AMD, I need you to try harder. I mean, it's not like you're actively
antagonizing your partners, customers, and the media. That's more NVIDIA's jam.
It's just that if you want to have your Ryzen moment in GPUs, now is the time to
find the hunger that turned you from a
player in the CPU space to the A player that you've become. I mean, don't get me
wrong, the new Radeon 960 XT looks pretty good compared to NVIDIA's
lukewarm 5060 series, and that might win
you some sales, but I want you to look at the big picture. This is an
opportunity while your main competitor is distracted by their rapidly growing
AI business to change the perception of Radeon from that brand for scrub gamers
to that brand that I never knew how much I liked until I tried it. It's an
opportunity to build an army of loyal Radeon customers who through their sheer
numbers will incentivize your board partners to build exciting solutions and
incentivize developers to focus on Radeon when they're optimizing their
games and software. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. Adam just
walked out of the keynote and he's got the details on everything from the new
Radeon cards to AMD's fastest Thread Rippers ever. He's also got a segue to
our sponsor. Touch me again. You're going to
find out exactly who I am. I'm your sponsor, ODU. They have
over 50 apps to help you cook up your business. Whether you want to put your
hands on marketing, accounting, or even HR, they have you covered. The RX960 XT
is AMD's attempt to appeal to gamers who reject NVIDIA's lackluster 8 GB cards
while also offering a profit marginfriendly 8 GB option for
shareholders. To their credit, unlike Team Green, who has a history of quietly
downgrading their lower VRAMm variants in other ways, AMD has built both of
these new cards using the same Na'vi 44 GPU with 32 compute units, up to 3.1 GHz
boost clocks, and up to 821 AI tops
running through a 16 lane PCIe Gen 5
interface. Thank you AMD for understanding that budget cards often
end up in budget systems with older gen PCIe slots and having those extra lanes
makes a big difference in compensating for those lower speeds. Power targets
are 150 and 180 watts for the 8 GB and
16 GB cards respectively. And according to AMD, the 960 XT6 GB will be the
world's best GPU under $350. and I'd like to believe them
because is pretty dire for budget gamers right now, but there's a couple of red
flags that I want to point out. AMD hasn't presented a clear path to ensure
that the 960 XTs will be actually available at their MSRPs. And for
another, I couldn't help but noting the way that AMD focused on comparisons
between their 16 GB card and NVIDIA's 5060 Ti 8 GB. It's a valid comparison,
and the numbers do look impressive with AMD claiming a roughly 15% better
performance per dollar in raster and in rateracing at 1440p.
How much of that margin comes from VRAM issues that will pop up on the 960 XT 8
GB as well? Also, what is that? And
hence, is that just three display outputs? AMD at least did confirm during
the press briefing that these are DisplayPort 2.1A, UHPR 13.5, and HDMI
2.1B. So, at least you'll be able to natively drive all but the highest
bandwidth displays. And I guess if you
really need more monitors, there's always DisplayPort multiream transport.
But it just feels like a bit of a weird spot for them to cut costs. Although if
it helps contribute to their competitive pricing, then maybe that's a good thing.
Well, sort of. See, the 960 XT 16 gig is
looking pretty good, undercutting the MSRP of the 5060Ti 16 gig and even the 8
gig by 80 and $30, respectively. But the
8 gig version of the 960 XT is stunningly
non-competitive. Something that AMD tacitly acknowledges when they gave it
approximately 2 seconds of screen time during their
announcement. Yikes. I mean, sure, they
price match NVIDIA's 5060, but this is exactly what I was getting at during the
intro. price matching the guy that everyone hates for overcharging is not
enough. And it doesn't seem like they're even trying to compete with Intel's B
series GPUs. The whole thing even just feels like backwards progress compared
to AMD's own lineup with gamers expected to pay $30 more than last gen's
disappointing 8 gig card, the RX7600. Anyway, these cards will be
launching on June 5th, so keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming coverage. While
we don't know for sure if their prices will be fake, what we do know for sure
is there will be fake frames. The latest version of FSR, AMD's AI upscaling tech,
brought massive improvements earlier this year, and AMD plans to keep mining
for extra performance with FSR Redstone, which focuses on improving path tracing
workloads. Specifically, to demonstrate this, they showed off this unflattering
demo that looks like it was ripped out of a Project Gotham Racing from Xbox 360
era. Like I like, what is this? Why did Why does it look like this? I thought it
was a tech demo. Anyways, the updates are one, neural radiance caching, which
