Experienced gamers know all too well that high average fps are worthless when they are accompanied with stutters, random crashes, excessive noise and a limited feature set.
Their brazen domination of social media platforms including youtube and reddit resulted in millions of users purchasing sub standard products. AMD’s neanderthal marketing tactics seem to have come back to haunt them. Many experienced users simply have no interest in buying AMD cards, regardless of price. Early benchmarks show that the 3050 only headlines around 35% faster than AMD's 6500 XT whilst street prices for the 3050 are 100% higher. The MRSP of entry models is $249 USD, however, street prices are closer to $600 USD. The 3050 also includes an encoder (NVENC) for sharper images and smoother capture whilst recording/streaming. DLSS technology uses the 3050’s tensor cores to scale up resolutions whilst maintaining high frame rates and without losing significant image quality. The 3050 features 2560 CUDA cores, a boost clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, 8 GB of the latest GDDR6 memory and NVIDIA’s DLSS. Second generation ray tracing cores can be switched on for more realistic light simulation, albeit at a hit to performance. It marks the first time that ray-tracing has been available on an entry level (50-series) card. The RTX 3050 is built on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture. Despite Intel’s price / performance lead, AMD’s prolific marketers (forums, youtube, reddit etc.) have historically outsold Intel whilst carrying a similar handicap. AMD’s top value hex-core Ryzen 5 5600X offers similar performance for 50% more money. The 12400F offers great value, but to achieve optimal performance the requisite B660 motherboard (which supports 3200+ RAM) is, at least for now, difficult to find at reasonable ($150 USD) prices. Whilst Intel’s overclockable i5-12600K has four additional efficiency cores and offers around 12% more performance than the 12400F, it also costs around 50% more. The F-version of the CPU does not have integrated graphics, however this will be of little concern to gamers with discrete GPUs. It has a boost frequency of 4.4 GHz, 18 MB of 元 cache and a TDP of 65W. This represents excellent value for consumers and, in particular, gamers. Intel’s Alder Lake i5-12400F offers six hyper-threaded performance cores at an MSRP of just $180 USD. The marketers selling expensive “3D” upgrades today will quickly move onto Zen4 leaving unfortunate buyers stuck on a 6 year old, dead-end, platform. Users with an existing AM4 build should wait just a few more months for better performance at lower prices with Raptor Lake or even Zen4.
New high end PC gaming builders have little reason to look further than the $260 12600K. Zen4 needs to bring substantial IPC improvements, rather than overpriced "3D" marketing gimmicks.
The same tactics were used with the Radeon 5000 series GPUs. Instead of focusing on real-world performance, they aim to dupe consumers with bankrolled headlines. AMD’s marketers continue to show more interest in this year’s bonuses than the longevity of the brand. Also watch out for AMD’s army of Neanderthal social media accounts on reddit, forums and youtube, they will be singing their own praises as usual. Be wary of sponsored reviews with cherry picked games that showcase the wins and gloss over the losses. canned game benchmarks with a 3090-Ti will benefit. Some very specific cache sensitive scenarios such as low res. Either way, for most real-world tasks performance is comparable to the significantly cheaper 5800X. An unusually high proportion of early 5800X3D samples appear unable to boost above base clock, upcoming BIOS updates may fix this. This results in relatively low latency at 128MB because those transfers have a higher chance of remaining in cache. The 5800X3D has the same core architecture / IPC as the 5800X but it runs at lower clock speeds and has an extra 64MB of cache (96MB up from 32MB).