AMD Lists The Radeon RX 490 Flagship – Polaris based Dual GPU Graphics Card For 4K Ready Gaming

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

The same applies to smartphones though. Want to know why my mom wouldn't buy a OnePlus 3? Because if she walks into a regular store and asks a person there which phone to get, they won't mention the OnePlus 3. They won't mention it because the store won't be carrying it.

Why did you avoid using GPUs as examples when referencing to my mom? Was it perhaps because it would not fit your narrative? Nvidia did not become the dominant force they are by catering to the 1% of customers who buy graphics cards and build their own computers.

 

So what you are saying is that AMD is not a recognizable brand to people who buy graphics cards? You got to be joking. Here is what I see it coming down to:

 

The vast majority of people who buy off-the-shelf computers won't care about Nvidia vs AMD. They probably don't even know what a graphics card is. To get these customers, it is almost entirely down to what your relationships are with system builders. You don't get free sales here because you have to work to get those relations.

 

The people who order a graphics card on Newegg or some other site most likely knows that AMD exists. If they pick Nvidia then it is not because they don't know about AMD. They pick it for some other reason (previous experiences, recommendations, or in my case simply because Nvidia is offering a superior product, assuming it holds up to their marketing material).

 

But that's not how it works... When AMD releases superior products they actually do get sales. After the launch of the Athlon 64 AMD actually sold more than Intel did. A few years after the marketshare was almost 50/50. The same goes for GPUs if we go back to the X800 series. AMD went from being the same type of underdog they are today, to having a significantly higher marketshare than Nvidia.

People are not biased against AMD and history shows this. It's just that AMD's products have not been that great for the last ~10 years. They seem to struggle to even match what their competitors are releasing. Right now their CPU business is dying and I don't think it makes sense to buy from them, and on the GPU front they only got a mediocre card out while Nvidia are releasing cards which are in leagues of their own. If the GTX 1060 is what Nvidia claims then AMD won't even be the clear choice in the only market where they are currently competitive (the sub 300 dollar graphics card market).

Because your mother is not in the market for graphics cards I'd assume. If I went out on the street and asked people about their opinion on the latest graphics cards the majority would have no clue what I was talking about but if I asked them about an iPhone they'd all know what I was talking about but I guess this makes no sense to you. 

 

There is nothing about a narrative. Maybe it's your narrative that's messed up since you see one everywhere you look when there is none. She wouldn't be getting an LG or HTC phone either or a Huawei for that matter. It would be the Samsung or the iPhone. 

 

Brand strength. Graphics cards buyers know AMD exists but go for the Nvidia option anyway. Gotta get that 960 even if the 380X is better. Gotta get that 970 even if a 390X is better. For the casual consumer who dabbles in gaming they know Nvidia and recognizes the brand. 

You seem to deliberately go the other direction from where I'm taking you. It's quite entertaining actually.

 

As I also said: Nvidia has the money and power to gain influence and therefore gets the deals. There is also the fact that AMD managed to get themselves virtually kicked out of the OEM laptop market for dedicated graphics when their solutions were shite. They will be working double time to get back that confidence and they can only hope they get a piece of the pie back. 

 

Ah, so they do buy what their friends buy (you said it: recommendations). So why are you disagreeing with me and then five minutes later you casually push my own arguments into the conversation as if it were your own? 

But really, even retailers push Nvidia products more because that's what the customers want. That's what they'll put on the front page. They will cater to the customer. Always. Customers view Nvidia as the better choice whether it is so or not because that's "the way it's meant to be played".

 

When AMD products are better or much better they get sales, yes, but they're not dominant. It would take at least five years of constant dominance in performance and price/performance for them to gain the upper hand in marketshare.

I can't find any easily accessible market share data that covers the last decade or more so I can't show you any data and I can't be bothered to look up each quarter that far back but I doubt AMD was at 80% or higher marketshare in CPU back in their prime and I doubt that AMD or ATI was at 80% marketshare in GPU in any of their dominant years. I did however look at the marketshare of ATI around the time of X800 (in 2004). It was 55% in favor of ATI. That's a bit of a far cry from Nvidia's 80% today, wouldn't you say?

