I think we’ve never really left, and it’s been going on for much longer. All the popular tech gets scalped. Switch, PS5, Phones GPUs, etc. If you can’t launch with infinite products available, it’s going to get scalped nowadays.
I’d say not. During the last crypto fuelled shortage there was practically nothing available and anything you could get your hands on was ludicrously expensive. Just checked on a few stores and there is currently some offer at varying prices. Just don’t obsess on last gen Nvidia products.
Unlike Nvidia they will not be artificially restricting production. It’s already in backrooms and shelves they’ve been bringing them over from manufacturers for months now. There will probably still be some scalping but it’s expected to be enough supply to actually meet demand.
AMD have said, the 9070 series is going to be up to 4070 ti performance. Leaks have also shown the performance between 7800XT and 7900XTX, so you can trust these numbers of course.
As for the price, AMD can say what they want, but how they’ve handled this launch so far doesn’t sound promising. A vendor, who has the cards already, speculated about the price, and it was horrible.
Things have changed since then, but until AMD has released concrete numbers, all these leaks are useless.
I also don’t know what you mean with the artificial restriction of production of the cards. Because NVIDIA is mainly producing AI cards for servers and workstations? AMD will be doing the exact same thing, since that’s where the majority of the money is.
With the 5070 at a 550 MSRP I wouldn't be suprised to see AMD matching that for similar performance. Given all the delay shenanigans it'd be shocking for them to deliberately wait for the 5070 info and then launch with a more expensive part.
How much you end up having to pay to get one is anybody's guess, of course, as MSRP is increasingly meaningless. Since they've had cards with retailers for a while and have been delaying there may actually be some stock at launch, though. We'll see.
The idea that it would "smoke the 5070" and "nearly match the 5080" is probably just fanboyism or they wouldn't have ducked out from directly pitching it after the 5070 reveal (and if they had a 500 dollar 5080 competitor they wouldn't be cancelling their high end cards this gen).
In any case, it's immensely dumb to fanboy for multibillion dollar chip manufacturers. I just hope people can buy good, affordable GPUs from multiple manufacturers at some point. I own GPUs from Intel, AMD and Nvidia and would really want them all to remain competitive in as many pricing segments as possible.
Oh, they're absolutely not retaking a huge chunk of the dedicated GPU market. I think what's realistic to expect if they have a good launch (readily available stock, competitive performance and price) is that they may regain a couple points of desktop install base and at least get to sell that they're moving in the right direction instead of abandoning that space altogether. Maybe some growth on handhelds and competitive iGPUs for laptops and tablets so it makes sense for them to continue to develop the gaming GPU business aggressively at least.
I dont fanboy, I chase value. My house is a mix of AMD/Nvidia/Intel/ARM and I use the right architecture wherever I can.
If im guilty of anything its Hopeium but honestly all the leaks I have been following show suggest that the 9070 and 9070 XT will offer same or better performance vs 5070 class cards at prices far below street cost. Nvidia’s MSRPs are a lie and the market shows that. NO AIB can produce these cards for the prices Nvidia has them selling at without rebates on the back end. Thats why you saw a very small number of MSRP models and no plans to restock. Everything else out there on the market is over MSRP.
We know AMD has stock in back rooms and warehouses, we have the pictures and confirmation from rank and file staff at places like Microcenter. We also know that AMD’s Instinct MI series is not selling as well as Nvidia so they are not as incentivized to divert silicon to higher margin products.
So, yeah it might be another round of shitty nvidia prices and stock, but we wont see the same scalping for AMD, and the value offered by AMD will embarrass nvidia once you turn off DLSS. Why else would they lie and say the 5070 matches 4090 performance other than to try to sell as much as they can before the 9070 forces them to drop prices.
That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I'm... mildly impressed.
AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they're pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia's MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD's new dates. Because both of these companies suck.
On the plus side for consumers, there's some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won't underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We'll see what reviews have to say about it.
Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia's aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that's not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they're easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.
I'm also very confused about why you'd "turn off DLSS". Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That's a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn't exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.
See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a "matter of opinion". It doesn't even need to be on purpose, it's just easier to produce than to counter.
Aaaand now I made myself sad.
In any case, here's hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They've apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I'll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.
I dont think this is misinformation, just a difference of opinion and interpretation of what is known. I also openly admit that I have a tint on this release because I am really hoping that AMD does it right with reasonable pricing and performance.
