To buy a new GPU now or wait a couple of months?

If you're planning to buy a new gaming PC or upgrade your existing PC, picking the right moment is always a difficult decision. AMD and NVIDIA regularly roll out a new GPU architecture and soon we'll also see the first discrete video cards based on Intel's brand-new Xe architecture.

At this particular moment, the decision whether you should buy a new GPU is a hard one to take. NVIDIA just released its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series last month. The high-end GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are also available, while the RTX 3070 should follow at the end of this month. The RTX 3090 is priced at $1,499 so that disqualifies it for most gamers due to the combination of the very high price and the poor price/performance ratio. The GeForce RTX 3080 on the other hand is a very attractive card, even at $699 (or slightly more for custom models), but the problem is that it's plagued by very poor availability. Whether NVIDIA isn't producing enough cards or market demand is way high than expected, the result is that any new supply of cards is selling out almost instantaneously.

AMD has been lagging behind NVIDIA for years now, never being able to challenge the green team's top cards. Will that change this generation? Most market watchers expect AMD will be unable to beat NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 but it looks like Big Navi could be quite competitive with the GeForce RTX 3080, at least in terms of traditional raster performance.

It will be really interesting to see how Big Navi does in terms of ray tracing. Big Navi will be the first AMD GPU with ray tracing support, while NVIDIA's Ampere is the green team's second-generation architecture with ray tracing support. At the moment, adoption of ray tracing is still poor but it's bound to become a major technology in the coming years as all major platforms will support it. Graphics are very important for computer users, everyone likes a nice GUI even when playing casino. To play the latest AAA games in high quality at high resolutions, a high-end GPU is basically a necessity.

Overall, we know little of what to expect from AMD's Big Navi. The red team will host an online press conference on October 28 to reveal its Radeon RX 6000 series. Rumor has it that the cards will be available in stores sometime in November. As such, it may be opportune for gamers to wait a week or two longer to see what AMD brings to the table. For third-party performance reviews you'll have to wait until November though.

NVIDIA is also not resting on its laurels and is working on new GPUs too. While the 5nm Hopper is still a year away, it does seem that we can expect higher-capacity versions of Ampere soon after the Big Navi launch. Sometime in December, you can expect not only a 20GB version of the RTX 3080 but also a 16GB edition of the RTX 3070. Other than this, a refresh of the GeForce RTX 30 is also in the cards. The current models are made using Samsung's 8nm process but NVIDIA is rumored to be working on a switch to TSMC's higher-performing 7nm process.

Ampere GPUs made on TSMC's 7nm will likely have both higher energy efficiency and higher performance. Odds are high that these will basically be a refresh of the current RTX 30 series, perhaps a new SUPER line.

To further complicate matters, a new player is entering the discrete GPU market soon. Intel has tried its hand at 3D graphics in the past but so far the company failed to make a market entry. With NVIDIA having so much success in the datacenter market, Intel is now taking graphics more seriously. Besides accelerators for the datacenter market, Intel's new Xe architecture is also used for integrated graphics as well as discrete video cards.

The first gaming cards from Intel are expected sometime in 2021. It will be interesting to see how these perform.