learns how light bounces within a scene to try and predict ray intersections
before they happen. Two, ray regeneration, which is NVIDIA's ray
reconstruction, but more AMD earer. Three, super resolution, which is super
resolution. And four, frame gen, which is frame gen. Sounds
cool. What would be cooler is having more games supporting the tech. Oh. Uh,
okay. What next? We got AI. AI. Oh,
right. Uh, new Threadripper. The king is back, baby. And the new Threadripper
9000 lineup looks wild. While AMD isn't
packing any more cores than last year, Shimata Peak seems to squeeze a lot of
juice out of the move to AMD's more efficient Zen 5 architecture. Starting
with a 300 MHz higher boost clock, which
doesn't sound like much, but when it's across this many cores, it adds up to a
lot. Now, if you were hoping for 3D Vcash on these models though, and let's
be real, we were all hoping for 3D Vcash, you're going to have to keep
waiting. But despite the minor changes to the on paper specs, AMD showed off a
pretty decent performance uplift over their last gen Inbench before they
pivoted to shaming Intel for a while. You know what? Fair enough AMD. Enjoy
your victory lap. Now, naturally, given that these are workstation chips, AMD is
also emphasizing how improved CPU performance will allow for improved AI
performance when you're working with large models that require multiple GPUs,
which is becoming more and more relevant as larger local models are gaining
popularity. The best part, though, is these new chips are dropping compatible
with existing 7000 series motherboards with just a BIOS update. Good guy AMD
finally delivering on a Threadripper upgrade path just like we delivered
these great cargo pants available in two inseam lengths for shorter and for
taller kings ltstore.com. There is bad news though.
If you want to get your fingers on a 96 core Threadripper Pro when they arrive
in July, they will only be available through partners like Lenovo, meaning
that enthusiasts are going to be stuck with the nonpro lineup that caps out at
just 64 cores with fewer PCIe lanes, half the number of memory channels, and
far less supported memory capacity. AMD
has well and truly forgotten the Threadripper enthusiasts who supported them in
the early days of Ryzen. Cool. Also,
there's no pricing information today. It really is amazing how much AMD acts like
Intel and NVIDIA when they are the top dog. Also coming to the workstation is
some new AMD GPU tech. Earlier this week, we did a video on Intel's B60 GPU,
and we talked about why it was their most important GPU yet, offering an
affordable option for entry-level workstations that required certified
drivers and creating a lowcost platform for running pretty large AI models
locally. Meanwhile, AMD is hoping to wrigle their way into the ProGPU market
by throwing a whopping 32 GB of VRAM on
their new Radeon AI Pro R9700, a GPU
name optimized for shareholder value. AMD is also making big strides to
improve their software, bringing improved RockM support to Windows and
Linux alike, which enables developers to bring their AI and HPC applications to
Radeon. Get it away from CUDA is what they say. They say, "Please, please, no
CUDA, sir." They didn't say how much this GPU would cost, but they did spend
a fair amount of time comparing it to the 5080. So, a a thousand probably not.
It's probably not It's probably not going to be a thousand. AMD's
announcements this year then were a mixed bag of exciting and also
underwhelming. I mean, compared to the NVIDIA keynote, at least there was
something worth talking about. And we took this incredible GPU and we shrunk
it in here. Does that make any sense?
And AMD is clearly busting their buns to catch up to NVIDIA in the workstation
and data center spheres. But like the rest of the industry, they seem to have
forgotten about their customers who don't have six, seven, or eight figure
annual budgets. I guess we're all just chopped liver. You know what isn't
chopped liver though? Our sponsor. L is
getting older and older. He really need to retire. That's why I use our sponsor
Odu to help him reboot Lannis's cat tips. Odo has over 50 apps for business.
So while using a project app to track our progress, Lance told me to try this
method to lure the cats out. An hour later, only Noodle shake my hand to work
together. In our brainstorm session, Missy and Brownie remain missing, but
Noodle is one hardworking cat. We listed the ideas out and structure our
workflow. Noodle agreed to letting me cook the cat. Cook with the cat. We
scheduled the shoot within a couple of clicks, keeping things organized.
Filming with him has been a blast, but this sneaky cat better not think I will
work for free. Luckily, I can easily lock my time sheet along with the
project or to keep test organized. But to be honest, Noodle didn't contribute
much. Lance better not retired. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out
the one we did on Intel's most disruptive GPU yet, the Ark Pro B60.