Question 3080 Shortage & Big Navi? Blessing?

ejohanss69

Member
Nov 12, 2009
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It's pretty easy to be frustrated with the inability to buy a 3080. Like many in this forum, I too was vigorously refreshing vendor pages the fateful day of launch, and got so far as checkout before I was given the "I'm sorry, the item you are buying is no longer available". Now, I'm enduring the frustrating 'in-stock' messages I'm getting from Amazon and others, only to be brought to a vendor that is asking $1,500+ for a 3080.

I'm also watching Nvidia's reaction, as well as their promise (and other vendors) of "thousands" of 3080's being made available this week and next. This is not giving me any hope of everything lining up for me to actually get one before the end of October.

However, it's got me thinking, what if all of this ends up being a blessing, not a curse? What if the higher end version of Big Navi actually rivals 3080 performance, but at $150-$200 less?

What do we really know about Big Navi - is this a possibility for the 'best' part in their product stack?

If I'm AMD, and if I know after testing a 3080 that my 'best' Big Navi part rivals / beats 3080, I start leaking benchmarks immediately.

Your thoughts?
 
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Grooveriding

Diamond Member
Dec 25, 2008
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If AMD's new flagship is actually fast and genuinely competitive or better on performance and price, then sure. But, it's been a long time since that has been the case.

It's starting to look like nvidia and their partners are full of PR hot air with their claims about supply being good and similar to past launches. I'm sure demand is super high with covid and many people having more free time. But, this launch has been rushed. Amazon has never had actual stock on any cards, the 1.5 trillion monolith etailer has never had one card in stock. Newegg, nvidia, evga all had some stock on launch day, sold out literally under a minute. The only restock that has happened since launch day was a few cards yesterday on evga's site, sold out in 20 seconds and the website crashed.

They rushed these cards out for whatever reason. AMD is not even unveiling their cards until november. Maybe that was the calculus for them, that they weren't ready to launch, but wanted this much of a lead on putting their new stuff out there first and generating hype.

I'm doubtful AMD will have a card that is even as fast as the 3080, but I'd like to see it, because they probably will do really well then. I believe AMD is using 7nm TSMC, while nvidia is on Samsung? If AMD actually manages a decent card - they could pull a win out finally against nvidia with the process difference? The 3080/3090 are hot and power hungry - reminds me of another Fermi 470/480 situation, with a much better cooling solution that can actually handle the heat. AMD could have a perf/w advantage that could translate to actually being performance competitive. Still, I will believe it when I see it.

The 3080 is a unicorn in the current stock situation. No GPU launch I have seen that I can remember, all the way back to 8800GTX, hasn't had stock blipping in and out daily. Zero stock anywhere since launch day, except the few scraps on evga yesterady. Amazon has never had a single piece of stock. Newegg has nothing since having like 5 SKUs on launch day that sold out instantly. 3080 launch is as soft as mayonnaise.
 
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Heartbreaker

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2006
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However, it's got me thinking, what if all of this ends up being a blessing, not a curse? What if the higher end version of Big Navi actually rivals 3080 performance, but at $150-$200 less?

I think there is negligible chance of that. Pricing is really good on Ampere. Not really leaving AMD room to undercut and still have the margins they need. AMD might undercut by $100 at best.
 

Dave2150

Senior member
Jan 20, 2015
639
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My last few GPU's were as follows:

390X
RX480
Vega64
Radeon VII

I've had driver issues with all of these cards, off and on. The drivers got noticeably worse with the Radeon VII - which is surprising as it's still a Vega architecture. Twice, driver updates have broken the drivers, and caused black screen crashing issues. Of course it's easy to roll back to the previous stable drivers, but you then lose out on the game ready driver improvements. This has caught me out twice now, and I'm fed up with it.

I'll be getting a 3090 on release (pre-ordering, assuming the Nvidia UK store has no stock) and being done with it. My Asus 6700HQ laptop, with 980M, hasn't crashed a single time in all the years I've had it.

I have no confidence that big Navi will have stable drivers. It could be faster than the 3000 series for all I care, GLHF with the crashes.
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
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Hmm, a good idea that would be I suppose, maybe. IDK what the performance will be like on next gen RDNA2 cards, but I suspect it will be close to 3080 at the top end, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. In any case, if the cards are available, this makes all the difference.