 

Many consumers consider AMD inferior and has had that opinion for more than five years (by that I mean both new and old consumers). It's heavily ingrained in the community. Kinda like the "shit drivers" talk we still hear (yes, they could be better but so could all drivers). That combined with the ubiquity of Nvidia in marketing material, game advertisement, front pages of retailers, recommended by tech journalists/personalities and presence in many OEM machines makes it the natural choice. 

 

Can AMD regain a stronger footing? Sure, it's possible. It will be incredibly difficult though. Their resources are depleted. They can't match the pace of competitors when they have to allocate resources to (almost) one project at a time where their competitors can do five or more projects in the same time span. They could really use a large cash infusion but who in their right mind would do that when looking at the market right now and the position they're in? They'd have to find some success by the end of 2016 and throughout 2017 before anyone would be willing to place bets on AMD.

[Dabombinable]

9 hours ago, Prysin said:

yep.

it invalidates them all based on price to performance. A metric that nobody on these forums cares about except when they feel like it.

Considering that the GTX 970 trades blows with the RX 480, and costs around the same (depending on the country it can be more ore less), and that the R9 390X also costs around the same. They aren't obsolete, and the GTX 980 wasn't made obsolete was it when the GTX 970 came out with better price performance? i'll also note-the 480 has the same problem with video decoding that all previous AMD/Ati cards have-they draw far too much power doing it.

[Prysin]

also, just a note to this thread.

 

It is likely that the 490 will be a "dual GPU" card. But not in the "normal" sense of dual GPU.

Personally i think it will be more of a MCM solution, similar to AMDs opterons.

 

Meaning they will take two 480 dies and glue em together at a interposer. They will pose as a single GPU to any system, but essentially be TWO GPUs in one socket.

 

By using two, cheaper and smaller dies, they can increase yields while keeping costs down.

 

It is not any "new" technology. AMD, Intel and i think even IBM has made MCM solutions before. Albeit, for CPUs.

[TheRandomness]

9 hours ago, Prysin said:

yep.

it invalidates them all based on price to performance. A metric that nobody on these forums cares about except when they feel like it.

Why are people still arguing... it's been 7 pages of arguments :c

 

I agree with you, considering the fact that the prices of 480s will eventually drop enough to make that price to performance value extreme. Especially good considering I can just about make a $550~ build with an i5 and 480, I'd still like to get that below $500. And that kind of performance for a $500 build is slightly ridiculous.

11 minutes ago, Prysin said:

also, just a note to this thread.

 

It is likely that the 490 will be a "dual GPU" card. But not in the "normal" sense of dual GPU.

Personally i think it will be more of a MCM solution, similar to AMDs opterons.

 

Meaning they will take two 480 dies and glue em together at a interposer. They will pose as a single GPU to any system, but essentially be TWO GPUs in one socket.

 

By using two, cheaper and smaller dies, they can increase yields while keeping costs down.

 

It is not any "new" technology. AMD, Intel and i think even IBM has made MCM solutions before. Albeit, for CPUs.

I'm fairly certain most of IBM's CPUs are MCM.

[CTR640]

AMD still making dual-GPU's? It doesn't make sense because most of the games doesn't support more than one GPU

and dual-GPU has their disadvantage. nVidia stopped making dual-GPU, their last one was the Titan Z en before that,

GTX690 and 590. AMD should focus more on single cards than dual-GPU's.

[Briggsy]

21 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

AMD still making dual-GPU's? It doesn't make sense because most of the games doesn't support more than one GPU

and dual-GPU has their disadvantage. nVidia stopped making dual-GPU, their last one was the Titan Z en before that,

GTX690 and 590. AMD should focus more on single cards than dual-GPU's.

