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Call For Questions For DF Direct Weekly #204 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-03-06 11:44:06
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Here we go again! It's been a punishing week from my perspective, what with two GPU reviews to produce. However, the march of time is relentless and my labours continue with prep work for DF Direct Weekly #204, filming tomorrow. It'll be myself, Alex and Oliver at the mics with deadline for submissions of 8am GMT Friday morning.

We'll be talking about the RDNA 4 launch and the general reaction to the RX 9060 and RX 9070 XT and we'll be discussing path tracing performance on the new cards (something we didn't have time to verify by embargo). Beyond that, we'll try to cram in some testing on Lossless Scaling's new dynamic frame generation beta feature, and looking to get to the bottom of the Monster Hunter Worlds PC performance debacle - with good sources saying Capcom's anti-tamper tech is to blame.

Any more topics you'd like the panel to discuss? And more importantly, any questions for the team? I'd also be interested in your comments on RDNA 4 - there seems to be a good degree of variance and opinions on this one, which I found intriguing. Any way, the stage (or rather the comment box below) is yours!

Files

Comments

Special Agent Cooper

Hi gentlemen, I find myself in a situation I reckon many people are in right now. I held off on buying an RTX 4090 to see what the 50 series is all about. Not being impressed by the new multi latency generation as well as price, I decided to go with the 4090 after all. But of course as we all witness now, that ship has sailed and I feel stuck with two options: a) Go for a 5080 and begrugingly take the 20% performance hit, or … b) bite the bullet, get a 5090 and live in my car for the next 2 years. What do you recommend people to do, who would theoretically love to buy a 4090 right now? Wait?

Taggen86

Why is not the 50 series outperforming the 40 series in AI and RT workloads? Expected the cost of dlss 4 to be much smaller on my 5090 than on my old 4090 but that is not case per Alex coverage. Instead it seems that it is in raster workloads that blackwell really shines for some reason. Do we need new software that exploit the new architecture to see some real gains?

Jonny_5a

Morning guys’, your review of the AMD 9070 cards was great, hopefully they keep it going to give Nvidia some decent competition. I wondered, is there any tangible advantage to pairing an AMD CPU with an AMD GPU?

Taggen86

I am really impressed to see the gains that AMD has made in RT and AI upscaling. Have you got some more in depth knowledge how they have achieved these massive improvements (e.g., in RT)?

minty-hippo

Hi foundrymen! Amidst the shuffle of GPU launches this week, Apple announced a new Mac Studio with M3 Ultra. For Oliver: what are your thoughts on this chip and will you upgrade? It seems exciting from a unified memory/AI workload standpoint, but why M3 as a baseline instead of an M4 Ultra? And also do you anticipate it having similar issues with performance scaling in certain programs/games like the previous Ultra chips? This is definitely a niche product as far as PC gaming is concerned, but seemingly relevant in terms of the state of the art while AMD is rolling out Strix Halo and the potential of giant APUs starts to be realized in the consumer space. Thanks!

Question Generated By JensenGPT

We now have two different ML upscalers designed for AMD hardware - PSSR and FSR 4. How do the two stack up to each other in terms of quality and frame time cost?

Prerit Anwekar

Hey guys, big fan of your work and have started supporting DF via Patreon. I have been lucky to get a RTX 5080 (20% below MSRP, I knew a guy who knew some guy). I have been enjoying the frame generation 3x in Indiana Jones and 4x on cyberpunk, I don’t really see a huge difference in the image quality at 4k on 27 inch monitor. I feel FG is a new technology and the way transformer model, even on Performance, has completely shifted the view on upscaling, do you think down the road FG will mature so much that it will be truly enjoyed and will become a necessary feature by the consumers, with Full-RT becoming a common thing in games as it solves lots of problems related to lighting? Keep up the great work guys! Cheers (exclamation point, Hey Rich)

Peter Karadimas

Hello gents, do the 9070 and 9070xt have the compute power to run something as advanced as the transformer model of DLSS or will this require future hardware iteration?

