vram in modern games but giving up access to Fancy Pants dlss upscaling and Ray reconstruction so half a year later do I regret it let's recap for those who missed the first video or have just forgotten in the first half of 2023 a bunch of games were released that felt Taylor Made to make older gpus obsolete I'm not a conspiracy theorist I don't think the devs of The Last of Us collaborated with Nvidia and AMD to convince people to sell their 4 to 8 GB graphics cards but well that's pretty much what happened the new series of games with system requirements centered around the specs of a PS5 or Xbox series X left higher performing 8 GB cards like the RTX 3070 in a weird place still perfectly capable of running low and medium at 100 FPS or more but basically incapable of smooth experiences as higher quality settings a lot of people will say so what last year's games were terrible who cares if they played poorly on 8 gig gpus just play older ones instead you're always complaining about how your backlog keeps getting longer to that I say first I disagree there were some great games hiding behind poorly optimized ports last year second how dare you be so accurate about my backlog and third this is my job I mean I could make content just for people who want to know how old Hardware performs in old games and while that might be interesting for some I think those YouTube videos have already been made back when there were new games and new hardware there's no shortage of content on how the i7 8700k runs GTA 5 but someone looking to maintain a z370 plat perform in 2024 might want to know how it performs in games made this decade anyway it's too late to argue now the decision was made 6 months ago I sold my RTX and switched to the red side knowing full well what I was getting into and that my brand switching experience probably wouldn't be uniformally good but was it bad and am I switching back naturally as my channel is mostly about PC gaming you'll want to hear about my experience playing games well to tell you the truth when I realized the 6month anniversary was coming up I panicked like a kid who hasn't done their homework I've done almost no gaming for fun since December maybe I've been busy for the last few months with the channel to the point where I spend my downtime just lazing on the couch more than anything I consider putting this video back and making it one year later but rather than take the coward's way out I decided to cram to that end I've played a bunch of games from my backlog at least an hour in each to get a feel for how the RX 6900 XT performs in games I actually want to play let's start with the game I've been afraid to play for about a year now Star Wars Jedi Survivor was my most eagerly anticipated release of 2023 I loved the first game fall in order and I was initially concerned that putting Survivor on my Benchmark roster would get me into the standard benchmarkers rut playing the same three minute section over and over again until the end of time and never actually getting to experience the game as it turns out I should have been far more concerned about the game's performance now having played through four on order twice I'm aware that respawns Star Wars games have a tendency to stutter but that game mostly lived or died died by whether it was on a hard drive or SSD and as a flasher ficado I obviously played it from a solid state drive and had Fairly little to complain about Survivor started life extremely poorly being overly demanding on both the GPU and CPU and lacking much in the way of updates since just a couple of months after launch my personal editing SL gaming rig currently has a ryzen 75700 x which has two more cores than the recommended AMD CPU and 32 GB of RAM double the recommended amount so at least according to respawn I shouldn't have any problem running their game the intro video tells you about all you need to know about that respawn should be ashamed to see a system this far above the recommended spec having difficulty getting through their logo without intolerable amounts of stutter anyway before I restarted the game from scratch I ran a couple of my usual tests in Cobo to get a feel for how it performed at 1440 epic I could see frame rates appearing to be hovering in the 70s though of course there was still plenty of stutter so I imagine 1% lows would have been a fairway below the 60 Mark I did really want to play the game with raid racing so I gave it a try at 1440 high with FSR quality and RT enabled and the Baseline frame rates appeared to drop to about the 60 mark But fluctuated into the 50s and 40s quite frequently I thought this would have been pretty acceptable for a single player title but nevertheless I did a bit of tweaking in MSI After Burner to the core and vram clocks before I started a new game the early stages on corent were about what I expected with the abundance of metal and neon providing an Ry Enthusiast stream but an rdna two cards nightmare frame rates bounced around between 60 and 70 but still dropped into the 40s and even the 30s in cutcenes even turning back to my non-rt settings which could run well into the 80s during regular gameplay took a sharp nose dive when the Cinematic started playing things really fell apart in the first boss