As for drivers, I am now of the opinion that there are very few actual major driver issues for either Nvidia or AMD. Some people like to talk about this as a talking point, I am starting to think it is FUD, marketing, and other such business BS, or possibly people repeating what they hear and not actually knowing what they are talking about. This, and what some may have seen as a driver issue, might be a hardware defect, keep in mind.

Only real driver issues I have recently, like last 10 years or so, are either crossfire compatibility issues, that or possibly issues with Geforce experience. And I have had several crossfire rigs, (though no SLI so cannot comment on that) and I have had a 1070, 1080 TI, Vega 64, RX 580, 290s, and Fury cards. I also had a 7950 and 2 6950s. Not sure if the 5870s fit in this time frame.
 

aleader

Senior member
Oct 28, 2013
502
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Hmm, a good idea that would be I suppose, maybe. IDK what the performance will be like on next gen RDNA2 cards, but I suspect it will be close to 3080 at the top end, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. In any case, if the cards are available, this makes all the difference.

As for drivers, I am now of the opinion that there are very few actual major driver issues for either Nvidia or AMD. Some people like to talk about this as a talking point, I am starting to think it is FUD, marketing, and other such business BS, or possibly people repeating what they hear and not actually knowing what they are talking about. This, and what some may have seen as a driver issue, might be a hardware defect, keep in mind.

Only real driver issues I have recently, like last 10 years or so, are either crossfire compatibility issues, that or possibly issues with Geforce experience. And I have had several crossfire rigs, (though no SLI so cannot comment on that) and I have had a 1070, 1080 TI, Vega 64, RX 580, 290s, and Fury cards. I also had a 7950 and 2 6950s. Not sure if the 5870s fit in this time frame.

I'm with you about driver issues that I have not ever had, but I've only ever owned AMD cards when they were still ATI. The driver issues are real. Hardware Unboxed had several (8 - 10 I believe) 5700xt's running in systems and recently gave them away to family and friends. Steve had always said that he never had a single issue with any of them, but as soon as he gave them away, half the people had issues right away (freezing, CTD, green screens). This is very consistent with all of the Newegg reviews. Here's the two latest reviews on the Sapphire card:

Sept. 13th - Pros: Pros? Well its powerful .When it does actually work.
Runs very cool.

Cons: Constant random Green screen crashing, but oddly not while im gaming, just when im doing normal browser related tasks. seems to be worse in MS Edge and Opera than in chrome or firefox. Apparently its the driver ( which is up to date ) that randomly decides it's going to stop running.


Sept. 22nd - Thoroughly do your research before buying one.
Overall Review: Great benchmarks but horrible issues. Not very stable.
Recommend reviewing all the issues with the card before purchasing one.


Are all of these reviews made up? Is it a massive conspiracy? Rather doubtful. To me it doesn't matter if it's hardware or software, the cards have issues that you won't find in Nvidia reviews. Cards at this point should be plug and play. Why would I or anyone risk having issues with the cards when there is a perfectly good alternative in Nvidia that doesn't have these issues?

Also, I don't see why everyone thinks that AMD needs to compete with the 3080 or 3090. That is a tiny slice of the market. People on these forums do not represent the market at all. They only need to compete with the 3070, and especially the 3060, in price, performance, and they need to get their drivers fixed. Then and only then will I consider AMD.

It is an opportunity for AMD with the 3080 being nothing more than a paper launch. Nvidia keeps saying that stock will improve drastically in October in time for the 3070, but maybe the plan all along was to hold back so that when AMD releases Nvidia will actually have stock?
 
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peonyu

Platinum Member
Mar 12, 2003
2,038
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I'm looking at the 3080 myself right now and it is sort of a blessing about the shortage. AMD has new cards coming out only a month from now and if the performance is roughly the same but cheaper, why not go with that instead [not counting fanboys, myself i have a good opinion of both companies so i will use whatever is best for the gen]. The 3080s range from $599 to $699 and perhaps the price will drop some a month too.

I have a GTX 970 which is still doing well for me though so of course it's different for everyone. I imagine folks who have older cards than that will be chomping at the bit to get a 3080 asap.
 