Mehzeb Chowdhury

Ahoy DF Crew! AMD’s recent GPU launches have been positioned as strong value offerings, particularly in contrast to NVIDIA’s increasingly high prices and supply constraints. However, this raises a key question: Are AMD’s GPUs genuinely cost-effective, or does their value proposition only seem strong relative to NVIDIA’s pricing and availability issues? At the same time, AMD is making a concerted push into the AI sector (historically dominated by NVIDIA’s CUDA platform) and their aim seems to be to break into a market where software support and industry adoption have long been in NVIDIA’s favour. But if AMD’s AI hardware does gain traction, could it end up facing the same price gouging and artificial scarcity issues that have plagued NVIDIA’s GPUs? Thanks for your time.

Diecou

DF Indirect was last seen alive in June 2024. We demand its unconditional and inmediate release, unharmed. Cheers!

Iuri Grangeiro

Hi DF crew! After watching the opinion of a few reviewers, it seems like FSR 4’s quality gravitates around DLSS 3’s (a little bit better here, a little bit worse there, in not too dissimilar ways). Do you guys think a DLSS 3 vs FSR 4 performance comparison would be a better “apples to apples” comparison going forward? Obviously CNN is not the state of the art from nvidia, but “native with TAA” was much more removed from Nvidia’s state of the art, and was the point of comparison for so many years - and I think that unlike native with TAA, the CNN model is still relevant for people who aren’t very sensitive do TAA blur, and choose when to stop decreasing the resolution when the artifacts become too much instead of the image being too blurry. Cheers!1!

Having an AI-neurysm

Greetings gents. Do you think we’ll ever get to a point during this generation where you can build an equivalent or better PC for the same price as a console? You can already do this with used parts if you manage to get lucky with good deals, but that’s only really valid if you ignore that used consoles (or official/retailer refurbished with a warranty) exist too. On the budget CPU side you can readily get chips that outperform the aging Zen 2 parts in consoles. Unfortunately in the budget GPU tier we still have upcoming cards (namely 5060 and 9060) expected to release with 8GB VRAM models, significantly lower than what PS5/Series X have access to, requiring setting compromises and having questionable longevity. Will the VRAM skimping ever end?

Stephan

Hello DF! Why is it that FSR is oftentimes so sparsely supported in games when DLSS is much more widely deployed? Should it not be more used since it is Open Source Software and runs on so many more cards? Is there anything we as Radeon-enjoyers can do to make it possible? Thanks and have a wonderful day, Auf Wiederhören 🙂

EvilRacer329

Afternoon, gents! As the complete 50x stack has slowly been revealed it's become apparent that only the higher-end cards are fast enough to generate base framerates from which framegen's extra latency becomes palatable, at which point it's only really useful for driving framerates well into triple digits in any case. Super-high refresh rate monitors seemt to be primarily targeted at e-sports junkies whose preference for such framerates is driven entirely by the desire for minimum latency, so those 'extra' frames surely hold no appeal to them either. As such, I'm increasingly convinced that while 2x framegen might be nice to get that 144Hz smoothness out of a 90fps render, multi-frame-gen seems to be a pointless gimmick with no actual real-world application. Thoughts?

Iuri Grangeiro

With the release of day 1 reviews for the 9070 XT, I left with the overwhelming impression that most reviewers wrote their reviews as a continuation of the pre-embargo leak conversation. Lots of focus was given to the manufacturer’s performance claims and launch prices, not a lot of focus was given to the new features. Given day 1 reviews are what pop up for the entire lifespan of a graphics card when looking for reviews, is it responsible of reviewers to address their continuous followers who are more informed of these factors anyways to the detriment of people who are coming into these reviews in the dark - sometimes without having watched a GPU review in years, and not aware of the feature difference between the previous generation cards? cheers!

Skyrimfest 26 FPS Edition

What features of current gen consoles do the team foresee the next gen consoles removing? Personally, I would want to see the 'share' button replaced with something more useful. Is there a console equivalent of PhysX being dropped?

jerrylongbones

Hi gents! Now that the threatened tariffs from the US have gone ahead, what are your thoughts on how damaging this could be? Is this the final nail in the coffin for physical games which are predominantly printed in Mexico. And do we think with 75% of gaming hardware being produced in China, that this may impact Switch 2 supply or potentially cause delays to the PS6 and Xbox Next? Thanks all :)

DEX7ER_M0RGAN

Hello you gentlemen of the Foundry. How come Metro Awakening and Alien Rogue incursion have already shadow dropped last year on PSVR2 with no mention of them anywhere? I mean Sony has already dropped the machine after release, but not mentioning these "big-name" releases after having teased them as a showcase in a direct is particularly disturbing. Have you played either, are they any good? Cheers!