fight with the ninth sister there's a ton of particles volumetrics and Alpha effects in this fight and the 6900 XT simply couldn't handle it even without RT frame rates dropped into the teens at times and spent most of the time around the Cinematic 24 mark on Cobo I found I could play happily at 1440 high with rt enabled and FSR balanced which didn't look too bad on the whole but which maintained a pretty playable frame rate most of the time I'm going to spend some more time tinkering with this one to see if I can find any combination of settings that helps improve performance I do really want to play this game but I think I have to accept it's not getting much better than this last time I talked about my personal rig I expressed a desire to play more death stranding and it's been 2 years and that still hasn't happened yet I know it's a polarizing game and I can't say I'm particularly a fan of coa's work or Norman Reus as an actor but what attracts me to the game is what I can only describe as Vibes the Iceland inspired landscape the chill music and character models that are so good you almost forget it's a PS4 game yes it's the director's cut with some current gen enhancements but if this had been made today and looked exactly the same as it does now I'd be equally impressed except I can't help but feel like if it were made today then it wouldn't run anywhere nearly as well uncapped at 1440 Max settings frame rates are in the high refresh territory and if it weren't for my capture card limiting me to a 60 HZ refresh rate I think I'd be able to have player to 144 or maybe 120 to be on the safe side I did learn the value of vsync however even in cutscenes where the frame rate limits itself to 60 there were significant and distracting amounts of tearing enabling vsync caps gameplay to 60 as well removes the distracting tearing and GPU utilization is under 50% pretty much the whole time I also noticed that despite the general Stellar image quality Shadow resolution is isn't the highest and this can cause some slight flickering at times obviously a remnant of its PS4 Origins but it'll be nice to see some R traced Shadows [Music] added from soft's critical and Commercial Blockbuster Elden ring is I admit a game I've struggled to get into I don't know if I'm just intimidated by its reputation for treating noobs unfairly or or if I just need a game to hold my hand a little more in order to feel like I'm doing the right things but I've never really given it a chance well from a performance level I was not impressed at first I'm used to the game being fairly easy on higher end Hardware due to the presence of a 60fps cap but since I last played it fromsoft have added R racing and given how trivial the game would be for the 6900 XT to run otherwise it made sense to give RT a try what they haven't added is any form of advanced upscaling and changing resolution at all sometimes involves a fair amount of [ __ ] around at full 1440p Max quality with Max RT the frame rate was only in the 30s and 40s so I dropped both quality and RT to high to get back up to the 60 mark this was mostly fine both indoors and Outdoors with the frame time graph only SP spiking a small amount from time to time however it did drop into the 40s when I reached this particular area this struck me as weird as there is a lake here but I don't think Elden Rings Reflections use ra tracing so I can't quite explain what it was about this area that was so demanding on the system anyway I tried butting my head against a couple of brick walls early on before deciding my time was better spent elsewhere maybe I'll return to Elder ring in the future future when I'm not on a [Music] deadline I got about halfway through control a few years back around the time I started taking YouTube seriously but I didn't finish when I returned to it a few months after putting it down I'd forgotten too much what the mission involved what all the controls were what exactly was going on in the story so for this video I started from scratch 1440 high with rt enabl was a little short of the 60 Mark and I know that at times it can drop even further so I used FSR with a render resolution of 1080p the game looks pretty grainy with rt enabled anyway it's a prime candidate for nvidia's Ray reconstruction or some other kind of AI noise reduction technique and while FSR doesn't help it also doesn't look much worse plus the RT effects look spectacular with the wood veneer tile floors and metallic surfaces having a convincing amount of roughness and glass reflects realistically though I did get a little confused by the lack of Reflections from these ceiling lights especially as it's also the same in the pre-rendered cut scene weird anyway FPS was well above 60 most of the time so I enabled the limiter to minimize tearing and had a blast remedy really needs to work on a Jedi or Sith game cuz a lot of Jesse's Powers would be great in a Star Wars context [Music] in a moment of either blinding Clarity or blind stupidity I cancelled my game pass sub last year abandoning dozens of hours of progress in for of horizon 5 in the process I'd got tired of Microsoft's terrible launcher and its tendency to uninstall games when moving drives between systems or get permanently stuck when downloading