GodisanAtheist

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2006
6,715
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I've been sitting on this 980ti for the last 4+ years and I can probably wring another couple of years out of it if I really insisted on it. The card is definitely behind on a huge number of QOL features like idle fan stop, Freesync, not to mention the newer graphical features.

As such, all players are on the table for me this round: New NV cards, New AMD cards, and Used NV Cards (unfortunately used AMD cards will be leaving some features and performance that I can see myself needing in the next 4 years off the table, so they're not a serious contender).

Since I'm in no rush at the moment, I figure I'll be watching new product launches and the used market through Feb/March of next year as some of the hype and frenzy dies down and things settle in a good place.
 

GodisanAtheist

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2006
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aleader

Senior member
Oct 28, 2013
502
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I'm looking at the 3080 myself right now and it is sort of a blessing about the shortage. AMD has new cards coming out only a month from now and if the performance is roughly the same but cheaper, why not go with that instead [not counting fanboys, myself i have a good opinion of both companies so i will use whatever is best for the gen]. The 3080s range from $599 to $699 and perhaps the price will drop some a month too.

I have a GTX 970 which is still doing well for me though so of course it's different for everyone. I imagine folks who have older cards than that will be chomping at the bit to get a 3080 asap.

The vast majority are going to try for the 3070 or 3060 or 6?00 AMD card, not the 3080, and certainly not the 3090. I wouldn't count on a price drop though. I see they finally put the ASUS TUF 3080 card (that gets high reviews so far) back on Newegg.ca, and surprise surprise, it's $100 more now ($1,049 CDN - $789USD), but still not in stock of course. It was $949 CDN at (paper) 'launch'.
 

Fallen Kell

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
6,009
417
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Hmm, a good idea that would be I suppose, maybe. IDK what the performance will be like on next gen RDNA2 cards, but I suspect it will be close to 3080 at the top end, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. In any case, if the cards are available, this makes all the difference.

As for drivers, I am now of the opinion that there are very few actual major driver issues for either Nvidia or AMD. Some people like to talk about this as a talking point, I am starting to think it is FUD, marketing, and other such business BS, or possibly people repeating what they hear and not actually knowing what they are talking about. This, and what some may have seen as a driver issue, might be a hardware defect, keep in mind.

Only real driver issues I have recently, like last 10 years or so, are either crossfire compatibility issues, that or possibly issues with Geforce experience. And I have had several crossfire rigs, (though no SLI so cannot comment on that) and I have had a 1070, 1080 TI, Vega 64, RX 580, 290s, and Fury cards. I also had a 7950 and 2 6950s. Not sure if the 5870s fit in this time frame.
In Windows, sure I will agree with you that both Nvidia and AMD have similar amounts of issues with their drivers. However, in linux, Nvidia blows away AMD, it is not even close. The level of headache and problems that you will face right and left with an AMD card is absolutely amazing. Yet with Nvidia, as long as you have your kernel headers/development libraries and software, Nvidia’s drivers just work.

Compare that to scouring for an AMD driver for your specific card that works on your specific kernel version, or trying to fake it so that the installer runs when you have a vanilla kernel installed. Heaven help you if you need to stay on an older kernel with a newer card, or an older card on a newer kernel.
 
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Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
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Sep 13, 2008
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In Windows, sure I will agree with you that both Nvidia and AMD have similar amounts of issues with their drivers. However, in linux, Nvidia blows away AMD, it is not even close. The level of headache and problems that you will face right and left with an AMD card is absolutely amazing. Yet with Nvidia, as long as you have your kernel headers/development libraries and software, Nvidia’s drivers just work.

Compare that to scouring for an AMD driver for your specific card that works on your specific kernel version, or trying to fake it so that the installer runs when you have a vanilla kernel installed. Heaven help you if you need to stay on an older kernel with a newer card, or an older card on a newer kernel.
Hmm, this is an interesting point. I fairly recently had used linux for mining, but have not done gaming in it for some time. I have used the AMD proprietary drivers for mining (much better performance on dual Fury cards when they were mining Equihash. Now, are you talking about the proprietary drivers provided by each said company, or open source drivers?
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
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Hmm, this is an interesting point. I fairly recently had used linux for mining, but have not done gaming in it for some time. I have used the AMD proprietary drivers for mining (much better performance on dual Fury cards when they were mining Equihash. Now, are you talking about the proprietary drivers provided by each said company, or open source drivers?

