And NVIDIA has taken notice, judging by CEO Jensen Huang’s comments.
After AMD released its seven-nanometer Radeon VII graphics card with impressive-looking performance, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang responded by essentially trashing it. "The performance is lousy and there's nothing new," he told PC World. "No ray tracing, no AI. It's 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with an [NVIDIA RTX] 2080."
NVIDIA's CEO doth protest too much, perhaps, but he's right to be worried. According to a CES performance tease, the Radeon VII actually beat the RTX 2080 in several video-editing and 3D-animation tasks. It also bested the RTX 2080 when playing Strange Brigade and other titles, especially at 4K resolution.
While NVIDIA just adopted 12-nanometer tech for the RTX series, AMD has moved on to seven-nanometer designs for the Radeon VII. Rather than criticizing its rival's performance, NVIDIA notably attacked AMD's lack of (NVIDIA-exclusive) features like ray tracing, G-SYNC and AI-powered DLSS anti-aliasing. However, that has yet to prove useful for gamers and doesn't help content creators at all. If ray tracing doesn't pan out and AMD keeps pushing the chip-design envelope, the next couple of years could get rough for NVIDIA.
NVIDIA still dominates...MUCH MORE
NVIDIA still dominates PC graphics, as its performance at CES 2019 clearly showed. It will own the laptop-gaming space this year with its all-new RTX Max-Q designs, as numerous PC makers introduced fast and light devices based on the GPUs. NVIDIA managed to shrink its chips down to a point where you can get a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU into a 4.5-pound laptop, which is a pretty incredible feat.
During his last keynote, Huang spent more time talking about ray tracing than Max-Q. First he showed off some cinematic ray traced graphics and how they improve games like Atomic Heart. Next he flaunted the company's AI-powered DLSS anti-aliasing tech running at 1440p resolution to smooth out blocky pixelation, along with a cool demo of light-scattering "caustics" in Justice.
After unveiling the midrange GeForce RTX 2060 at a not-exactly-cheap $345, NVIDIA launched into G-SYNC, announcing that it was testing and certifying a number of monitors packing AMD's FreeSync tech. Out of hundreds tested, he noted, only a dozen were certified, but Huang didn't stop there. "As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync," he said. "The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD's graphics cards."...