Eric Benoit

If Valve brings out a stable Steam OS for desktop this year, how do you think this would affect Microsoft?

Rich

That is flat out not true. It's only true if you assume 4k. As an esports junkie myself I can tell you that most esports gamers are still on 1080p, let alone 1440p. The 5070 can easily generate high base framerates in 1440p and 1080p, and frame generation is really aimed at high end single player experiences, not esports for the most part. Indeed this is one of the flaws that I saw in DF's and others' reviews and comparisons of the 5070/9070 cards, assuming that the 70 class will be mostly used for 4k displays! Nvidia is looking forward to higher refresh rate 4K displays which are coming in the future.

The Phantomnaut

The release of Unleashed Recompiled and the tools used to help bring Sonic Unleashed to the PC with modern features brought out a strong interest of other Xbox 360 games getting the same treatment. Obviously it's not a simple solution as one game can require a lot of knowledge and time to port. But with the tools available, will recompiled projects become the way to go or is dedicated emulation a more likely scenario? Also what Xbox 360 exclusive games would you like to see being worked on for recompilation?

EvilRacer329

That's...entirely fair. It's easy to forget that not everyone has moved on to 4K displays. But if I'm only gaming at lower resolutions, why would I bother with a 50-series card at all?

Rich

There are many good $800 and below laptops which operate at about the same level of power draw as consoles when plugged in. And most consoles don't actually use more than 8gb of VRAM for video, their RAM has to be shared with total system memory including the OS itself - most 8gb amd even 6gb Nvidia GPUs are vadtly more powerful than equivalent RDNA2 GPUs regardless of VRAM. I would argue its easily already possible to build a computer as powerful as a console for the price of the console RIGHT NOW; the 2020 consoles just aren't that powerful by today's standards, ESPECIALLY the lower power RDNA2 GPUs! Let's not miss the forest for the trees, the whole point of the console business model is to SUBSIDIZE the cost of the hardware and make the money back on closed ecosystem sales, Sony and Microsoft LOSE MONEY on the hardware they sell, especially at launch.

Mechajin

Hello gents! Hope all is well. I was wondering if you have any insight into the ps5 disc drive availability? Like a good little consumer that loves his hobby, I bought the ps5 pro but no disc drives were available at the time and I don't want to buy one off a scalper or pay an inflated price at Cex. I've been checking several times since January and I'm starting to feel I've been hoodwinked into a digital only future and it's leaving my disc collection feeling rather sad too. Do you have any insight what Sony is up to? Will the discs ever spin for my pro? Thanks, all the best and stay awesome!

Rich

I'm sure almost nobody will be using CNN on any Nvidia GPU within a year. The Nvidia app is already automatically updating the the Transformer model as "latest" in the override. The performance penalty even on an RTX2060 is still not enough to outweighs the benefits of DLSS itself, indeed with the Transformer you can use aggressively lower resolutions! CNN is already irrelevant imo, but certainly will be irrelevant going forward.

SamG

Hi DF! First time supporter but I've been enjoying your content for a long time and really appreciate the way you guys approach reviewing and analyzing tech and games. With that out of the way, my question concerns GPU pricing. This mostly applies to Nvidia and maybe AMD to a much lesser extent. With pricing being so far beyond the MSRP, is there anything Nvidia could realistically do to get the pricing back in line? I saw that MSI recently upped the price of their MSRP 5070 Ti but then mysteriously brought it back down after it was the story started to spread. Maybe it was Nvidia's doing, maybe not, but they must have some influence they can exert. Or do they not care? Some of the AIB partner models with the tiniest of over clocks and the giantest of coolers are almost 50% over MSRP. But people are still buying them so I guess they can do it. Have you talked at all with any of the AIB partners about how/why they price their cards the way they do? Thanks!

Iuri Grangeiro

That's a fair point, but I think the main point still stands that it's a better reference for like for like than TAA. If AMD GPUs have a performance penalty using fsr 4 vs dlss CNN, and dlss CNN isn't even the state of the art, I think measuring that difference is if anything an understimation of the difference, but a smaller one than doing native with TAA vs native with TAA

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hello gentlemen! Do you think RDNA4 is a good indicative of what we’ll see in PS6 and the next Xbox in terms of the GPU performance and feature set? Cheers!