Yeah, AMD open source drivers are way beyond Nvidia's on Linux. I haven't had any driver issues with AMD on Linux for at least a couple of years, ever since they stopped trying to produce proprietary drivers for consumer cards and instead embraced the open source community. It's been a very smooth and easy experience lately, you don't even have to install anything (unless you're on Arch or something), you just run with the open source driver that is automatically installed.
 

Fallen Kell

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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I am talking the proprietary drivers under linux, because they are the only way to get the full power out of the cards. Yes the open source driver “works”, but as has been seen by anyone doing a comparison of 3D performance or GPU compute loads, the performance is easily 20-30% less (or more depending on what you are doing). The same is true with Nvidia cards and the open source driver. But at least Nvidia’s proprietary drivers install and work (and performance wise get you similar results as in Windows and in some cases, for compute loads, even better results) and support your cards (they use the similar unified driver approach as under Windows, supporting the same/similar cards with the driver version as they do for Windows).
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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Aug 22, 2001
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My last few GPU's were as follows:

390X
RX480
Vega64
Radeon VII

I've had driver issues with all of these cards, off and on. The drivers got noticeably worse with the Radeon VII - which is surprising as it's still a Vega architecture. Twice, driver updates have broken the drivers, and caused black screen crashing issues. Of course it's easy to roll back to the previous stable drivers, but you then lose out on the game ready driver improvements. This has caught me out twice now, and I'm fed up with it.

I'll be getting a 3090 on release (pre-ordering, assuming the Nvidia UK store has no stock) and being done with it. My Asus 6700HQ laptop, with 980M, hasn't crashed a single time in all the years I've had it.

I have no confidence that big Navi will have stable drivers. It could be faster than the 3000 series for all I care, GLHF with the crashes.
I had great experiences with Pitcairn, Antigua, Ellesmere, and Polaris. And I am still having a great experience with a Red Devil Vega56 in one of my systems. But reference Navi/5700XT on launch is the worst experience I have had with any card since the old days. Forget that it was hot and loud, so many things were broken, I sent it back within 48hrs of install. A clean windows install did not resolve the problems. Most of the popular tech tubers install what they need to run a bunch of benchmarks, run them, and that's it. Try using it like it is your daily driver when testing, and get back to me. Most types of video playback and acceleration were nerfed on mine. Some older games were nerfed; Fallout 4 had this weird hitching that all of the fixes I tried, failed to resolve. Then it locked itself to 800MHz and neither Afterburner nor Wattman settings worked on it. Nuked the drivers with DDU, then tried manually doing it, no joy. I was going to do another fresh win install, but decided to cut my losses. No way it was going to sit in a box, waiting for the drivers to get worked out, while my return period expired.

This leads up to the part where it is relevant to the topic: Which is that I agree with you completely. It does not matter how great Big Navi benchmarks on all the sites, if the drivers are nerfed again. That they get the drivers solid for the games everyone tests is great. But what about all those things I mentioned? Video playback in Chrome and VLC. Performance in older titles none of the reviewers any longer use in their test suites. And hopefully the reference 5700XT is something we never see again. As I could not tell you if it could perform properly undervolted because it was so nerfed it would not take the settings, as mentioned. Which until it locked itself to 800MHz, was a very loud one. Reminded me of my old FX 5800 Ultra, and that ain't good! And I hope no one comes at me with the never buy reference, wait for AIBs. Because I was willing to live with the inferior design, since undervolting always made for a great experience with every other AMD blower model I have owned.

I ended up buying a 2060 Super and 2070 Super for both our main gamers, and the difference in user experience has been hugely contrasting. If you stop looking at reviewers benchmark results, and conclusions about bang for buck, and whatever else, and use the cards? Well, let's just say I would buy an Nvidia card on launch right now (If you could buy one :p ), but not AMD. Heck, one of the tech tubers I watch, is still reporting broken drivers keep coming and going on his Navi cards. I think freesync is the one that keeps giving him the most trouble.

As to AMD and Linux: I have had a surprisingly good experience with the Vega and Manjaro for gaming. @Hitman928 is dead on for my experience, it was easy to get setup and running, and start playing some of my steam library.

