I guess it's regional bang-per-buck. I just bought a 4070 over a 7800XT because it cost only 20€ more and for that 20€ I get a better upscaler (I personally find DLSS visually better than FSR) and much better ray-tracing performance with only a marginal drop in rasterization performance. Oh and also better wattage which is a factor considering my cost of electricity, probably offsets that 20€ over the duration of me using the card. And I got the new shitty Star Wars game for free. I'm not trying to be an Nvidia fanboy here. When I decided to get a new card I was absolutely certain I'm getting an AMD card because Nvidia cards were supposed to be overpriced as hell. Well, turns out bang-per-buck Nvidia card came out on top.
I think my 4070 example is probably why they're going to target more budget cards, because xx70 cards are already outside the budget of the average gamer. If you look at the Steam hardware survey xx50 and xx60 cards make up the lion's share of the cards from the last 3 generations. There's literally only 3070 in the top 10 most popular cards, everything else xx60 or xx50. 3080 is the first xx80 card and that's only 15th most popular and 4090 is the first xx90 card while being 30th most popular. Why waste resources trying to compete with xx70, xx80 or xx90 cards when you could just beat the xx60 card and get most of the market.
Well, I feel a bit better getting my 7900 XTX then even if the price was a bit of a gut punch. It’s been a rock solid replacement of my 3090 for gaming and general Linux performance and stability. Guess I’ll be sticking with this for a few years till AMD decides to compete on high end again.
I bought high end graphics cards from amd because I game under Linux, and Nvidia drivers are crap there. Or at least used to be, they are supposed to be improved now? But I already left that camp...
I'm planning to upgrade my Linux system with a new graphics card soon, and the only reason I'm actually still considering Nvidia is CUDA. It just seems so much easier, and so much more broadly supported by software. But maybe that's just because I've never tried it.
I am curious to see the next series from AMD. I am wishing for a new gaming rig for about a year now. I was really considering getting the 7900XT/XTX. If the mid-range for the next gen is performing well, that might just do it.