Tony Escobar

This might be a question for Oliver, but what is your take on the current state of Mac gaming, both Retro emulation and modern AAA gaming? Although I own an i9 gaming PC laptop, I struggle with the Windows ecosystem of constant updates and general user unfriendliness. My MacBook Pro is my daily driver, and I only use my PC for PC-only tasks. Thanks!

Snorlax cat

is the crew dead with Forza horizon on ps5?

Rich

In gaming specifically we're probably seeing driver issues, from what I can tell the DLSS4 issues have been patched. But for AI in general, keep in mind that it took AI developers years to incorporate support for structured sparsity into their models, and many months until we saw FP8 support too. Ampere GPUs got much faster at AI over time, same with Ada. It's likely FP4 support is even more difficult, so Blackwell might see the same pattern.

Yannick Ex

Is my dream of building a Bazzite SFF 4K console at an affordable price finally doable??

Tyrus1235

Hello DF gents! Are any of you excited for the recently revealed Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4? From the trailers, it looked like they were using the same tech as Vicarious Visions used for THPS 1 + 2, which is fine (it looks gorgeous at any rate). Do you have any expectations or guesses as to what will ship in the game? Any favorite song from their soundtracks? Thanks and have a nice weekend!

Marcus

Hiya gents! Supposedly RDNA 4 cards might get a price increase after launch according to some retailers. Some seem to speculate that it might be over a rebate AMD used to reduce the launch price. How do you feel about this type of price increase post launch? Here is the link, sorry that it is in Swedish: https://www.inet.se/nyhet/11657/radeon-rx-9000-serien-msrp

Selwyn Nypels

Hi Gents! I own an RTX 4090, and I am thinking of upgrading to a 5090. I like to own the very best and am willing to pay a price for that. Do you think it is worth it though with all the 50-series issues going on? And considering I would pair it with a 12900k? Should I upgrade other components first? Maybe even my monitor?

Leftisthominid

Hello Digital Foundry folk! I have been wondering, outside of the supply shortages of the pandemic, have we ever seen such a large discrepancy between MSRP and actual GPU price? I have been contemplating an upgrade from the RTX 3080 to the 5070Ti; however, these prices are extreme, and idiotic tariffs will make them go higher.

Leftisthominid

Hello, I just wanted to say, I hope that Richard's family emergency had resolved. I hope that everything is fine in the here and now, so to speak.

Someguyperson

PSSR was designed to work with an older RDNA that had some slight modifications, while FSR 4 was designed in tandem with a brand new architecture to get performance up to par with a much heavier model. FSR 4 has much higher quality than PSSR as a result, but FSR 4 can really only be run on RDNA 4 GPUs or newer.

wildwildwesty

Ahoy hoy Founders. You have said on a number of occasions that AMD are about 4 years behind Nvidia’s technology. With the success of FSR4, how far behind are they now?

Jules Wyns

Hello Mr. DF. So .... March 6, 15.00 o'clock. Refreshing a dutch computer retailer, because I had made up my mind. I was going te replace my 10 GB RTX 3080 for a 9070 TX. ( hoping to sell my 3080 for 299 ish ). I was willing to pay 650 max. Then the price appeared : 889 € !!!!. So no sale obviously. I mean 599 MSRP to 900 € ??? that's a 300€ surplus !! Imagine Sony announcing !!299!! and then at retail day one you pay 399! Can't AMD and/or Nvidia force third party board manufacturers to release a base model, and then ask what they want for their more exuberant models ? Because this is waaay out of hand. I mean if they announce 599! as a godsent gamechanger and then it is absolutely not true, aren't they just lying to our face ? Something really has to change with setting false MSRP's, and quick ... On a lighter note, keep up the excellent work Mr. DF ^^.

Pol Kallamata

When looking at the reviews of the new 9070 / 9070 XT cards, it seems like AMD is finally narrowing the gap with NVidia when it comes to the features offered by their cards. Particularly exciting is how competitive their ray tracing performance has become. Do you think there are any implications for the next generation of consoles that we can draw from the direction AMD is heading with these new cards? Could a PS6 launching in late 2028, based on RDNA 6, be performant enough in RT to make path tracing the baseline for all next gen games?