Conclusion: Big Navi better deliver not only in benchmarks, but user experience. Who cares if the bang for buck is better, if a significant portion of us, get the big Oof instead of the big FPS? Frustration over supply and pricing of a card is bad. Nerfed drivers, and a bad reference design are worse.

Sorry for the bit of a diatribe. I just think it is important that readers/buyers know about things reviews either- never mention, experience, downplay/try the PINIC card on.
 
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Hitman928

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Apr 15, 2012
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I am talking the proprietary drivers under linux, because they are the only way to get the full power out of the cards. Yes the open source driver “works”, but as has been seen by anyone doing a comparison of 3D performance or GPU compute loads, the performance is easily 20-30% less (or more depending on what you are doing). The same is true with Nvidia cards and the open source driver. But at least Nvidia’s proprietary drivers install and work (and performance wise get you similar results as in Windows and in some cases, for compute loads, even better results) and support your cards (they use the similar unified driver approach as under Windows, supporting the same/similar cards with the driver version as they do for Windows).

I think you are running off of an old experience or don't understand how AMD Linux drivers work anymore. The open source and proprietary AMD drivers share the same source now and you are not supposed to use the proprietary drivers for consumer use, they are only there to provide additional tweaks/support for certain professional workloads. The regular open source drivers typically outperform the proprietary drivers in gaming because that's what they are there for. There are a few titles that will perform better on the PRO driver, but it is rare that the open source driver doesn't perform as well or better.

1601044944092.png
 
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MrTeal

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Dec 7, 2003
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The vast majority are going to try for the 3070 or 3060 or 6?00 AMD card, not the 3080, and certainly not the 3090. I wouldn't count on a price drop though. I see they finally put the ASUS TUF 3080 card (that gets high reviews so far) back on Newegg.ca, and surprise surprise, it's $100 more now ($1,049 CDN - $789USD), but still not in stock of course. It was $949 CDN at (paper) 'launch'.
Interestingly, the TUF 3080 OC is still up and only $999, so that would be the card to get if they come back into stock at that price.
 

Mopetar

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Jan 31, 2011
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I think there is negligible chance of that. Pricing is really good on Ampere. Not really leaving AMD room to undercut and still have the margins they need. AMD might undercut by $100 at best.

Ampere pricing is a return to pre-Turing levels. If you consider the 3080 a Ti successor instead of a true xx80 card the whole price stack falls neatly into place with what we know so far.

Pascal offered good value (particularly the 1080 Ti) so it's hard to complain about that, but Turing was expensive as hell so part of Ampere looking so good on price was only because Turing was so ridiculous.

My last few GPU's were as follows:

390X
RX480
Vega64
Radeon VII

I've had driver issues with all of these cards, off and on. The drivers got noticeably worse with the Radeon VII - which is surprising as it's still a Vega architecture. Twice, driver updates have broken the drivers, and caused black screen crashing issues. Of course it's easy to roll back to the previous stable drivers, but you then lose out on the game ready driver improvements. This has caught me out twice now, and I'm fed up with it.

I'll be getting a 3090 on release (pre-ordering, assuming the Nvidia UK store has no stock) and being done with it. My Asus 6700HQ laptop, with 980M, hasn't crashed a single time in all the years I've had it.

I have no confidence that big Navi will have stable drivers. It could be faster than the 3000 series for all I care, GLHF with the crashes.

I'm honestly not surprised. The Radeon VII was something AMD pushes out the door just to have a 7nm card for their CES keynote because Navi wasn't ready yet. They can't have made very many of those cards.

I'm surprised you bought one given how badly they were panned here and by anyone else online. I'm not surprised the support for them sucks either because there aren't a lot of those cards and not a lot of reason to tune anything for the architecture at this point.

I suppose that should be a lesson to companies releasing a turd for marketing purposes. Some diehard will actually buy it and be soured by the experience. It's kind of funny you mention wanting a 3090 because that looks like an albatross around NVidia's neck at this point.

I'd get a 3080 if you can. Otherwise I think RDNA2 cards are going to be the first AMD cards that are really worth owning in a while.
 