As for DLSS/FSR I prefer not to use either because where I actually want faster frames and benefit the added latancy is not worth it, and where I dont care about the extra frames I prefer higher quality details. I find both framegen tech to be a poor service to the end user and thats why I dislike Nvidia’s marketing of the 5070 as equivalent to a 4090 when turning on DLSS. I also dislike their texture compression as an excuse to keep vram artificially low to prevent people from using consumer GPUs for running LLMs.
Ah, so you meant DLSS to mean specifically "DLSS Frame Generation". I agree that the fact that both upscaling and frame gen share the same brand name is confusing, but when I hear DLSS I typically think upscaling (which would actually improve your latency, all else being equal).
Frame gen is only useful in specific use cases, and I agree that when measuring performance you shouldn't do so with it on by default, particularly for anything below 100-ish fps. It certainly doesn't make a 5070 run like a 5090, no matter how many intermediate frames you generate.
But again, you keep going off on these conspiracy tangents on things that don't need a conspiracy to suck. Nvidia isn't keeping vram artificially low as a ploy to keep people from running LLMs, they're keeping vram low for cost cutting. You can run chatbots just fine on 16, let alone on 24 or 32 gigs for the halo tier cards, and there are (rather slow) ways around hard vram limits for larger models these days.
You don't need some weird conspiracy to keep local AI away from the masses. They just... want money and have people that will pay them more for all that fast ram elsewhere while the gaming bros will still shell out cash for the gaming GPUs with the lower RAM. Reality isn't any better than your take on it, it's just... more straightforward and boring.
I dream that the reason AMD delayed their launch and are being so cryptic, is because they saw how underwhelming the 5080 was and decided to make a card (perhaps a 9070 XT) that matches its performance at the price of a 5070 or something.
Now I don’t think that will happen. Their previous market strategies have been very uninspired. But there’s certainly an opening here to make a play for market share and make Nvidia look like greedy fools.
AMD cards are not scalped like nvidea. During the pandemic going to wait outside of microcenter they always had AMD cards available. No one wants them!
I would never expect anything day 1, ever. Scalpers ruined day 1. And though I would be surprised if they were out of stock a week later. Unlike Nvidia they actually want to sell cards.
Unfortunately it’s pure capitalism. No matter what company got paid. They don’t care about it users got the card they wanted, or even if the scalers make a profit or go bust, they already got paid.
I’m very curious how this one will pan out. I tried Outer Worlds, and I dropped it after about 10 hours or so. It felt oddly empty to me. I figure I should give it another shot at some point.
Excited for this! It might scratch the Skyrim itch I’ve had for so many years. I know I can go into this without playing the other PoE games, but I’ve been hooked on CRPGs ever since BG3 so I kind of want to play those games first
Can’t speak for PoE1, but the second one (deadfire) is a treat. Though I would not recommend playing it through turn based mode, it feels very much like retrofitting the existing RTwP system into a turn based system, which is what happened.
It takes some time to get used go it (or at least it did for me since I don’t really enjoy RTwP) but still.
RTwP is the only thing that I’m worried about since I’m coming from BG3 and Dnd 5e. Plus, I’m playing it on Xbox with a controller, and RTwP seems better suited for mouse and keyboard, but we’ll see how it goes!
Kingdom Come 2 kinda does that for me, it’s more of a medieval rather than fantasy setting but I get flashbacks to Skyrim because of the melee combat. It’s also funny as shit
Seems like all the way on the other end of the spectrum of Kingdom Come deliverance 2. Might pick this up after I’m done with Kingdom Come.
the lack of stealth is a bit of a turn off for me personally, but the hand placed events and mobs seems like a big plus.
Does anyone know if the game is viable without any companions? The reviews I have seen seem to complain about them a lot and I already dislike AI teammates.
Same, I really enjoyed Veilgaurd and actually finished the damn thing, which is rare for me these days. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good, breezy arpg.
Shame to not have Mortismal’s “review” since they are probably one of the biggest PoE fanboys on the internet and CRPGs are their wheelhouse www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMCS_1ortZk
And also, to be kind of a shit, I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game aren’t just tolerable, they’re the main reason I love it.
I definitely read a review where the reviewer was frustrated that he was underleveled and annoyed that his companions kept yelling at him to upgrade his gear, lol. But seriously, this sanding down of any sort of friction is something that has gotten to me with plenty of games in the past decade, so I appreciate someone laying it out plainly.
The thing to understand is that reviews are inherently subjective. Decade(…s?) ago, Kieron Gillen wrote a pretty famous manifesto where he basically compared game reviewing to travel writing.
When you are booking a holiday, you don’t care how many grains of sand are on the beach. You probably don’t care too much about the average flow rate of cars on the highway during rush hour. What you care about is whether you will enjoy it.