an update so I bought it on Steam even though you still need to log into your Microsoft account to play your progress doesn't cross over so I had to start building my car collection all over again unfortunately Beyond using it as a benchmarking tool I really struggle in returning to Horizon right now anyway my ISP gave me a free game pass sub just in time for fors and Motorsport and I find myself on the verge of making the same mistake I don't want to spend money on a game that's had a lukewarm critical reception is hated by series fans and makes the somewhat poorly received Gran Turismo 7 look awesome by comparison on the other hand I'm kind of enjoying myself but I don't want to get too far into it lest I end up buying it on Steam again although I'm a self-c confest RT fan I don't care so much about it in the context of racing games especially ones where I don't really have time to stop and appreciate the view if you're laser focused on your racing line and breaking point I don't really see the benefits of accurate lighting shadows and Reflections at 1440p with the other quality settings maxed out and as many Dynamic quality options as I could find turned off the canned Benchmark showed an average of 92 FPS which would be perfectly acceptable for me my monitor's freesync range caps out at 90 HZ again due to the capture device I was stuck at 60 with a limiter to avoid tearing and while races were mostly pain-free the intro cinematics were St is all hell again I suspect this is more of a programming problem than a hardware issue as fors and Motorsports hasn't had the best of starts and I think a lot of the post launch period was spent fixing flying cars and more memeable problems am I going to stick with it I don't know I was kind of hoping Gran Turismo will be ported to PC and with rumors that psvr2 is coming to PC that could be a pretty sweet combo maybe I'll stick with fors of horizon for the time being and get the pipany title if it ever makes it across the platform [Applause] [Music] divide in the last video Phantom Liberty had yet to be released and I'd pretty much made peace with the fact that my new graphics card wouldn't be able to handle path tracing and wouldn't support Ray reconstruction either I'd accepted that but maybe not fully I spent a bit of time before heading over to Dogtown just trying out RT settings path tracing looked fine but with balanced upscaling it was kind of soft and that still only managed a pretty uneven 24 FPS VRT Ultra preset could manage high 30s to low 50s with quality upscaling so it looked a bit smoother and sharper but still didn't quite meet my requirements granted I wasn't making life easy on myself but I was finding it a bit tough to drive at this frame rate a solid 60 would have required dropping to RT medium losing out on Reflections and balanced upscaling at best so I did what I should have done all along and turned RT off starting the Phantom Liberty expansion at the Dogtown checkpoint I'm running at Native 1440 Ultra and seeing 70 plus FPS even as high as 100 in some scenes but with the capture device plugged in I'm seeing a ton of tearing so I turned on a frame rate cap in rtss I will definitely be spending some more time going through this expansion not least because they've introduced new mechanics and skill trees and my character feels a bit weaker than the last time I played plus I haven't met Idis yet finally I have Nick one of my subscribers to thank for my copy of balers Gate 3 a game which I've yet to feature in my YouTube videos because uh I actually wanted to play it I was borderline obsessed with bg1 and 2 in the early 2000s and while my interest in the sword coasts fell off before never winter nights even came out the hyper mg3 caught my interest thankfully it's pretty much zero challenge for the 6900 XT Nvidia sponsorship or not this game can happily run at 1440 maxed out at over 150 FPS and while I hav't reach the city yet I'm confident my CPU won't cause too many problems I rolled for this video but I admit I really wanted to spend more time with a character creator my new Bard is pretty much the default high elf option with a different haircut I have no complaints about the graphics in this one yes without RT there are a few flaws in the lighting and ambient occlusion but given the size of the game and the small team behind it I think it looks incredible plus the last Boulders gate game I played was at like 1024x [Music] 768 the reality is though that my Rx 6900 XT doesn't get used for gaming all that much look I had to literally set aside a week and force myself to play games on it for this video this is a workstation PC and what really matters is how it performs in my video editing package of choice black magic designs Da Vinci resolve like most creative software resolve is built primarily around nvidia's Cuda acceleration and while radons are supported they've never been highly recommended now that I have a radon installed I can say that I've had a few issues but at the moment it's actually all working out pretty well when I first installed the card I had problems with layers and transitions causing huge slowdowns when playing back and scrubbing through footage on the timeline but dealing with that has taught me to be more careful