This is noting the fact that CES is currently ongoing and AMD along with Nvidia have made their presentations.
According to PC World, AMD has just made a number of announcements pertaining to future products. Ryzen+ is set to be unleashed this March, but it’s not going to come with a huge jump in performance (at least 10 percent which is better than Intel, but it will mean that single-core performance at least will remain behind the new Coffee Lake chips). Threadripper2 is also in the works (a good thing for enthusiasts), but the news also came with the disappointment of no new GPU models (possibly not until Navi hits in 2019). Now it doesn’t mean that AMD does not have sizable upgrades to their CPU line in the works, but we can pretty much count on Zen2 not arriving until 2019.
Nvidia meanwhile is also not planning to unleash any new GPU models this year, as this year it looks to be all about software such as their new Freestyle feature and the new GeForce now
Overall, it looks like AMD is still not going to do great in the desktop GPU market this year (especially with the rumors of a Vega refresh being false), they might make up some ground with new driver code aimed at Vega, but Nvidia will still remain the safest choice if you want a straightforward upgrade in terms of both performance and reduced power draw and heat production. Now it does in fact look like the opposite is true if you are a user with a netbook, but it’s not that applicable to those of us in 3D.
In fact, the safest option right now at least, in my opinion, may be to simply have a machine free of AMD once again. Nvidia still has a major advantage in the combo of performance/power draw/heat production while Coffee Lake, despite the recently found security hole, still offers a superior balance of single/multi-core performance and better plug-n-play with memory (you also have Optane which, for now, only works with an Intel machine). Perhaps AMD will indeed be the goto choice by next year when you can get a Zen2/Navi combo, but for those of us whose machines are already several years old, it would be a hard wait.
Now we still have to see what Intel will bring out, their next CPU for sure is the 8-core Ice Lake, but it’s probably not going to exist until the end of the year.
Comments, how will this affect your upgrade decisions?