This approach might make sense in a year or two if dx12 multi-adapter is widely adopted, and every DX12 AAA title works well with the technology. Right now it just seems like a desperate move to do a dual gpu solution using mid-range chips, if for no other reason than to keep an AMD card near the top of high-end benchmark charts, like a box that needs to be checked off.

[Guest]

On 7/8/2016 at 7:56 AM, Misanthrope said:

No chance in hell it's just a dual polaris card unless they've run into catastrophic issues with Vega. 

i hope for amd's sake you're right

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Briggsy said:

This approach might make sense in a year or two if dx12 multi-adapter is widely adopted, and every DX12 AAA title works well with the technology. Right now it just seems like a desperate move to do a dual gpu solution using mid-range chips, if for no other reason than to keep an AMD card near the top of high-end benchmark charts, like a box that needs to be checked off.

GPUs aren't like CPUs in that more cores (in the case of GPUs, separate chips entirely) means more performance when, for similar or even lower amounts of money, they could just produce a single more powerful chip.

 

The only time this ever makes sense is to use the currently most powerful chip (which the RX 480 is not) for people who want a single card solution but more power than a single chip.

[Briggsy]

5 minutes ago, Lord_Doge said:

GPUs aren't like CPUs in that more cores (in the case of GPUs, separate chips entirely) means more performance when, for similar or even lower amounts of money, they could just produce a single more powerful chip.

 

The only time this ever makes sense is to use the currently most powerful chip (which the RX 480 is not) for people who want a single card solution but more power than a single chip.

yeah, I definitely recommend the same thing. If someone is thinking of crossfiring a 480, then the 1070 is the smarter option.  If this rumor about a dual P10 card is true, AMD are desperate as hell.

[LAwLz]

26 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Because your mother is not in the market for graphics cards I'd assume. If I went out on the street and asked people about their opinion on the latest graphics cards the majority would have no clue what I was talking about but if I asked them about an iPhone they'd all know what I was talking about but I guess this makes no sense to you. 

You're comparing apples and oranges. People knowing what an iPhone is doesn't mean they will pick Nvidia over AMD. People knowing what an iPhone is doesn't even mean they will buy an iPhone. Your arguments makes no sense.

 

27 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

There is nothing about a narrative. Maybe it's your narrative that's messed up since you see one everywhere you look when there is none. She wouldn't be getting an LG or HTC phone either or a Huawei for that matter. It would be the Samsung or the iPhone. 

Actually, she has an LG. But that's an anedcote. What isn't an anecdote is that both Apple and Samsung have been losing marketshare to companies like Oppo and Huawei since 2015.

You greatly overestimate how brand loyal people are.

 

 

34 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Brand strength. Graphics cards buyers know AMD exists but go for the Nvidia option anyway. Gotta get that 960 even if the 380X is better. Gotta get that 970 even if a 390X is better. For the casual consumer who dabbles in gaming they know Nvidia and recognizes the brand. 

You seem to deliberately go the other direction from where I'm taking you. It's quite entertaining actually.

What fantasy world do you live in? Maybe people were getting the 970 over the 390X because it offered better price:performance? Both at 1440p and 1080p. Gee... I wonder why people pick Nvidia when they offer better a better product at the same price. Gotta be brand loyalty! Clearly they should be buying the inferior product!

Oh but the 380X was clearly much better than the 960. Just look at how much better it was in terms of price:performance! Oh but excuse me. I am clearly cherry picking (the cards you chose). The 380X does actually win in terms of price:performance when we go up to 2560x1440. It wins by an entire percentage point.

 

 

41 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Ah, so they do buy what their friends buy (you said it: recommendations). So why are you disagreeing with me and then five minutes later you casually push my own arguments into the conversation as if it were your own? 

But really, even retailers push Nvidia products more because that's what the customers want. That's what they'll put on the front page. They will cater to the customer. Always. Customers view Nvidia as the better choice whether it is so or not because that's "the way it's meant to be played".

Recommendation and buying the same thing as their friends are two completely different things. My friends come to me for computer advice all the time and I recommend them widely different things. Stop with the strawman arguments.