Ben (Snatcher42)

Second on discussing the Sonic Unleashed recompilation, what it means for future 360 ports, and game preservation in general. Especially interested in John's thoughts, though I see he's not on the panel.

DyeHardX86

Hello DF Crew, after seeing the latest ML offerings from both AMD (with the apparently excellent FSR4) and Nvidia (with DLSS 4 Transformer) I wonder if CNN Upscaling will become obsolete with Transformer upscaling taking its place or if there is room for both to continue to evolve into the future?

Mr.Pirotech

Hello gents, since new GPUs from AMD are out and reviews dropped just as the embargo lifted, we can all see how they perform in games. However, there were several titles where the performance was not in the "expected" range, specifically in RT tests. Do you think this will be fixed in upcoming driver updates or (maybe in the games themselves)

Mr Bespoke

just add one more to this question, can we have a brief cameo from John to contribute his thoughts on this subject please?

HarryB

I was curious re: why Alex used the performance mode in his FSR4 comparison rather than quality. I thought maybe because it’s easier to see the difference, or because that’s the mode he thinks most people should be using?

DaJaCo (Dan)

Argos seem to have them available for delivery at RRP in the UK. Says delivery in 3 days.. ?

randyrrs

Hi DF crew! With DLSS being so successful in enhancing image quality do you think it was a mistake for the PS5 and series x not to release with their own machine learning equivalent back in 2020? Do you think these consoles should've launched with this feature back then?

Leftisthominid

Hello foundrymen, I was wondering, have any of you ever worked in an analog foundry?

Leftisthominid

Given the lack of ML acceleration in RDNA3/-, I was wondering, why do so few handheld PCs use Arc? I understand why they don't use GeForce (as Nvidia does not have an x86 x64 license). However, Intel's XESS solution, while generally not as great as DLSS, represents a superior solution to FSR. XESS on a handheld could be game changing, even maybe Next Level Stuff.

Brrrrgrrrr

I just posted it in the PC hardware section of the discord, but AMD just confirmed Sony helped them in co-creating FSR4. I wonder that now it’s released, will there be something more they will reveal in the coming months?

Daniel M

Handled PCs would need an all-in-one SoC that integrates both CPU and GPU; does Intel offer such a solution with Arc graphics? As far as I can tell Arc is just available as discrete GPUs at the moment.

Mechajin

Shows not available for delivery for me and no click and collect. I'm in South London.

marsmage

Aloha Foundrymen! Is the RX 9070 XT finally the product to deliver a solid 60fps@1440p Ultra Wide experience without breaking the bank? My 3080 Ti in conjunction with a Ryzen 9 5900X felt like it was just short of delivering "the solid 60 experience" in recent titles (Indiana Jones, Dragon Age: VG, Monster Hunter) by hovering in the low to mid 50 fps range without cracking the upscaler up into pixel swamp territory.

MGsubbie

If the 9070XT ends up being a massive success, what do you think the odds are of AMD releasing a 9080XT? The 9070XT looks very appealing next to Nvidia's lineup, but it's just not enough of an upgrade over my 3080 for me. A $799 9080XT with say 84CU's and 20GB of VRAM would be a great fit for me however.

MGsubbie

Keep in mind it was announced $599, and that retail price is never tax included. Europe has a significant VAT included.

MGsubbie

Another possibility is that FSR2 performance looked terrible.

Ryan Seymour

I’ve been toying with getting a gaming PC for years and been close to pulling the trigger on a number of occasions only to chicken out at the moment of truth. Usually because a decent GPU was either impossible to buy or ridiculously expensive. The arrival of the 9070XT has really got me interested again but I’m curious. Would that GPU (paired with a decent CPU and Memory) be a huge improvement over my PS5 Pro? Cheers!!

Alex’sRayTracedBottom

With NVIDIA’s—let’s be honest—disastrous launch, are we witnessing the beginning of the end for NVIDIA as a gaming company? I’m not trying to be overly dramatic, but with 90% of their revenue now coming from AI, it’s difficult to ignore the possibility that the gaming side of the company is suffering as a result. It’s hard to believe they could fumble this badly unless something fundamental has shifted in their culture and priorities.

Jules Wyns

Indeed forgot about VAT ^^ ...599 plus 21% VAT equals 724, still a far cry off from 889 still. There are cards in the thousands on eurpeon sites even :x

Ryan Luker

Easier to see the graphical difference when comparing performance to performance maybe?