USER8000

Golden Member
Jun 23, 2012
1,542
780
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If AMD's new flagship is actually fast and genuinely competitive or better on performance and price, then sure. But, it's been a long time since that has been the case.

It's starting to look like nvidia and their partners are full of PR hot air with their claims about supply being good and similar to past launches. I'm sure demand is super high with covid and many people having more free time. But, this launch has been rushed. Amazon has never had actual stock on any cards, the 1.5 trillion monolith etailer has never had one card in stock. Newegg, nvidia, evga all had some stock on launch day, sold out literally under a minute. The only restock that has happened since launch day was a few cards yesterday on evga's site, sold out in 20 seconds and the website crashed.

They rushed these cards out for whatever reason. AMD is not even unveiling their cards until november. Maybe that was the calculus for them, that they weren't ready to launch, but wanted this much of a lead on putting their new stuff out there first and generating hype.

I'm doubtful AMD will have a card that is even as fast as the 3080, but I'd like to see it, because they probably will do really well then. I believe AMD is using 7nm TSMC, while nvidia is on Samsung? If AMD actually manages a decent card - they could pull a win out finally against nvidia with the process difference? The 3080/3090 are hot and power hungry - reminds me of another Fermi 470/480 situation, with a much better cooling solution that can actually handle the heat. AMD could have a perf/w advantage that could translate to actually being performance competitive. Still, I will believe it when I see it.

The 3080 is a unicorn in the current stock situation. No GPU launch I have seen that I can remember, all the way back to 8800GTX, hasn't had stock blipping in and out daily. Zero stock anywhere since launch day, except the few scraps on evga yesterady. Amazon has never had a single piece of stock. Newegg has nothing since having like 5 SKUs on launch day that sold out instantly. 3080 launch is as soft as mayonnaise.

When is the last period you had a hyped nvidia launch such as this?? Fermi. I think nvidia thinks amd has something up their sleeve so went full speed early launch.




My last few GPU's were as follows:

390X
RX480
Vega64
Radeon VII

I've had driver issues with all of these cards, off and on. The drivers got noticeably worse with the Radeon VII - which is surprising as it's still a Vega architecture. Twice, driver updates have broken the drivers, and caused black screen crashing issues. Of course it's easy to roll back to the previous stable drivers, but you then lose out on the game ready driver improvements. This has caught me out twice now, and I'm fed up with it.

I'll be getting a 3090 on release (pre-ordering, assuming the Nvidia UK store has no stock) and being done with it. My Asus 6700HQ laptop, with 980M, hasn't crashed a single time in all the years I've had it.

I have no confidence that big Navi will have stable drivers. It could be faster than the 3000 series for all I care, GLHF with the crashes.

I had friends with the first two card series,and they had no real problems.Friends with V56 and it was OK. It sounds like your system is problematic. I can't comment on Radeon 7 as why would you buy it over a GTX1080TI??

I know a few dozen gamers in my gaming circle,and at least 10 have Polaris based cards. Some of the most solid cards they have used. I knew gamers with 5 year old R9 390s as daily drivers which were OK. They don't have all these crashes you keep having.

It makes me question why you have all these AMD cards if you are so unlucky with all of them.

I have been on Nvidia for the last few years,and had some driver problems - my friends didn't. One of my friends had an RTX2080TI and it was problematic at launch. Black screens. The grass is always greener on the other side.This is after 20 years and owning dozens of cards - each company has gone though its own periods of poor drivers and problems. Nvidia and Vista had a lot of problems with driver crashes as an example(1/3 of Vista crashes were because of Nvidia). ATI didn't.



In Windows, sure I will agree with you that both Nvidia and AMD have similar amounts of issues with their drivers. However, in linux, Nvidia blows away AMD, it is not even close. The level of headache and problems that you will face right and left with an AMD card is absolutely amazing. Yet with Nvidia, as long as you have your kernel headers/development libraries and software, Nvidia’s drivers just work.

Compare that to scouring for an AMD driver for your specific card that works on your specific kernel version, or trying to fake it so that the installer runs when you have a vanilla kernel installed. Heaven help you if you need to stay on an older kernel with a newer card, or an older card on a newer kernel.

All my Linux mates,now prefer AMD cards because their open source drivers are better than what Nvidia has to offer. These people used to be die-hard Nvidia only users but have flipped 180 degrees the other way which is kinda funny.

