MSI confirms focus on GeForce RTX, as MSI Radeon cards are disappearing from stores

[DuckDodgers]

MSI has responded to an inquiry about missing stock of Radeon SKUs and steep discounts on leftover quantities. 

 

Quotes

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MSI has clarified its stance on graphics cards, stating to that it is now prioritizing GeForce RTX cards. This doesn’t mean a complete halt in Radeon GPU production from the Taiwanese company, nor does it suggest a permanent change in company plans; however, it does shed light on the scarcity of MSI Radeon GPUs in retail outlets.

 

As observed, MSI has released only four models based on the Radeon RX 7000 series thus far, contrasting with the GeForce RTX 40 lineup, which has 147 models. This significant difference in numbers is even more pronounced compared to the Radeon RX 6000/RTX 30 series ratio, which stands at 39 and 128 models respectively.

 

MSI is not ceasing working with AMD, on a contrary, the company is working with AMD through its motherboard business which MSI describes as ‘essential and extremely relevant’.

 

 Nothing unusual in this move -- several AIBs have preferred to be serving one GPU vendor exclusively, but it just confirms the market status quo between GeForce and Radeon.

 

Sources:

https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-confirms-focus-on-geforce-rtx-gpus-as-msi-radeon-cards-are-disappearing-from-stores

 

[TVwazhere]

Gigabyte might be going this route as well

 

 

At this point Asus seems to be the only one "fully" supporting both teams, but even the number of cards (and the actual variance in cooler design) they've pushed out for RDNA3 is short. 

 

 

We'll have to reserve judgment for the next generation, but honestly, I'm not sure this is a big deal either. Both teams have enough reputable AIB's that we don't need to worry about AMD being underserved for third party cooler options.

[starsmine]

14 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

We'll have to reserve judgment for the next generation, but honestly, I'm not sure this is a big deal either. Both teams have enough reputable AIB's that we don't need to worry about AMD being underserved for third party cooler options.

Do they not see a future with AMD because RDNA3 under delivered, and big RDNA4 got canned?
Im sure the sales for AMD this gen was mostly people buying up all of RDNA2 due to how amazing of a value those cards still are. While both ADA and RDNA3 both underdelivered heavily in terms of sales verses the what was hoped for them, That had to have hit AMD proportionally harder.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It makes you wonder if after all the claims of NVIDIA having tiny margins for AIBs, perhaps AMD are just as bad but due to smaller sales its even less worthwhile for AIBs to bother?

[da na]

Remember when Nvidia cut loose one of their top board partners because they wanted to start producing ATi cards as well?.....

 

I wonder what the incentive to move to only Nvidia was, it seems from an outsider's perspective that their partners are treated worse.

[Kisai]

MSI has 147 SKU's, what the crap. Pare that to two models per chip. "Stock configuration" and "OC configuration"

Geez, how is there even that many SKU's

Are we missing something? Is there a bunch of separate SKU's for different countries?

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

MSI has 147 SKU's, what the crap. Pare that to two models per chip. "Stock configuration" and "OC configuration"

Geez, how is there even that many SKU's

Are we missing something? Is there a bunch of separate SKU's for different countries?

 

This is what happens when people start focusing on form over function.  Its doubly stupid given OC models are largely redundant on 4000 series.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

MSI has 147 SKU's, what the crap. Pare that to two models per chip. "Stock configuration" and "OC configuration"

 

Geez, how is there even that many SKU's

 

Are we missing something? Is there a bunch of separate SKU's for different countries?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those are duplicates because some stores put up the same model of card with slightly different names on for example Amazon, and that counts as a "different card" in those systems counting the SKUs.

In other cases though, it's just the OEM bumping the clock speed up like 100Mhz (maybe better binning?) and then introducing that as a new SKU. I wouldn't be surprised if the old SKU just gets discontinued as time goes on but never gets deleted from those systems like PCPartPicker.

 

 

According to PCPartPicker, Asus has 12 different versions of the RTX 4090. Some have different coolers. Some are the same cooler but with ~100Mhz different clock speed. Some are the same card but in different colors (like one white and one black). Some are special/limited editions.

