AMD, I need you to try harder. I mean, it's not like you're actively antagonizing your partner's customers in 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 9060XT 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.
The RX 9060XT is AMD's attempt to appeal to gamers who reject NVIDIA's lackluster 8
Gigabyte cards while also offering a profit margin-friendly 8 Gigabyte option for shareholders.
To their credit, unlike Team Green, who has a history of quietly downgrading their lower
VRAM variants in other ways, AMD has built both of these new cards using the same Navi
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 Gigabyte and 16 Gigabyte cards, respectively,
and according to AMD, the 9060XT 16 Gigabyte will be the world's best GPU under $350.
And I'd like to believe them because s*** 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 9060XTs 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 Gigabyte card and NVIDIA's 5060 Ti 8 Gigabyte.
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 ray tracing at 1440p, but how much
of that margin comes from VRAM issues that will pop up on the 9060XT 8 Gigabyte as well?
Also, what is that? Enhance.
Is that just three display outputs? AMD at least did confirm during the press briefing that these are DisplayPort 2.1a UHBR13.5
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 multi-stream transport,
but it just feels like a bit of a weird spot for them to cut costs.
Although if it helped contribute to their competitive pricing, then maybe that's a good thing?
Well, sort of. See the 9060XT 16 gig is looking pretty good, undercutting the MSRP of the 5060 Ti 16 gig
and even the 8 gig by $80 and $30 respectively.
But the 8 gig version of the 9060XT is stunningly non-competitive.
Something that AMD tacitly acknowledges when they gave it approximately two 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 RX 7600.
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 upskating 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, what is this?
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 ear.
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've got AI, AI.
Oh, right, a 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, Shimada peak seems to squeeze a
lot of juice out of the move to AMD's more efficient Zen 5 architecture, starting with
a 300 megahertz 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 3DV cash on these models, though, unless we real, we were all
hoping for 3DV cash, 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 and Cinebench 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 drop in 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. lttstore.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 non-pro 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. Making an affordable option for entry-level workstations that required certified drivers
and creating a low-cost platform for running pretty large AI models locally.
Meanwhile, AMD is hoping to wriggle their way into the pro GPU market by throwing a
whopping 32GB 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 ROK-M 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 thousand?
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 and 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. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one we did on Intel's most disruptive
GPU yet, the ARC Pro B60.