how I edit now that I've optimized my workflow making sure everything I edit is on an SSD taking better care of my caches and ensuring all the files I use in codecs which to the GPU can handle performance is now dramatically improved of course this could just be me trying to cope with my inferior graphics card purchase so I decided to do a sanity check I happen to have an RTX 2080 TI on hand review coming soon so I ddu my radon drivers and swapped out the 6900 XT for the old touring card the 2080 TI's fourth gen Envy deck is one generation behind the state-ofthe-art so perhaps I shouldn't expect too much and indeed timeline performance is about the same as the radon scrubbing through with only the slightest of delays playing back at an almost perfect 60 FPS and rendering out the test file at the slow preset completed in about the same time though the very slow preset did take about twice as long for no apparent benefits wrapping things up there's a few questions to be answered firstly did I have any problems in a word no I don't want to dismiss the accounts of people who've had major driver issues with radon gpus I know Tech noce abandoned the idea of using the 7900 XT in an editing rig because it made Premier Pro mysteriously shut down I'm not saying people don't have genuine problems with AMD GPS but I am saying that in 6 months of using it in Da Vinci resolve benchmarking CPUs and maybe a dozen or so total hours of gaming for this video I haven't experienced any of the negatives people talk about am I satisfied with my GPU well no frankly of course not I want an RTX 490 or being more realistic maybe a 408 super doesn't everyone unless you have some ideological reason to hate one giant semi eval Corporation over the others you'd spend a small amount of your lottery win buying the best GPU available at the time and right now if money isn't an issue then the card in question is a GeForce but of course money is an issue I run a small YouTube channel in a niche with a relatively low CPM and the only sponsorships I've accepted so far just send me free review samples of mini PCS I'm not rolling in money is what I'm saying 5 years ago hell even 3 years ago I wouldn't have dreamed of spending £525 on a graphics card and even now I need to justify it as a work expense because if it weren't for the channel I'd be more interested in something like this old RTX 2080 TI seriously I got this thing for £277 and although the gigabyte caller is a bit noisy it's a cracking deal for the price the point is I'm used to not having the best of everything I can't run RT in a lot of more demanding games without dropping substantially below 60 FPS and I'd rather have the frames if I do use RT I'm kind of stuck with FSR and xcss instead of something more advanced like dlss and while I'm looking forward to the new AI powered upscaler that amd's been teasing recently recently I'm also aware that it might not come to this generation of product as it is I'm happy with the level of performance I get from the 6900 XT in most modern games and if developers would kindly get their [ __ ] together I could probably make this thing last for a while longer however that brings me to the next question am I keeping it that's a question I can't quite answer the rationale for owning a radon hasn't changed I still want to test a bunch of older CPUs in the coming months I want to revisit some earlier Horizons some HDT zons i7s and i9s from the socket 2011 V3 and 2066 days as well as some more humble 2 and four core chips as I found last year driver overhead is a real problem for older CPUs and that means to get the most out of them radon Remains the best choice it doesn't mean however that it has to be this rad on I have two projects in mind one requiring the RX 7900 gr and one requiring the RX 7800 XT the 7900 gr has the same SM tmu and Dr count as the 6900 XT and so I'd expect the only real world benefit would be to gain av1 encoding whereas the 7800 XT wouldn't be an unambiguous winner against my existing card and may actually be a small downgrade but the video idea is more interesting all of which leaves me with just one final question to answer you dear viewer should you do what I did and switch to AMD well that depends I assume you have a graphics card already and are in some way tied to the Green Team if you can get better value from an AMD I wouldn't let the naysayers put you off just make sure to use something like ddu to remove your Nvidia driver first or better yet do a full fresh install of Windows on the other hand if you're looking with an eye towards creative work especially with Adobe suite or anything that uses cuder acceleration then Nvidia is still really the only game in town especially as it looks like zuda isn't going to be a widespread thing anymore meanwhile if I can find time I'm going to play some more Jedi Survivor stutters and all thanks for watching kindly do the usual YouTube things if you feel so inclined and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Iceberg Tech

Views: 439,338

Keywords: iceberg, switching to amd, switching to amd gpu, why i switched to amd, switching to radeon, amd radeon experience, using amd graphics card

Id: MuUV_BRCqi4

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024