I guess the number of unique SKUs quickly gets out of hand once you start doing OC versions of cards as well as different colors.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

It makes you wonder if after all the claims of NVIDIA having tiny margins for AIBs, perhaps AMD are just as bad but due to smaller sales its even less worthwhile for AIBs to bother?

They might have better margins but you still have to sell enough to get over ROI of doing the product in the first place, I suspect a lot of AIB have been burned by a few AMD GPU models in the past that just didn't sell enough.

 

Also people just want Nvidia, brand power does mean something whether we think it is logical or not.

[pedrogmix]

That explains why my GPU that I bought November last year had ongoing sales for several months, and nowadays it's completely out of stock.

 

 

[starsmine]

30 minutes ago, pedrogmix said:

That explains why my GPU that I bought November last year had ongoing sales for several months, and nowadays it's completely out of stock.

 

 

No, what explains that is that its a previous gen card and was stopped being manufactured alltogether to be replaced by the 7000 cards.

[Shimejii]

MSI AMD GPUS simply dont sell well. They had a pretty bad history of bad coolers on their AMD cards, often times causing issues. That reputation pretty much killed their GPU brand for AMD. Now pretty much the only GPUS i ever see recommended for AMD  is Saphire and XFX.

 

Other things behind the scenes as well, look at the MSI Claw, their AMD laptops going away etc.

[dogwitch]

4 hours ago, Shimejii said:

MSI AMD GPUS simply dont sell well. They had a pretty bad history of bad coolers on their AMD cards, often times causing issues. That reputation pretty much killed their GPU brand for AMD. Now pretty much the only GPUS i ever see recommended for AMD  is Saphire and XFX.

 

Other things behind the scenes as well, look at the MSI Claw, their AMD laptops going away etc.

i think i have a rx460 or 500 line gpu from msi. near same cooler on both. which is sad.

[porina]

2 hours ago, dogwitch said:

i think i have a rx460 or 500 line gpu from msi. near same cooler on both. which is sad.

400 and 500 series were basically the same GPU, so not really a surprise if they reused everything else around the GPU including the cooler.

[RejZoR]

7 hours ago, Shimejii said:

MSI AMD GPUS simply dont sell well. They had a pretty bad history of bad coolers on their AMD cards, often times causing issues. That reputation pretty much killed their GPU brand for AMD. Now pretty much the only GPUS i ever see recommended for AMD  is Saphire and XFX.

 

Other things behind the scenes as well, look at the MSI Claw, their AMD laptops going away etc.

And that's when you're cheap and lazy and you release garbage products. AMD or Radeon isn't at fault here, it was solely MSI's doing where they made cheap poorly designed coolers and thought they could get away with it. And people voted with their wallets.

[dogwitch]

10 hours ago, porina said:

400 and 500 series were basically the same GPU, so not really a surprise if they reused everything else around the GPU including the cooler.

yeah but msi did heavly oc the later one thru

[porina]

6 minutes ago, dogwitch said:

yeah but msi did heavly oc the later one thru

How heavily? Taking the top like-for-like models, standard 480 was 150W and standard 580 was 185W. This is pretty easy to cool given even a blower cooler is good for around 250W or so.

 

I had to look up the 590 thinking that would take even more power, but it actually was less than the 580 at 175W. I forgot they moved from 14nm to 12nm which offset that.

[dogwitch]

8 hours ago, porina said:

How heavily? Taking the top like-for-like models, standard 480 was 150W and standard 580 was 185W. This is pretty easy to cool given even a blower cooler is good for around 250W or so.

 

I had to look up the 590 thinking that would take even more power, but it actually was less than the 580 at 175W. I forgot they moved from 14nm to 12nm which offset that.

the same hs was used thru for the really oc version of the gpu

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-460.c2849

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-560.c2940

 

 

i found this gpu out paced the 560 version of wu in folding/bionc.

mostly due to better metal and how the hs was done

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/sapphire-rx-460-oc-4-gb.b4214

then the msi 560

 

the 4 and 5 series rx in general had really strange swings in power/cooling/memory.

it was a hell of a work horse thru line.

[atxcyclist]

21 hours ago, dogwitch said:

i think i have a rx460 or 500 line gpu from msi. near same cooler on both. which is sad.

