WYP
News Guru
It looks like AMD plans to release RX 5600 XT series GPUs in early 2020.
Read more about PowerColor's RX 5600 XT series graphics cards.
Read more about PowerColor's RX 5600 XT series graphics cards.
PowerColor RX 5600 XT series graphics cards appear in ECC database
- Thread starter WYP
- Start date
NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
AMD wth are you doing? Why release a weaker card with 8GB then follow it up with a faster card with 6GB of memory?
Just shooting yourselves in the foot. It'll confuse people and decreases your pricing power.
Just shooting yourselves in the foot. It'll confuse people and decreases your pricing power.
WYP
News Guru
Well, there are 4GB RX 5500 XT cards.
This is not as bad as Nvidia, who released their GTX 1060 3GB when the GTX 1050 Ti has 4GB of VRAM and no 2GB option. Nevermind the fact that the 6GB model also featured more CUDA cores, making the GTX 1060 name hugely misleading IMHO.
I wouldn't call it shooting themselves in the foot, but it is confusing.
In theory they could make 12GB and 16GB versions of the 5600XT and 5700XT too, someone probably will for the weird HPC edge cases where that makes sense(Like the 16GB Polaris cards), but at the end of the day if you want a bus width between 128-bits and 256-bit you've gotta take a 192-bit bus and suddenly your GDDR chips need to come in multiples of 3 whether that fits with your stack or not.
WYP
News Guru
Exactly. In most situations memory bandwidth trumps capacity. The RTX 2080 Ti doesn't have 11GB of VRAM because games need it, it's because a GPU that strong needs that much VRAM to offer enough memory bandwidth over a wide bus.
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
I think people are starting to twig on that as long as you have more than 4GB and the card has decent horsepower, you're going to be perfectly fine. I don't think people are still looking at VRAM as the prime determinate of power. And 8GB has been on low-end cards for a while now. It's as synonymous with the low-midrange as it is the high-end.
NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
My problem is they give a cheaper card 8GB that's useless for such a weak card and reduces the pricing power AMD has with a stronger yet less vram card.
Not really into the above reasons. Not relevant. I'm purely talking consumer standpoints and how people will look at it. They haven't said anything about 12GB and they won't do it. It would just further convolute everything and give a much weaker card more memory than a more expensive and significantly faster card. Though since they are doing it now.. guess they could again. People less into the know will probably be confused.
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We've had 8GB AMD cards since the R9 290, AMD literally replaced it with a much faster card with only 4GB vram possible, while refreshing the 290 as a 390 with 8GB across the board as a lower end card to the 4GB Fury, no one still uses VRAM as an estimator of performance, that hasn't worked with AMD/NVidias stacks for generations(Since 2013?). Who is seriously going to read the model numbers 5500 and 5600, see their prices, and still get confused at their place in the product stack? Companies should, if anything, resist curtailing to these misconceptions of the misinformed.
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AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
Sorry I'm late coming back to this.
It makes total sense to me.
As said above, people don't gauge performance by the amount of VRAM as much any more. As long as you have 4GB or more, it's fine for the majority of use cases. There are obviously outliers, but there are often outliers somewhere in the chain. Nvidia is either competitive or top dog in all games... except Forza. AMD is in control of the CPU market... except in high refresh rate gaming and music production. These aren't perfect examples, but they serve their purpose.
A big reason people don't use VRAM as an accurate gauge for performance any more is in a title like AC: Odyssey. Compare the 1650 Super 4GB vs the 5500 4GB and 5500 XT 8GB. The 1650 Super and 5500 XT 8GB match each other, but the 4GB 5500 falls away. The 1650 has 4GB of memory just like the 5500. The reason is because it's not an apples to apples comparison. Nvidia uses different compression techniques and other hardware/software-based optimisations. So the VRAM quantity when equal doesn't equal the same performance. A similar thing happened with the Fury cards.
EDIT: And regarding the performance plummeting for the 5500 4GB in Odyssey, bear in mind that the performance was already what many PC gamers would consider unplayable, at around 40 FPS. Odyssey is a really demanding game, and for 1080p/60 FPS dropping the settings is a must with the 5500/1650 Super class of GPUs. Whether you have a 4GB or 8GB, it doesn't matter, you need to drop settings. At which point, does the 4GB model catch up? Obviously VRAM is used for textures, and textures don't usually cause that much of a performance drop (if you have enough VRAM). But it's hard to say because I don't know how I'm going to find someone who's got data on this particular comparison.
If the 5500XT had 4GB and ONLY 4GB, consumers would likely be frustrated. The price of the card would still be too high at its performance level; that wouldn't change. And some people would want more than 4GB of VRAM and would be willing to pay the extra $30 for it. They've had it for years with Polaris. To go back to 4GB now would be a frustration and one that could be avoided by just offering consumers a choice. The price difference is not the same difference between 8 and 16GB of HBM2, or 8 and 12GB of GDDR6 where the memory bus has to change. For gamers who want the extra VRAM but can't afford a 5700 and don't want an Nvidia card or an RX 580 (niche market, I know, but that's AMD for you), the $200 5500XT 8GB model exists. It's overpriced, but I don't see any reason to not offer both a 4GB and an 8GB version. They should both exist at a lower price point.
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NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
My main point was pricing power for AMD. I don't really care about the other stuff as its just hypothetical with nothing to back it up.
