I’m very familiar with this game. At 1080P, the 6700 XT is more than enough if raytracing is disabled. You don’t even need to use FSR. You could probably even use low raytracing settings and still be above 60 fps.

Do you need a high end water loop to cool these monsters for max efficiency? I’d think that they would throttle fast even with high end AIOs.

It also depends on whether they’re evaluating games that use more than 8 cores. The 2 CCD latency penalty is probably a little bit overblown because even in the previous generations, 5950X/5900X beat the 5800X in quite a few games.

I think the 7800/7950X3D is a big leap from the 5800X3D. 2700x to 7800X3D probably feels like a console generation jump.

If you’re the type that likes to max out performance with your system by maximizing cooling, overclocking, tweaking memory, etc then Intel is probably what you want. Intel CPUs draw a lot more power than the AMD X3D cpus but they’re also capable of going quite a bit faster than stock if you can tame the heat and get fast memory to run.

I’m on a 7950X3D right now. It’s been so great so far but there’s not much you can do to get big improvements over stock performance. You could undervolt but there’s still a hard cap over the boost speeds. Some motherboards can allow more tweaking but it’s a lot of work. So even with great cooling, don’t expect much more than stock performance. AMD processors currently also don’t benefit much from faster than 6000 ram.

Those top end Intel CPUs are already kinda made for high end water cooling systems. You can’t really make the most of them without being able to keep them cool enough to not throttle. No AIO is good enough if you really want to push the 14900 to its limits.

At stock, 7800X3D and 13900/14900 are very close except for some games where 3D cache gives a huge advantage. But the Intel systems have more untapped potential for expert users.

I just got a 7950X3D. Been very satisfied with it so far but it’s not very overclockable even tho temps are well controlled in my system. On an Intel system, performance could be much better than stock as long as the heat is under control. Memory also isn’t very tweakable on AM5 so far. Most AM5 systems are gonna be around 6000 for memory.

Steam deck needed this. The new handhelds were pulling in every where except for the touchpads. Wish that they had upgraded the processing power as well tho. DF has shown many new games are too “big” for the deck. Battery life js important but it would have been nice to have the option of more power when plugged in. At least this should put some major pressure on Lenovo and Asus to cut prices.

Radeon needs massive investments in drivers and technology.

They had the raw compute power since a while but struggled to get this power ‘onto the street’.

Something which is still baffling me, considering that they seem to do well on consoles.

It’s not just about drivers tho. AMD driven consoles are also weak with good upscaling and ray tracing. It’s getting to be a real problem on consoles because the resolution has to be dropped significantly when high quality ray tracing is used. Then those consoles have to upscale back to 4K with FSR2 which is still pretty bad.