When Polaris was announced back in 2016, there was much rejoicing.
A new generation of graphics cards is always something to be excited about, but there was
something about this launch that was, at least for its time, more exciting than most. Which
was sort of strange, given that Polaris wasn’t the biggest, or fastest card at its time.
It wasn’t even AMD’s flagship product! WHY it was so exciting will soon become evident
in this video.
There was a period, long ago, when AMD and Nvidia leapfrogged each other every 9 months
or so, ferociously out-performing and undercutting each other every generation, almost without
fail! If you bought a new PC, you could guarantee that within about 6 months, you could have
got something better, for less. But one thing led to another and Nvidia slowly got the upper
hand, and with it, prices started to creep up.
This was noticeable with the 900 series. At that point, AMD’s 290 series of cards were
still powerful enough to come close in terms of performance, but consumed a lot more power
in the process. At the ultra-high end, AMD’s Fury cards couldn’t quite beat the flagship
980 Ti, but got close enough to be okay, given the price was right. But with the release
of Nvidia’s 1000 series, there was no longer anything AMD could do. They were outclassed
in pretty much every way, and with more than a year to go before their competing high-end
Vega cards were ready to launch, Polaris was all they had to tide things over with.
It’s not like they had any choice in the matter, but how they marketed these cards
was quite unusual, and very effective. Just so you know, before Polaris (That is,
the Radeon 480), people weren’t too interested in the ‘80’ tier cards- which normally
just provided previous-gen high-end performance, but at a lower price-point. Normally with
a new generation, the faster ‘90’ tier would come out first, everybody would get
excited for them, and then the ‘80’ tier would come out soon after for everybody who
couldn’t quite afford the fastest cards. A second best, if you will. In fact, both
companies did this- the fastest product took centre-stage, and those below them were an
afterthought. But all this changed with Polaris. Finally,
it was the mid-range tier’s time to shine, as the Radeon 480 took centre-stage. It finally
looked as though AMD was going to be able to match Nvidia on power efficiency again.
It was fast enough to meet the requirements for VR. And it was priced at just $199. It
seemed to be everything! THIS was an exciting moment for gamers! It might not have been
flagship performance, but it was FAST ENOUGH. Before this point, you had to make serious
compromises if you only had $200 to spend on a graphics card. But with this card, it
was good, affordable, and finally ended a period of price-performance stagnation, sending
prices tumbling in the mid-range and making the $200 price-point the sweet-spot again.
And for all those gamers who were chugging along on ancient hardware, THIS was the card
that was within their price-range, and that appeared to sport enough power to handle modern
games well for the foreseeable future.
THAT’s what we need now. A $200 graphics card hero to make PC gaming affordable again.
As the go-to card for budget gamers, for people building second rigs, or for competitive gamers,
gaming at low resolutions. This card would support new features like raytracing and intelligent
upscaling. A feature like DLSS, which increases performance with minimal hit to visual clarity,
would be more useful in a $200 card than it is in a more expensive one! But raytracing
would also be nice. Hear me out here: it doesn’t need to run it well. I don’t EXPECT it to
run it well- more expensive cards exist, and are there to do just that. But down at the
$200 price point, it would just be nice to have the option of raytracing if I wanted
it. Just to see what the fuss is about, even if it is at sub-30 fps. And also to know that
this $200 graphics card isn’t artificially rendered obsolete the moment games begin to
demand raytracing. Don’t tell me how to play it! If I want to play it at 360p with
raytracing and DLSS, I should be able to! And while I’m making demands, I’d like
this card to be available at $200, and not out of stock everywhere. This seems to be
an unreasonable ask in 2021. But that’s why we need a $200 hero now, more than ever!
I don’t think AMD quite understood the significance of what they did with Polaris. They showed
benchmarks where two Radeon 480’s matched the Geforce 1080. Anybody who knew about dual
GPU setups took this with a pinch of salt- nobody bothers with 2 slower cards over 1
faster one. There are just too many down-sides. With just one, the Radeon 480 wasn’t even
particularly fast – it sat pretty much where you expected a new 80-tier would- roughly
matching AMD’s previous-gen 90 tier of card, and landing somewhere between the previous-gen
Geforce 970 and 980. But I don’t think this mattered to consumers, when it was SO attractively
priced. Plus, this was all just from an ‘80’ tier of card. If this is what AMD’s new
midrange could do… how awesome would the ‘90’ tier of Polaris be when it finally
came out?!