As for drivers, I am now of the opinion that there are very few actual major driver issues for either Nvidia or AMD. Some people like to talk about this as a talking point, I am starting to think it is FUD, marketing, and other such business BS, or possibly people repeating what they hear and not actually knowing what they are talking about. This, and what some may have seen as a driver issue, might be a hardware defect, keep in mind.

Only real driver issues I have recently, like last 10 years or so, are either crossfire compatibility issues, that or possibly issues with Geforce experience. And I have had several crossfire rigs, (though no SLI so cannot comment on that) and I have had a 1070, 1080 TI, Vega 64, RX 580, 290s, and Fury cards. I also had a 7950 and 2 6950s. Not sure if the 5870s fit in this time frame.

This in my view.
 
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peonyu

Platinum Member
Mar 12, 2003
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The vast majority are going to try for the 3070 or 3060 or 6?00 AMD card, not the 3080, and certainly not the 3090. I wouldn't count on a price drop though. I see they finally put the ASUS TUF 3080 card (that gets high reviews so far) back on Newegg.ca, and surprise surprise, it's $100 more now ($1,049 CDN - $789USD), but still not in stock of course. It was $949 CDN at (paper) 'launch'.

The 3090 is definitely in another tier and something i am not even remotely considering, it's $1500 US which is obscene for my budget. Now as far as the 3080 goes, to me it seems to be the sweet spot even though it is rather pricy right now. Just looking at the specs that it has vs the currently not benchmarked 3070 / 3060 - it looks like it is in another league from those cards and would be well worth the $100 or maybe even $200 more for it.

That's provided that the cards scale well though, for all we know they don't and the 3070 might be only a tad bit slower than the 3080 but won't handle 4k+ well due to lower ram limits. If that is the case then the 3070 definitely becomes more appealing, but we will see. It's interesting to me because when i last looked at a card it was the 970GTX and barring going with a Titan or SLI, you could usually overclock and either closely match or exceed the next card up.

Price wise yea, it is wishful thinking on a price drop. I am hoping that the competition from AMD will drop it a $100 but i doubt it.
 

lightmanek

Senior member
Feb 19, 2017
387
754
136
My last few GPU's were as follows:

390X
RX480
Vega64
Radeon VII

I've had driver issues with all of these cards, off and on. The drivers got noticeably worse with the Radeon VII - which is surprising as it's still a Vega architecture. Twice, driver updates have broken the drivers, and caused black screen crashing issues. Of course it's easy to roll back to the previous stable drivers, but you then lose out on the game ready driver improvements. This has caught me out twice now, and I'm fed up with it.

I'll be getting a 3090 on release (pre-ordering, assuming the Nvidia UK store has no stock) and being done with it. My Asus 6700HQ laptop, with 980M, hasn't crashed a single time in all the years I've had it.

I have no confidence that big Navi will have stable drivers. It could be faster than the 3000 series for all I care, GLHF with the crashes.

Just to give another data point to your experience with Radeon cards, I have owned the following cards in the last 5 years:

R9 290X
RX480
RX580
Vega 56@64
Radeon VII
and R5700XT

No major driver problems, had one multi-monitor issue on my 144Hz Asus on R VII which was fixed 2 months after launch, but the bug was easy to live with as just power cycling monitor to reinitialise DP connection was removing vertical line on screen (TBH that is a known ASUS firmware issue but to fix it I would have to send monitor away).
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
Super Moderator
Aug 22, 2001
28,270
19,907
146
Okay, I changed my mind; I will not buy any card at launch again. We had space invaders with the 20 series, now we have crashing with the 30 series.


Big Navi executes, and it could be a real mindshare win for AMD. Man do they need one of those in the GPU market right now.
 

CP5670

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2004
5,508
586
126
I never buy stuff on release because of things like this. I do prefer Nvidia these days, even though I've had many cards from both companies in the past, because I'm much more familiar with their third party tools and game fixes. Both companies have driver issues, but I know more about the Nvidia issues and how to work around them. Any card I get has to work with not only the latest AAA titles but my existing library of games going back over 20 years. I'm less inclined to spend time fixing issues than I used to be and want things to just work with no effort.