Ryan Luker

There was some rumblings that AMD is using a combo of CNN and Transformer for FSR4?

Ryan Luker

Sounds like we will see the original 9070/xt prices that AMD had planned before Nvidia's reveal in January. It makes sense if you think about the fact that retailers bought stock from AMD at x price and AMD can't just come along and force the retailers to price it at x-y hah.

Ryan Luker

Sadly I think 9070XT is the top of stack for AMDs 9xxx GPU line. I do not believe, normally, GPU manufactors start in the middle and work out for binning different GPUs (eg when a GPU Chipset has small defects you just disable those areas and make it a lower tier GPU but you don't magically get more areas of the waffer to "up bin" something). I am no GPU arctitech guru though, hah...

MGsubbie

I know that, just deciding to make a physically bigger chip.

GalaxyGoer

Hey DF crew. Why doesn't the PC evolve to a more game console or Mac/Halo Strix style usage of RAM? A 12gb GPU is recommended for games because that is what consoles use. But then PC users are asked to spend a lot more for 16GB of expensive DDR5 memory. I understand how x86 cpus and motherboards are not built for this, and the vRAM is different, but i feel like these are legacy issues. Sure, a user on PC would still need more. But we can't effectively mix them in games it seems. Why exactly is it that games need 28GB (12vram + 16ram) to do what consoles do with 12? Thanks and keep up the great work.

DudleyTheGentleman

Hi DF team, with the decreased reticle limit of High-NA creeping ever closer as a necessary reality for GPU manufacturers, do you think we'll see our first true consumer targeted multi-gpu die MCM within the next 5 years? If so, which company do you think will be the first to create one and why? On a completely separate topic, whatever happened to enthusiast PC motherboards with PLX chips? Why did they go away? If I recall correctly, these were high-end multiplexing chips that allowed end-users to fully populate all of their PCI-e slots without compromising bandwidth. A feature like this would be really valuable today.

TheMightyEthan

Hey DF! With how much the ML upscalers have improved their handling of elements without motion vectors, would it now be possible/desirable for Nvidia and AMD to release a driver-level toggle for DLSS and FSR, to allow ML upscaling even on games that don't natively implement it? Or if not upscaling, what about driver-level MLAA? Do you think it would be possible to get decent image quality that way, or would trying to treat the entire image without the normal background data be too prone to errors? I'd love your thoughts. Cheers!

Someguyperson

AMD 9000 series cards sold out on launch day (not as quickly as the Nvidia cards sold out), but they had a price hike of 25%-35%. Do you think the stupid price hikes above MSRP will stop happening only after there's enough stock in the market where you can just buy a GPU whenever you need one? Do you think the high-end stock will improve only after the mid-range stock issue is resolved?

Someguyperson

FSR 4 finally looks like the DLSS Super Resolution competitor that AMD needed to make 5 years ago. Considering that GPUs take ~5 years from concept to market, do you think AMD is just copying Nvidia and there will just be a 5 year lag in features on AMD GPUs? Intel seemed to be investing in R&D so they wouldn't fall behind Nvidia in terms of features, while AMD is much more invested in the CPU & enterprise space. Do you think we'll see Intel overtake AMD GPUs despite the relative win AMD has with the 9000 series?

Someguyperson

The GB203 die is only 6% larger than Navi 48 (378mm vs. 356mm), yet the Nvidia products have an MSRP ~50% higher than the AMD chips. Do you think AMD will actually make any money on the 9000 series GPUs considering how relatively inexpensive they are? Another comparison is between the RTX 5070 and the Intel B580, which both have about the same amount of area (albeit the 5070 is on TSMC 4N vs. TSMC N5 for the B580), yet the 5070 is literally twice the price of the B580. Intel surely isn't making money on these cards, right?

Someguyperson

The point of having these large gains in software is that you can run the latest model on older hardware. Artificially limiting yourself to use older software as a "true" comparison is only useful for things like Alex's video comparing the different upscaling techniques. Going forward, you have to judge each card with the current software available for each product. Everyone can promise that things will get better, but you can't rate things on a promise. You need to review the product in the box on the current day.

Someguyperson

I agree with Rich (not Leadbetter) here. You should buy higher up the "stack" if you want to use a higher resolution monitor, but if you're fine with 1080p or 1440p, a xx60 or xx70 card should work quite well and multi-frame generation can help you with monitors that have high refresh rated and a lower resolution than 4k.