 

Retailers push Nvidia products more? They push whichever is the new and exciting product. Did you miss the RX 480 launch when basically every store had their entire front page covered with it? It was pretty hard to miss. The same will happen with the GTX 1060.

But let's look at how valid your claim is that retailers are pushing for Nvidia products to be sold.

 

 

Newegg:

0 Nvidia products featured on the front page, and 1 AMD product featured (the Shell shocker R9 390).

Spoiler

 

Amazon's PC components section:

Huge banner saying "Best-selling AMD graphics cards". You have to scroll down to the best selling products to find an Nvidia card.

Spoiler

 

OutletPC:

Quite the clusterfuck. Just a bunch of cards listed. Both Nvidia and AMD. Does not seem to favor one over the other.

Spoiler

 

NCIX:

Seems to favor Nvidia, but not because of reasons like "people want to buy Nvidia so let's promote them!". It seems like they are getting rid of stock of old Nvidia cards which will make no sense once the 1060 launches in like a week. The "top 10 most popular products" are just high end Nvidia cards where AMD doesn't have any competitor. That's AMD's own fault. They don't have a product to compete with the most popular Nvidia products right now. The rest of the page is in alphabetical order.

Spoiler

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

When AMD products are better or much better they get sales, yes, but they're not dominant. It would take at least five years of constant dominance in performance and price/performance for them to gain the upper hand in marketshare.

[Citation Needed]

They might need a longer time today than they did ~10 years ago, but back then they only needed 1 good product line and 1 year to regain the lead. Since their competitors have a bigger head start these days my guess is that they would need ~2 years to catch up. The problem is that I think they are too far behind now to be able to dominate as hard as they need to. They need to reverse their position. Right now I don't really see any reason to recommend an AMD processor to anyone. Not at any price point (there might be some edge case but I am making generalizations here). They would need two generations where the roles were reversed. Where it would not make sense to recommend any Intel processor to anyone for two years. The same goes for the GPU market.

If things keep getting worse then might soon need 3 years of dominance to catch up.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Many consumers consider AMD inferior and has had that opinion for more than five years (by that I mean both new and old consumers). It's heavily ingrained in the community. Kinda like the "shit drivers" talk we still hear (yes, they could be better but so could all drivers). That combined with the ubiquity of Nvidia in marketing material, game advertisement, front pages of retailers, recommended by tech journalists/personalities and presence in many OEM machines makes it the natural choice. 

AMD have had inferior drivers for ages. How many years did it take them to fix the cursor corruption bug for multimonitor setups? Like 10 years (it was fixed 1 or 2 years ago)? Remember all the stuttering? It was known for years on the forums I browsed. It wasn't until PCPer started measuring frame times and went "look, AMD is a lot worse" that they did something (and even then it took quite a while for them to improve).

Their GNU/Linux drivers are waaaaay worse than Nvidia's. Even today we constantly see a lot of people coming back to "in DirectX 11, AMD has a lot higher driver overhead than Nvidia".

Nvidia's drivers are by no means perfect. They got their fare share of issues too (mainly their tendency to blow cards up), but I don't think it would be incorrect to say that their drivers are far superior in a lot of ways (mainly well known issues getting fixed in a timely manner and performance).

 

AMD has a ton of marketing material too which gets posted over and over.

I think I debunked your "front page of retailers" quite hard already.

AMD products gets recommended by the same people that recommends Nvidia all the time.

Their presence in OEM machines is from time and effort spent with retailers and PC makers. It is not something Nvidia got handed to them on a silver platter.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Can AMD regain a stronger footing? Sure, it's possible. It will be incredibly difficult though. Their resources are depleted. They can't match the pace of competitors when they have to allocate resources to (almost) one project at a time where their competitors can do five or more projects in the same time span. They could really use a large cash infusion but who in their right mind would do that when looking at the market right now and the position they're in? They'd have to find some success by the end of 2016 and throughout 2017 before anyone would be willing to place bets on AMD.

