Here is the article in question: If RDNA 5 can’t turn things around I have a tough time believing AMD will stick around in PC graphics for much longer
The thrust of the article is, essentially, that Nvidia has absurd GPU market share (80% or higher, usually) while AMD has struggled to gain ground (15% market share before Intel ARC, around 10% today), and the numbers from Steam hardware surveys seem to back this up. AMD just doesn’t hold a significant portion of the stand alone GPU market, not compared to Nvidia.
The author goes on to attribute AMD’s lack of progress to the fact that Nvidia is always rolling out new features and new hardware, leaving AMD to play catch-up. Nvidia pushes G-Sync, AMD has to catch-up with FreeSync, Nvidia has DLSS, AMD has to catch-up with Fluid Motion, Nvidia has hardware dedicated to ray tracing, AMD tries to catch up with brute force.
This disparity in feature sets is what has given Nvidia such a market advantage, or so the author suggests, and why they think AMD won’t be in the GPU market for much longer. To the author’s credit, if you listen to much of the conversation around GPUs, there are really two big standouts in the decision process: Features and price. Which priority wins out is going to come down to the individual consumer.
For my part, I don’t think AMD is going to leave the GPU business any time soon, if they were, they wouldn’t be investing into new technologies like frame generation, but I don’t think AMD’s GPU division is going to thrive until they address how the PC community perceives them. As long as people think they’re getting more with Nvidia, they’ll keep buying Nvidia; AMD can either grow their cards’ feature sets more quickly than Nvidia is growing theirs’, or AMD can do a better job selling the features and performance that their cards do have, or, ideally, both.
People don’t get excited about AMD’s products the same way they do about Nvidia’s, and a lot of that is just because Nvidia has way, way more customers, but another part of that is because AMD doesn’t do as much to sell it’s product or it’s brand as Nvidia does. We’d all like to think that branding doesn’t matter, but when it comes to getting people interested and selling a product, it can make a big difference, and AMD’s GPU branding is nebulous at best.
AMD isn’t going to gain market share until they overcome people’s perception that they’re an “also ran.” In a nutshell, they need to gain mind share, be that through cutting edge features and performance, better marketing, or, ideally, both. When I read some time ago the headline “AMD engineer claims they could have made a card that competes with the RTX 4090, but it wasn’t cost effective to produce,” it bugged me, because even if they’d just made a single in-house sample it would have been enough to get people’s attention. “One-off AMD GPU beats RTX 4090” does nothing in terms of improving existing products, but everything to get customers to look at your existing products. It’s dumb, but humans are weird.
Okay, this was just me thinking out-loud. TL;DR: AMD needs to keep adding more features, more quickly, and do a better job selling and getting people to consider their brand.
Have an awesome Halloween, everyone!!!
As long as people think they’re getting more with Nvidia
But you do get more with Nvidia.
I would like to get a Radeon, but I’ve also seen that 7900XTX still draws 100W just for having multiple monitors connected. My 1080Ti draws 70W with two monitors, even two 1440p monitors at 60Hz, so this was an issue for Nvidia about 6 years ago, and I think it may have only been fixed on 40 series. Maybe AMD will get there in two or three years, but that’s just another thing to catch up on.
With my 1080Ti, I can use the Nvidia Inspector to drop this to 26W, but it does cause occasional artifacting when changing power states. I found this to be much less frequent on Windows 11 vs. Windows 10.
The VRAM on 7900XTX looks really nice, but all of the stuff you would want it for, is more difficult to use with a Radeon, or is slower with a Radeon, or is not supported at all.
It is obviously very difficult to compete with Nvidia but I think the absolute priority for them should be true drop-in CUDA compatibility.
It’s not a matter of perception, it’s a matter of results.
There just aren’t that many market positions where Radeon makes sense over Nvidia, it’s pretty much exclusively someone that uses a pc for gaming only, no productivity or content creation, no VR, and a budget where worrying about the latest RTX technology is irrelevant.
That’s not to say that Radeons literally don’t function outside of that narrow band, just that outside of that incredibly thin sliver of the market, it’s no longer an objective decision.
PcGamer has been irrelevant for a long time, a lot of the current writing is lazy and uninformed with less research behind it than an essential oil product.
