'give Us The Chip. Give Us The Ram. Let Us Have Our Fun. Let Us Go...

'I personally wish they would let us be the companies we are in, instead of trying to create the mold.'

Pick any third-party graphics card manufacturer and visit its website. If you browse through all the models it produces, you'll notice something very quickly: they're all very similar to each other. Some of the reasons behind this are all to do with saving manufacturing costs, but according to one company's PR representative, it turns out that the GPU makers themselves are pretty conservative about what can and can't be done.

This insight was shared by Sapphire's Edward Crisler, its North America PR rep and PC gaming evangelist, on the latest edition of the Hardware Unboxed Podcast. Over the hour-long discussion, Crisler and HUB host Tim Schiesser chatted about all things gaming GPU-wise, from the RDNA 4 launch to the current RAM crisis, and even Nvidia's 12VHPWR meltygate power socket.

While discussing VRAM and who gets to decide how much a card can have, Crisler said with a smile: "I got to be careful of what I'm about to say here. I'm going to get in trouble." And that's when he opened the secret book of graphics card making that many folks have never had the pleasure of reading.

"Sometimes I really wish the chip makers would get out of the way and let us partners just make our cards. Give us the chip. Give us the RAM. Tell us what we have to provide to make it work with the board. And then let us make the cards. Let us have our fun. Let us go nuts. Let there be real differentiation. Sometimes it feels like this market becomes too much the same."

Schiesser then asked Crisler if he was referring to things like overclocking limits and profiles with graphics cards. Sapphire's rep clarified his point: "Right now, quite frankly, if you're going to buy a new video card, I tell people don't look at performance. Performance is irrelevant. So, if you want to buy a 9070 XT, let's face it, from the worst 9070 XT to the best 9070 XT, [the] actual performance difference is a delta of 1.5%, 2%. It really is non-existent. It's margin of error."

He's not wrong, of course, as even the most overclocked of 'OC edition' graphics cards are barely any faster than stock models. Although Crisler doesn't explicitly say this, what he's essentially suggesting is that these narrow ranges of clock speeds aren't something that Sapphire has settled on, but it's a constraint set by AMD.

That leaves third-party companies to try and stand out from the crowd by focusing on the e

Source: PC Gamer