As much as I'm happy to see AMD has cards than can compete on price/perf again, I do wonder why you would buy a 5700/5700XT for two reasons.
1. the blower cooler. I understand there will be no custom cards anytime soon?
I’m not sure this is the forum for these discussions really, but if I’ll put on my PC game player hat for a moment.
Blowers have the advantage that they dump generated heat outside the cabinet. They have the disadvantage that they can’t get rid of a lot of heat through the small PCI-slot holes without high air pressure and noise.
If you have a PC cabinet that focuses on being quiet you will typically have covered front/sides/top to reduce the sound escaping from hard drives and fans. Your airflow will be low.
A blower cooler suits this scenario as the system will still be very quiet under all conditions
apart from max graphics card load. And even when gaming these cards are rarely running full out.
I’ve been using a Vega 56 blower for soon two years now, and apart from running benchmarks, I rarely hear it. (When I do though, I find it irritating and would appreciate it being more quiet.) I don’t even consider overclocking or running higher heat output cards with my setup.
2. No raytracing. It will be in consoles next year. It will be in navi cards next year. It already is on Nvidia cards. Essentially you're buying a card that doesn't perform much different, nor is a lot cheaper than the competion but does lack features you know will be used by many games come next year. I assume that price/perf is very important in the mid end market so why wouldn't you pay a couple of bucks more for a 2060 super knowing you can play with all bells and whistles turned on for the next couple of years?
You believe that the 2060 Super will allow you to ”play with all bells and whistles turned on for the next couple of years”? This requires you to have predictive abilities that would put Nostradamus to shame unless you are talking about 720p at 30Hz.
The fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know what titles will be produced, or when, or how RT will be utilized for some lighting calculation or what benefits and drawbacks that will bring.
What we do know is that all titles offered on PC will run not only on currently available hardware but on hardware a few years old and a couple of steps down the market ladder. The main benefit of the PC as a platform is that it typically allows you to adjust the rendering parameters to suit your preferences. So a RX5700 or my Vega will be able to play all new titles for the next several years.
Not everyone who is in the market for these cards are rendering technology enthusiast. As a game player I don’t care at all how the graphics rendering is achieved. Why should I? I care about results, performance and the price I need to pay for the privilege of chasing pixels on my screen. Regardless of my future cards abilities I doubt I will use raytracing for much of anything unless efficiency improves drastically. It simply doesn’t enter into my purchase decisions at all.