This isn’t much more than a hit-piece article to grab attention so their ship can sink a little slower. If you can’t write good articles you can always write shocking ones.
Remember: if you are not the greatest at this very moment, give up and accept that you are a failure.
The problem for AMD is this:
Why would they invest any more money?
If I were the CEO of AMD and I saw that billions of dollars in R&D for new GPUs has netted me, I would be tempted to shut down GPU entirely.
AMD cards are good, real good if you consider price to performance, but if your good product does not sell, why would you invest?
I say next generation will be like RX 5000 again, where the top model will be a mid range, affordable offering so they can show the people that they are the Value, not the performance king.
Why would they invest any more money?
Because it always returns far more money than the capital they put in…
People always rip on amds GPU drivers, but show Nvidia control panel vs AMD’s and amds is far superior.
Consoles are AMD hardware now also.
They just need a bit more positive word of mouth and they will really pick up sales.
You do know that the control panels are not drivers right?
Yep yep, apart from beta drivers I’ve hardly ever had issues with drivers on AMD. Just the odd rare game that never gets attention.
Worst thing I experience is low fps in some old games, as they don’t push the GPU to clock up and just putt along.
Back when I had Nvidia, new games would have issues until they released a game ready driver for it.
Steam survey also shows that Intel CPUs still dominate as well, but thats because Intel dominates laptops and OEM systems.
Same with GPUs, NVidia and Intel dominate laptop and oem sales.
But when you look at retail purchases of computer parts, AMD CPUs usually dominate over Intel, when it comes to GPUs, their are some signs that AMD does pretty ok too, like the Mindfactory figures show AMD GPUs have been outselling Nvidia quite commonly.
With that said if AMD can’t make a decent profit on these parts then its probably not worth it, same could be said about Nvidia though, right now its booming AI sales are going to mask a problem with the gaming GPU market which is that its getting too expensive, and all these so called “features” are something that most people can’t access meaningfully. RT being the big one which is just about useless on an 3060 GPUs which is the biggest selling one out their.
What’s interesting is another part of his article stood out but isn’t getting attention.
The fact that Radeon GPUs are only strong when amd is working on a console SoC
It seems true, embarrassing, makes me believe the rdna4 no high end rumors even more
I will chime in as an AMD card user. Nvidia sell you cards with complete feature set, while AMD sell you cards with feature set that might come in the near future. And here is me, almost year later waiting on promised FSR3.0 to be usable besides two games that nobody cares about, and where FSR3.0 was added just to fulfill their promise that it will come in 2023. To grow market share either theineed to provide that feature set togheter with card at launch or be really competitive in price.
So was the experience of Nvidia users back when DLSS 1 came out.
Very happy with the 7900 xtx, zero problems for 6 months now!
I have 7900XT myself, the case is that we were promised features that would come handy, that aren’t yet available after almost year. FSR3.0 would come handy definetly in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake II to max out settings. Anti Lag+ was total flop too. If we speak pure raster, then don’t get me wrong, I’m happy too with it it is just that everything else is twice as good on competitor cards, and I won’t even start about Ray Tracing
Meanwhile AMD ignores the fanfic and focuses on making money.
Nvidia jacks up the price? Great, let them do that, higher prices means selling AMD gpus at higher bargain prices next to the Nvidia ones.
AMD gpus have no selling point besides bargain pricing ?, slash production of gpus until better tech is developed and focus on selling AMD cpus at premium prices.
There’s too much hand wringing about market share as if you’re sweating that AMD isn’t making enough money. Nah they’re doing fine.
PCgamer is a horrible outlet, can’t believe they are still around.
It would be very very bad for us the consumers if Amd did leave the graphics market , it would allow Nvidia to charge what ever they want for cards , so I trully hope Amd has no plans to leave the gpu market
Tbh I would have bought 7900xtx if only its reviews were half as good as nvidia on amazon, so I didn’t, user reviews were average compared to nvidia, also the no of review were far lesser, so I thought which sells less generally have not as good after sell service
Amd as a gpu is very good in the midrange. Nvidia sometimes better but more expensive
Company with smaller market share and less revenue has less money to invest back into its own product, study finds.
“This is really hurting them, and until they fix this we should buy the other product”