For some? That means there being plenty of museums. For others it is beaches with accessible parking so that you can leave your crap in a rental car. For others still it is nightlife.
And that applies to “friction” as well. Because let’s take a different example. Many people (myself included) criticized Elden Ring for having a grace outside of basically every single boss room. We half joke that people would lose their god damned minds if they had to play Dark Souls 2 where one of the hardest bosses in the game involves fighting your way through a solid wall of Black Knight level enemies every single time. Others think we are fucking stupid for liking Dark Souls 2 (… they are probably right) and that this lets you focus solely on the boss and not memorizing what a weeb in armor is going to do… before you fight the other weeb in armor. And others still will point out that having to run past those enemies or fight one or two helps to “reset” the mind between attempts and avoids being on tilt against a boss.
Just like some people want a beach where everyone is in a bikini and dehydrated like Hugh Jackman on a film set. And others still want somewhere they can relax and maybe surf for a bit.
Which… mostly speaks to Grubb’s problems as a reviewer. As a “game leaks” guy, he is amazing. I think he lacks the drive to be a full on game journo but that is also a function of him working for the company that steals the work of the rest of games media on the regular (Fandom). But he has a VERY long history of giving “spicy takes” where he has a rudimentary understanding of a topic but still feels the need to shit on others unnecessarily. He isn’t the only one but I am increasingly at the point where I can’t tell if that is engagement farming or “Just Jeff Grubb”.
I understand that reviews are subjective. I just found it funny that the characters in the game were shouting the solution to the reviewer’s problems at him for so long that he found it frustrating.
Jeff Grubb’s not-a-review was speaking to exactly the kind of thing that’s important to me in games and why he likes this one so much, which did me a great service, so I’m not sure why you’re shitting on him for spicy takes here, lol.
And good for you if that aligns with your wants (it sure aligns with mine).
But, at its core, it is “stupid games media” rhetoric. If you are in a mad dash to finish a review or even a game guide (Fandom’s gotta eat), you might not have time or even interest to go back track and do ten side quests in the starting area. At which point constantly hearing “you should get a better pistol” is gonna be REAL grating and is arguably bad encounter design. What is described as “no friction” is often designing encounters so that people can do both the critical path (just story quests) and all the side paths. And its why so many games either have continuous encounter scaling or just big levers you can flip (PoE1 and 2 did the latter).
So yeah. I do have a bit of an issue with someone in the games media space (especially at the company that steals the work of the rest of games media…) “be(ing) kind of a shit” to colleagues in a manner that just fuels the same kind of bullshit they constantly put up with on social media.
Whereas a “real” games reviewer learns to… not be a shit? I forget what game it was, but I remember Mortismal basically saying “The level scaling is kind of wonky. If you just do only the main story quests, you are going to have a bad time and you’ll need to really understand the combat systems to progress. But if you do too many side quests, you’ll be overpowered and just run right through everything” (… actually that sounds like PoE1 after the DLCs came out…). Rather than just making fun of other reviewers for not being able to handle “friction”.
Although I will say, in Grubb’s defense: That is also kind of the Giant Bomb style guide. It ignores that the OGs (Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Alex, etc) had fairly strong “games media” backgrounds by the time the site started and knew how to say something inflammatory to get a point across without angering the publishers to the point of losing ad revenue (… okay, Jeff wasn’t quite as good at the last part). But without those old hats to act as editors (and no, Dan doesn’t count), you get situations where “snark” is just shit stirring that feeds the people tormenting the rest of the industry.
Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues. But there are plenty of them praising games that he and I found disappointing for that sanding down, so I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing. You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit. If you want more nuanced opinions of his, they come in podcast form, not written form.
I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing.
Yeah… that is a real shit perspective. You are actively “frustrated” that people like things you don’t. That is a very big side effect of the content bubble we all liv ein.
And I say this as someone who has loved squad based tactics since the JA2 and Silent Storm days. I am WELL used to “okay, add about 30% to the metacritic score for anything in that genre” and the like.
Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues (…) You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit.
Which gets back to what is really “the problem”. It is about building his brand by “lightly ribbing” his colleagues. His colleagues who are perpetually days away from layoffs and who are constantly attacked by the asmongolds of the world who are using the exact same arguments and are glad to say “See, this person gets it. Why can’t they?”.
Its about worker solidarity even amongst competition. It is why so many of his colleagues will make it a point to preface even the skeets with “I get that this probably came from on high but” or would have just removed the “snark” entirely and said something like
I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game are the main reason I love it.