WITH HINDSIGHT, it wasn’t so sweet. There wasn’t to be a ‘90’ tier until the next
generation, and even then, it wasn’t much more than an overclocked ‘80’ card. After
Polaris was out, prices stagnated again for some time. So long, in fact, that I know people
who wished they had just bought a Geforce 1080 instead of a Radeon 480, had they known
how long the price-performance curve was to remain static and that they’d be stuck on
the same card for so long. But there’s no way anybody could have known this at the time.
In 2016, the Radeon 480 was THE card to get. And the 470, which I also liked. As was the
competing Geforce 1060, released the month after, which ended up selling far better than
AMD’s cards did.
Since 2016, there hasn’t been much good news for budget gamers. If you have $200 to
spend today, you’ll still not get much better than what it would have got you 5 years ago.
And that’s depressing. Your best bet these days would be the Geforce 1650 Super, which
is about the same speed as the Geforce 1060 is. Or the 1660 Super, which is about as fast
as a Geforce 1070, and priced like the 1060 was at launch! But even that’s a tough sell
for owners of Polaris or a 1060, especially since these cards already lack current features
like raytracing and DLSS. Indeed, since 2016, the $200 price-point offerings have paled
in comparison to those in the $300 range and above, even from a value perspective.
Since then the prices have only increased, and the price-performance curve has remained
so static that I can’t even see where the ‘midrange’ is any more!
So instead of trying to identify the ‘mid-range’, let’s instead look for what it represented:
which was the sweetspot for price to performance. So where’s the sweet spot these days? Given
the 3060’s specs and how it isn’t out yet, right now, I’d say the price-performance
king has got to be the Geforce 3060 Ti. It’s not a lot slower than the more expensive 3070,
it has the same raytracing and DLSS features as the more expensive cards, and it soundly
beats almost everything released before that generation of cards. But the 3060 Ti isn’t
$200- it’s $400. And even more, given that supply of the card is so limited right now!
In other words: if you want the sweet-spot today then you’ll have to spend at least
twice as much as you did with Polaris. And I understand that things are different
these days- a new graphics card will last you longer than it would have done 10-15 years
ago. There are more graphics settings and resolutions to dial back if you need more
performance. We’re expecting higher framerates than before. I remember playing Doom 3 at
about 30 FPS back in the day and thinking ‘this is okay!’. And of course there has
been inflation since then. And shrinking down to a smaller node gets more difficult and
costly every time, too. But in my mind, what the world wants is a good $200 card again.
It doesn’t need to provide flagship performance- just performance that’s good enough. And
one with current features, and enough horsepower to handle them. A product that you can use
and to not feel like you’re missing out.
I feel like, at least in terms of upcoming hardware, this year is the best chance in
a long time we’ve got of seeing this. The $200 pricepoint used to be the domain of the
‘60’ tier of Geforce cards, but since even the standard 3060 has been announced
at $330, I guess we’ll have to look to the Geforce 3050 series to provide a $200 option.
It might be like how the 1660 series was, but with RTX support, which would close the
gap between it and the higher-end cards. The killer feature would be DLSS, which is
an intelligent upscaler, effectively combining the high framerate of a low resolution, with
the image quality of a higher one. At the high-end it’s mostly used to make raytracing
run acceptably. But at the low-end it could be used to massively boost framerates in games
in general, being what’s needed to push demanding titles over the 60 FPS mark, and
competitive games to 144. I’ve already tested it at ultra-low resolutions and it’s crazy
how coherent the image still looks, even when running games as low as 480, or even 360p.
You can check the video out here. The problem right now is how few games support
DLSS. You can’t just enable it in any game you want. And the technology is Nvidia’s.
