Great article and excited to see how the upcoming AMD boards perform. I really hope they exceed performance (including for path tracing in games) of the RTX 4070 and come in priced for the mass market. I also hope this is roughly the tech we get in the next-gen consoles.
I take some issue with the common theme among reviewers, as stated in this piece, "...relatively minor gains in terms of raw performance compared to RTX 40-series hardware." That is true, but a focus on "raw performance" is missing the point. It's like only looking at GHz ratings for PC's, which have barely crept up at all since hitting 3GHz in the early 2000's. Features like multi-threading and operations per clock cycle have enabled CPUs of today to vastly outperform CPUs of prior generations with no real change to the "raw performance" in terms of # of single-threaded operations possible per second.
As things currently stand in game development, ray tracing and path tracing are far more important to gaming than improvements in raw pixel moving. Features like DLSS and frame generation are hugely important. It's absolutely fair to criticize their negatives or when they introduce artifacts, like criticizing a turbo lag on a sports car or that not all apps can take advantage of multithreading, but make no mistake that those features are what allow game developers to create radically improved game experiences for users, and ultimately it's the changing UX that matters most.
I would ask reviewers to focus less on synthetic benchmark "raw" performance, and more on actual FPS and graphical fidelity in games with all the capabilities of the card in use. I know that's a little bit more work, but that would be giving readers more actionable and useful information than synthetic benchmarks with the most important features of these newer cards turned off.
We're already starting to see games like Indiana Jones and the upcoming Doom release requiring ray tracing-capable hardware. When developers believe they can require sufficient RT support that they don't need to spend hundreds of hours or more to bake-in fake lighting tricks (which also never look as good as ray tracing anyway), this releases a HUGE amount of time and effort to focus on other aspects of the game, or create more DLC, or move on to the next game more quickly.
So the real win in the upcoming AMD GPU announcement will be if it provides mass-market pricing and works its way into consoles so that path tracing capable hardware is the norm and we can finally phase out the requirement for game devs to design lighting solutions just to support older hardware.
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