Well, yours is certainly one perspective that I don’t share. I’m sorry his post wasn’t polite enough for you, but I promise he is and will continue to be friends with all of these people afterward; it’s a small industry and only getting smaller.
While several reviews are knocking the game for things that he and I find not only to be non problems but in fact solutions, I found value in him sharing that perspective coupled with a negative review detailing the opposite, which is why I put it here.
Hmm… sure, but I feel like "reviews are subjective" gets used as an excuse to give low-effort reviews a pass too often.
Like, I understand if a Steam reviewer writes whatever because they're just a user, but I cannot justify using the same scale to judge a professional reviewer.
I understand a game may not be a reviewer's cup of tea, but if this stops them from engaging with the game's systems and attempting to provide insight through their review then I think it's fair to judge they haven't done their job well.
Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go "Oh, I'm gonna do half of it because the rest isn't my cup of tea. Sorry." No, I'll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: "I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z."
I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.
Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go “Oh, I’m gonna do half of it because the rest isn’t my cup of tea. Sorry.” No, I’ll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: “I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z.”
How about we have ANY job security before we start playing the “I am paying you sub minimum wage to run that kroger. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU DO RESTOCKING AT EIGHT AM!!! YOU ARE PAID TO DO THIS OVERNIGHT!!” shittery? Hmm
Which is something a lot of old hat games media have actually talked about. It is a lot easier to run a 36 hour day to finish up that JRPG review when you know you’ll be able to rest next week. Rather than be told your contract isn’t being renewed but to check back next month. Or to just have your entire department gutted because an exec decided they didn’t need to have TWO whole people playing video games. And when you know you’ll get something other than “Fucking woke reviewers don’t understand how to play a game” feedback from the “fans” who only ever see your review when their favorite hatemonger youtuber talks about it while making sure EVERYONE knows your social media accounts.
I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.
Define “standards”.
Is it “You must finish a game before reviewing it”? Because Jeff Gerstmann kind of infamously made it a point to finish Metal Gear Survive prior to reviewing it (I think it might have been his final print review at Giant Bomb?). EVERYONE, colleague and fan alike, told him he was stupid. And his consensus was basically that he felt the same way after 30 hours of misery that he did after 2.
Is it “You must be good at a game to review it?”. Because, funny enough, Remap Radio kind of talked about this last summer on one of their ridiculously long podcasts in the context of “games media suck and aren’t good enough to play Shadows of the Erdtree” in that short window before basically everyone said “So… this DLC is fucking hard, huh?”. And they pointed out that this is not at all a new experience for them. They are regularly playing much less polished and MUCH harder versions of these games under a strict time crunch where the only “guide” they have is what their buddy who is paid to write a game guide can experimentally figure out.
And how that translates to a review?
like in the infamous God Hand review.
You mean the game which, throughout every re-release, the vast majority of players either nope out after they get their asses beat by random grunts in the first stage? And most of the rest leave when they get to the shop and realize they need to buy and build their own combos blind?
I have no idea what “infamous God Hand review” you are referring to. But the majority I read when I heard about this cool ass PS2 game? It was “Hey, this is a really freaking cool concept and I personally had a blast. But it is not for everyone and a lot of the fundamental gameplay concepts are outright bad. OPM or whatever the hell has a demo of it and we strongly encourage you to get that if it is still on news stands because you are either going to love or hate this”. And, because this was still the era of print (like the VERY tail end), there was money to have one main review and like two “impressions” reviews at most of the major outlets. And, like almost all games, they would make it a point to have at least one sicko persona give it a high score while the rest bounced off. Which kind of represented how players respond to it to this day.
I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.
Or is it just “you must agree with me?”. Because, speaking as someone who has loved flight sims and tactics games his entire life (I was the kid in elementary school who liked xcom. The old xcom…)… most gamers don’t have my tastes in gaming. So having someone who dreams of Silent Storm reviewing Fire Emblem isn’t a particularly useful metric for most people.
That said? I learned from an early age to actually look at the by line on a review. I learned which guys/personas at EGM or PC Gamer I vibed with and which I didn’t. And that continued on into the online age and to this day.
Sometimes it is really annoying. Like… I like WW2 RTSes a lot. I fully understand why I need to vet every single youtuber who likes the games I like…
But also? Sometimes it is a really awesome realization that the weirdo audiophile on a podcast is the same guy who wrote some of my favorite reviews over the past decade (Rob Zacny is a treasure). And that the reason I am vibing with his thoughts on Valkyria Chronicles is that I have been vibing with his thoughts on other games for a significant part of our adult lives.
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