AMD doesn’t have something comparable to DLSS -yet- but they have mentioned it in passing,
though the 6000 series came out and it still isn’t anywhere to be seen. It’s OBVIOUSLY
coming- consoles using AMD hardware have used similar tricks to reach high resolutions for
years. Microsoft’s got something called DirectML that games should soon begin adopting.
And it’s got to be coming, because DLSS is TOO GOOD to ignore! With AMD’s new RDNA
2 cards they do at least have raytracing support, and hardware that can scale up to the high
end. The question is, how far DOWN will they scale with this?
Come to think of it, it isn’t just graphics cards that have stagnated, is it. The processor
market has seen the same thing! The Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series had appealing products
in the $100 to $200 range. The 3000 series was faster, but below the $200 Ryzen 3600,
there seemed to be extremely limited stock for whatever reason. And now with the 5000
series of CPUs, AMD hasn’t even bothered going down below $300 yet! It’s like, if
you want to build a budget gaming rig, you can either choose to have second hand components,
or nothing at all!
All this isn’t helped by product shortages. I’ve never seen anything like it! Products
released months ago are still unavailable, and any that are released are immediately
snapped up and re-posted on ebay at well above their asking price by scalpers. It’s a nightmare
scenario for anybody needing new hardware. I can’t believe I did this, but to a friend
who wanted to play Cyberpunk who was unable to get a graphics card, I suggested streaming
the game via a service such as Stadia. STREAMING! If you want to own your own hardware, the
only sensible option right now is to weather the hardware draught out and to wait for stocks
to fill and for prices to hopefully return to normal again… though where ‘normal’
is after all this is anybody’s guess. Part of me thinks there isn’t any returning from
where we are. Now we’ve seen that there are so many people willing to spend $500,
$600 on a graphics card, there’s not so much incentive to make a cheaper product,
is there.
But part of me hopes for a new $200 hero card. So what’s going to end the midrange drought
this time?
MAYBE, once demand for the new consoles has gone down, and chip production has ramped
up, we might begin to see existing graphics cards returning back to the prices they SHOULD
have been at launch. Maybe then we’ll see some sort of mid-generation price war as the
mid-range cards from AMD and Nvidia start to be released later this year. This is what
I think will happen, and will result in the slowest and least exciting price-drops imaginable.
If history repeats itself, the cards we’re looking for might still be 2 years away. I’ve
been following this stuff for a long time, and if you want a PC to last for as long as
possible, it needs to be able to run the latest generation of console games. The cheapest
way of doing this would be to buy a new console the moment it’s released, but on the PC
side of things, the best time to buy is several years later. The Radeon 4850 was one of the
best $200 cards ever. It came out 2 years after the Playstation 3 was released and was
able to power games until the Playstation 4 came out. Less than 3 years after that console
was released, out came the $200 Radeon 480 card, which has been a capable card right
up until Playstation 5 games started coming out. Things have changed a lot since the Playstation
4 era, but it will be interesting to see how good $200 cards at the start of 2023 will
be.
MAYBE a sweet-spot could be managed BELOW $200 in the form of an APU. I loved the Ryzen
2200G that I bought a few years ago- this was a CPU / GPU combo for less than £100.
I can only imagine how great it could be now, if given the latest generation of hardware!
A Zen 3 CPU with RDNA2 graphics cores could be an awesome combination. Sure, you wouldn’t
expect great gaming performance, but it could be enough to tide people over, provided they
were happy with lower resolutions, framerates and graphics settings.
Or maybe, a $200 hero product will come from a third company. INTEL have been rather quiet,
but they’ve been working on their own graphics cards which we might start to see in the next
year or so. Maybe, in a bid to gain market-share and some good-will, they’ll offer some attractively
priced products around the $200 price-point. We’ll just have to wait and see.
But until one of these things happens, we’ll just have to sit tight, and to think back
to happier times. Polaris’s impact hasn’t been forgotten. I’ve noticed a recent trend
that AMD or Nvidia will spend more time talking about their second, or third fastest card,
before briefly showing their fastest product at the end as some kind of ‘halo’ product.
I wonder if this is a vague tribute to the success of that Polaris demonstration from
2016. Or simply because halo products these days
are so damn expensive.