My brother ran an MSI RX 480 for a long time, it was not a bad card performance-wise, but the cooler was extremely cheap-ish feeling. It wasn't high up their product stack so I guess that can be forgiven, but he moved to a rather basic MSI RTX 3050 and that card is so much 'cleaner' and feels much higher quality.

 

 

[Salted Spinach]

Looks like they took up the slavery contract that EVGA gave up on

[dogwitch]

3 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

My brother ran an MSI RX 480 for a long time, it was not a bad card performance-wise, but the cooler was extremely cheap-ish feeling. It wasn't high up their product stack so I guess that can be forgiven, but he moved to a rather basic MSI RTX 3050 and that card is so much 'cleaner' and feels much higher quality.

 

 

yeah it seems that series of chips ran cool or hot. no middle ground.

the rx 460 i have is the quit and been most rock solid from that line .

 

[Beskamir]

I admit I've not been following GPUs much lately, but while I have heard of what Nvidia is up to, AMD just seems like they've fallen behind completely at this point. I don't have a clue what they're best GPU is or how it compares to Nvidia's options, but perhaps that lack of performance from AMD is partly behind this decision? Of course I really wish AMD was doing a lot better. Since the lack of competition is at least in part behind GPUs becoming so insanely expensive these days, but why would MSI bother making an inferior product that'd get less sales. At least assuming Nvidia has objectively better products and more market share, which based on how much more aware I am of Nvidia's top cards vs AMD's, seems to be the case. So I think it's just a sensible business decision for MSI. Not that Nvidia doesn't conspire behind the scenes in an anti competitive way, but here it seems unlikely that they had to do that for this outcome.

[Monkey Dust]

10 minutes ago, Beskamir said:

I admit I've not been following GPUs much lately, but while I have heard of what Nvidia is up to, AMD just seems like they've fallen behind completely at this point. I don't have a clue what they're best GPU is or how it compares to Nvidia's options, but perhaps that lack of performance from AMD is partly behind this decision? Of course I really wish AMD was doing a lot better. Since the lack of competition is at least in part behind GPUs becoming so insanely expensive these days, but why would MSI bother making an inferior product that'd get less sales. At least assuming Nvidia has objectively better products and more market share, which based on how much more aware I am of Nvidia's top cards vs AMD's, seems to be the case. So I think it's just a sensible business decision for MSI. Not that Nvidia doesn't conspire behind the scenes in an anti competitive way, but here it seems unlikely that they had to do that for this outcome.

AMD cards are solid IMO, their biggest problem is DLSS vs FSR. They are still behind on ray tracing, but have closed the gap. For rasterization performance, AMD hammers the equivalently priced Nvidia card into the ground.

 

Actually, I think their biggest problem, more so than their upscaling tech, is most gamers don't consider them any more. If the games you play don't have ray tracing, or don't use it well enough to justify turning it on, and will run fine at your monitor's native resolution, you absolutely should consider AMD.

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, Monkey Dust said:

Actually, I think their biggest problem, more so than their upscaling tech, is most gamers don't consider them any more. If the games you play don't have ray tracing, or don't use it well enough to justify turning it on, and will run fine at your monitor's native resolution, you absolutely should consider AMD.

AMD marketing sucks, it's either terrible and inept.  It's always been like that, even ATI days just either not as bad or they actually had the better products once in a while which mitigated that terribleness.

 

Either way simply being a good product isn't enough in the market.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

AMD marketing sucks, it's either terrible and inept.  It's always been like that, even ATI days just either not as bad or they actually had the better products once in a while which mitigated that terribleness.

 

Either way simply being a good product isn't enough in the market.

It'll probably come back around once the over-reliance on CUDA for AI swings back towards dedicated NPU logic.

 

Like the problem overall is that there three must-have features (CUDA for AI, Tensor cores for RT, DLSS upscaling) and without equal parts on the AMD part, you basically are picking the "loser card" if you don't pick Nvidia.

 

This also applies to Intel.

 

Like we're not at a point any more where you can get away with the lowest tier parts and play a game at 480p. Most games using Unreal simply require enough compute power to run 1080p high, or you don't run it at all. Like there are some cinematic-quality games being put out that just make high end GPU's grind to a halt.