Welcome to 2023 and the return of DF Direct Weekly! After a short time away – we missed a week, actually – the team returns to discuss the latest gaming and technology news. The year kicked off with the Consumer Electronics Show – CES – and in this week’s show, myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia discuss the keynotes from Nvidia, AMD and Sony, including our first look at Gran Turismo 7 on PSVR2, while addressing the latest concerns about thermal throttling on the RX 7900 XTX reference board as well as new innovations coming this year for OLED TVs.
There’s also time to mull over the backlash to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which was perhaps inevitable. Bearing in mind the extreme reactions, I wanted to weigh in with some more detailed thoughts about why I thought the product was ‘OK’ as opposed to the total disaster that many think it is. There’s a series of factors that define how RTX 4070 Ti turned out as it did and clearly, questions remain about the outlook for the GPU market going forward.
The arguments against the 4070 Ti are fairly straightforward: it’s the most expensive 70-class product Nvidia has ever delivered and its specs are paltry compared to prior 70-class products. In terms of relative performance, the 4070 Ti is broadly comparable with the top-end results from the RTX 3000 generation, when the RTX 3070 did the same vs RTX 2080 Ti at $499. All of this is true and the outlook seems grim for PC graphics. On the face of it, Nvidia and AMD are not helping matters based on the prices of the products seen so far.
00:00:00 Introduction00:01:25 News 01: Sony at CES 2023: PS VR2 and Gran Turismo00:15:37 News 02: Nvidia debuts RTX 4000 laptop GPUs, RTX video upscaling at CES00:50:27 News 03: AMD announces new CPUs, discrete RDNA 3 laptop GPUs during CES showcase01:01:02 News 04: Upcoming OLED TVs get brightness boost01:06:42 DF Supporter Q1: Could modders add shader precompilation to a game?01:09:09 DF Supporter Q2: Are path traced remakes of classic games feasible on consoles?01:11:22 DF Supporter Q3: Would DF produce a video covering ray tracing games on Series S?01:12:39 DF Supporter Q4: What do you think DF has done right over the years to survive – and to keep growing?
That’s a pretty damning series of charges but while the case against the RTX 4080 is straightforward, the 4070 Ti is more complex. First of all, the lack of a Founders Edition card to peg prices at its $799/£799 is a disappointment – especially bearing in mind how outsized the products tend to be and how overpriced many of the third party boards are. However, looking at Scan right now, it’s still possible to get the card at its recommended £799 – and I’d still take it over the RTX 3080, which continues to sell at £700 or higher buying new. More memory, DLSS3 and improved efficiency are worth the extra money.