Someguyperson

Well, they've gone ahead, and then they've been pulled back, so who knows what is and isn't real anymore. When it comes to Switch 2, I believe production of that console is in Vietnam or another Southeast Asian country that specifically isn't China. I believe Nintendo moved this production outside of China during the first Trump Presidency specifically because of tariffs that were imposed on Chinese goods.

Diego ElRey

Hi DF, This question is for Oliver. Do you have background or training in speaking? Your cadence and word choices seem well practiced and professional comparatively. Does possibly a writing background influence this, or is it natural?

Someguyperson

It would really depend on the legal agreements Nvidia has with their board partners. There probably isn't an upper limit to how expensive a board partner can make a card, which would limit Nvidia's power there. There might be a way Nvidia could divert more supply away from board partners and towards themselves until the board partners lower their pricing, but it all depends on the legal agreements that none of use are privy to.

Someguyperson

If your CPU is a 12900k, moving to a 5090 is a bit of a fool's errand. You should absolutely upgrade your CPU before upgrading your GPU again. You should also have a minimum of a 4k 120 Hz panel with a setup like this. A 5090 will allow you to nearly max out a 4k 240 Hz monitor, so that would probably the second upgrade after CPU you should pursue there if you feel like you need an upgrade.

Someguyperson

I have a couple answers here: 1. Drivers 2. Power consumption 3. Drivers 4. Stability 5. Drivers 6. Cost/area consumed 7. Legacy support 8. General software support

Someguyperson

PSSR on RDNA 3 won't happen as Sony made hardware modifications to the CUs the make FSR 4 work.

Someguyperson

The size of the 9070 XT die is basically the size of the 5080, so AMD would need to make a GPU the size of the 5090 and sell it for half the price for this to make sense, which I don't see happening.

Someguyperson

AMD sold out of 9000 series cards today, so they won't be faultless in all this miasma either.

Someguyperson

Reticle limit die are basically limited to enterprise grade hardware. Blackwell showed that Nvidia is very much into the advanced packaging game by fusing two die together. The future will only go in that direction, so a decreased limit isn't that bad. When it comes to PLX chips. Broadcom bought PLX and jacked the price up so they're only feasible on enterprise grade motherboards and things like National Instruments chassis. Basically, if you actually need them, you never lost them, but they'll cost you an arm & leg now.

Someguyperson

Hope all is well with the family Rich!

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey DF crew! Looking at Split Fiction, what do you think makes developers choose UE5 over UE4 if they’re not using the latest engine’s features? One would think it’s easier to work in a more established environment but on the other hand UE5 is here to stay so they want to familiarise themselves with it. Or is there something more?

Someguyperson

I keep seeing people who want to purchase a 5090, yet they have a relatively anemic CPU in their system that will hold back performance. What is your CPU guidance for people that want to buy a 5080 or 5090? Instead of going for a $2000+ GPU that nobody can buy, what can people go for that will improve their experience for a lot less money?

BespokeEP

Well this was completely obvious.. why would you announce a collaboration if you were going to each make your own tech? The whole point of a collaboration is to split the work so you can fast track progress. I’d bet money that Sony did 90% of the work for the super resolution part of FSR4. Obviously there is a little custom work involved as a RDNA 2.x CU is not nearly as performant as an RDNA 4 CU, and the 9070 has more TOPS, caches and RAM, but at the end of the day PSSR and FSR4 is the same tech

yogi

With FSR4 impressive results, is there any reason Sony shouldn't cut their losses and drop PSSR for FSR4 with the PS6? How likely is Sony to keep going with PSSR?

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hello gentlemen! What do you think about Q1 2025 so far? I thought the 50-series cards and Switch 2 announcement will be the highlight of this period but it turns out I was wrong. I think DLSS4 and FSR4 are the best things that happened technology wise. And as a 4070TiS owner I’m really happy AMD is catching up with nVidia because a healthy competition is what we should really want (unless you want to waste you time on console or GPU wars). Cheers!

