I have the following questions about AMD:
- If I want to switch to an AMD GPU, do I need to change my motherboard? Or do all motherboards work with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs?
- Do I need to buy an AMD CPU as well? Or can I use my existing Intel CPU with an AMD GPU?
- How does the AMD GPU naming convention work? More specifically, what is AMD’s equivalent of the RTX 4070? (I want to get a 4070 but I figured it would be a good idea to research AMD’s options)
You don’t need an AMD CPU. Smart Access Memory (aka Resizeable BAR), which is what you’d be seeing if you try to research matching AMD CPUs and GPUs work with any combination of CPU and GPU. Yes, even nVidia GPUs have ReBAR now. SAM is just AMD’s marketing term for ReBAR.
AMD is currently lagging behind in the temporal upscaling department. This would be your DLSS, XeSS, FSR, and game engine-specific temporal upscalers. DLSS3 is currently the best of the lot but is locked to nVidia cards because of the way it works. It requires the Tensor cores only found on nVidia GPUs. The main reason to use these upscalers at the moment is to get usable FPS when running Ray Tracing at high resolutions. It can also extend the life of your GPU by allowing it to render at lower resolutions and upscale to higher resolutions. Ie 1080p -> 1440p. Fair warning that nVidia’s DLSS implementations aren’t very backwards compatible since they rely heavily on GPU architecture. FSR and XeSS are theoretically platform agnostic but XeSS is better optimised to be run on Intel’s ARC.