Alan

Hi guys, These new AMD GPUs from the reviews are great for PC players, but what about the PlayStation 6? Could the 9070XT be the base chip with some Sony Secret Sauce? At least AMD seems to be catching up to nVidia!

jerrylongbones

It's definitely a difficult one, the volatility of it all. I suppose its still valid whether they will again all preemptively now start pulling production out of China. With physical they may still decide I feel that this is a good justification for further reductions in printing, if not phasing out entirely due to an unstable market and potential threat of higher costs due to future tariffs. This is the problem we face now since its only been postponed (again). I guess we will see.

digitalfoundry

4x pixel scaling is one of the toughest tests for a reconstruction-based algorithm

EvilRacer329

I guess I'm still not seeing the use-case. If you're an e-sports enthusiast running a low-res, high refresh-rate monitor, you objectively don't want framegen of any kind - you want minimum latency, and high framerate is merely a byproduct. Everyone I know who's still on 1080p or 1440p displays has had them for years, and they're almost exclusively 60Hz. 1440p is the fastest-growing resolution on the steam hardware survey, but unfortunately we can't tell what the refresh rate capability is. I'd be very interested to see how many people are buying lower res, but ultra-high RR displays for regular gaming. Seems...unlikely to me.

Alex’sRayTracedBottom

I’d say the supply issue is pretty standard—modern GPU launches always sell out, so I don’t fault AMD for that. However, I do fault NVIDIA for the missing ROPs, poor generational performance, outrageous pricing, low VRAM, and disgustingly deceptive marketing—far worse than usual (e.g., 5070 = 4090). On top of that, the 12VHPWR connector is melting due to zero load balancing. There is also the black screening issue. We could go on and on about this particular NVIDIA launch.

Alex’sRayTracedBottom

My local MicroCenter has 100+ $599 9070 xt’s in stock, 2 days after launch. They have zero 5080s and only one 5070 in stock. Anecdotal at best, but it’s pretty clear AMD has had much better supply than NVIDIA. I don’t get how Apple can launch a cell phone every year and have zero supply issues. Is the world constantly at max silicone production? Literally 100% usage 24/7 365 and this is the absolute best AMD and NVIDIA can do?

Chris Merrill

The state of PC gaming from a former console gamer: I migrated over to PC gaming in November from being a life long console gamer and I’m frustrated. I purchased Returnal and it no longer starts up, it crashes every time at the start up logos(known issue & no patch) unplayable. Fine, went to try Battlefield 3 online, it crashes every time you try to adjust the video settings, sigh. Moved over to Dark Souls 3 and it’s loaded with stutters and hitches, even bigger sigh. I loaded up Silent Hill remake and it has even more stutters than DS3, grand sigh. I don’t regret building my first PC, but this is why Pc gaming is frustrating. It doesn’t work like it typically does on console. These issues seem to be all over the place, new and old games. Why are so many games broken and never fixed on Pc? Returnal is the most frustrating for me. Pc specs if it matters: Ryzen 7600x cpu, 4080 super gpu, 32gb ram.

Michael Pearn

We only just got back stock in Australia this week

Jules Wyns

Hey Mr. DF ! With the prices of the AMD 9070/xt launch being bumped up after the first batch (as according to retail insiders ) , how accurate are tech reviewers scores for said product ? Should tech journalists "re-review" ? What is your opinion of this Mr. DF ?

Will Cooling

I stumbled upon you guys on YouTube recently. Despite not being a hardware nerd, I really enjoy the chilled, grown-up way you talk about gaming. BTW I cannot believe *the* Richard Leadbetter who was behind my favourite magazines as a Sega kid in the 90s is still hard at work in the takes mines. I'm still waiting for Disc 2 of Panzer Dragoon Saga, Rich!

BespokeEP

PS6 will be based off of UDNA as per Kepler L2’s chip findings and Moore’s Law is Dead’s sources. And it will likely contain PSSR 2 which will be similar to I guess FSR 5. The PS5Pro will be one of the biggest advantages PS has next gen. By the time this gen is over there will be over 1000 games with PSSR implemented. I understand those games will have to be patched again for PSSR2 but in theory that should be less work than Xbox having to go in and implement it in their games for the first time. Also tons of developers likely won’t bother patching an Xbox version due to Xbox bizarrely telling people, don’t buy an Xbox lol. Where are 3rd parties supposed to sell their games in the Xbox ecosystem? XCloud? lol Strangest messaging ever

Mechajin

Just appeared in stock at PlayStation direct and ordered one. If anyone else in the UK is looking, now is your chance.