To call it an uphill battle is an understatement. It's more like climbing a wall. Personally, I don't care about their situation. The only thing I care about is getting the best product for my money. A few years ago that was my 7850. In a few weeks that will probably be the GTX 1060 (again, I am really hoping Nvidia lives up to their modest goals, because the RX 480 was a huge disappointment in my eyes).

I won't buy something out of pity, and neither will most people.

 

Maybe it would be best if they just got bought by someone. The company is already split up. It would be interesting to see how the market would change if the CPU division got sold to Nvidia, and the GPU division got sold to Intel.

[Zeeee]

21 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

AMD have listed the RX 490 as being 4K-ready, where 4K is qualifies as being DOTA 2 and League of Legends - two of the very least demanding games to be played. This means that the RX 490 will not be 4K-capable for modern AAA games, just as the RX 480 is not capable of 1440p for modern AAA games.

 

Btw, AMD lists the RX 480 as being a 1440p card, with the same qualification that it performs 1440p in DOTA 2 and LOL. But the reality is that the RX 480 can't even run all AAA games at 1080p and get 60 FPS.

 

With this latest round of GPU releases, AMD has proven themselves to be incompetent, and disrespectful of the gaming market. They planned to fleece gamers with an iteration of the same performance of GPU hardware as they regurgitated over and over for the past 5 years. I like their tech, but AMD is out to lunch, and is the cause of stagnation in gaming technology, and not a champion of it. The are only chasing leftovers from Nvidia, and I doubt they have the sense to properly estimate what performance targets they should be reaching in order to be a leader and an equal player.

 

AMD screwed up. The price drop per performance with the RX 480 would, or should have happened inevitably regardless of AMD's lineup, because that's what happens every year or every other year in PC hardware. It's what has happened every year since PCs existed, and it's what will continue to happen for every year going forward. So, I don't give AMD big marks for dropping the price-performance mark in the current market.

 

Remember that Vega is already signed off on. So, it's unlikely that it will rival the GTX 1080, either, since its design was completed before AMD knew that their lineup was only competing against GPUs releases from 2 years ago.

 

I can't stand AMD's disingenuous marketing with this generation of their GPUs, calling the RX 480 HD gaming that will last 3 - 4 years, when it already won't do 1080p gaming at 60 FPS in all AAA games since a year or so ago. I also can't stand that AMD admittedly didn't try to make a powerful GPU because they counted on graphics cards phasing out. What did they think about PC gaming then? They obviously thought that the future of PC gaming wasn't going to include graphically-intense and ultra-immersive AAA games. And I find that extremely disservicing of PC gamers, and an attitude that explains why AMD was milking the market for the past 4 years without producing new impressive GPU hardware.

holy crap the truth ladies and gents

[LordJoseph]

Seems great! cant wait to get hold on to one.

[Citadelen]

On ‎08‎/‎07‎/‎2016 at 2:38 PM, Trixanity said:

-snip-

But Vega is a new architecture, AMD said so themselves at a financial somewhere. Besides, you don't start your next architecture when you've finished your current one, they take years, thus AMD may have started Vega half way through Vega. From what they've said it's a new generation, and not an expansion of the 4XX series.

[Teddy07]

I had high hopes for rx 490 but i dont buy shitty dual gpus

[Castdeath97]

On 8 July 2016 at 3:47 PM, Warning said:

And then a few weeks after this cards launch, Nvidia will release the 1080ti and crush AMD again....

They won't need to it competes with the 1080, all they need to do is cut the 1080 price.

[Briggsy]

4 hours ago, Citadelen said:

But Vega is a new architecture, AMD said so themselves at a financial somewhere. Besides, you don't start your next architecture when you've finished your current one, they take years, thus AMD may have started Vega half way through Polaris. From what they've said it's a new generation, and not an expansion of the 4XX series.

You are probably correct. I think people who believe Vega will be ready before spring/summer 2017 are delusional. Polaris 10 and 11 were confirmed to be taped out in October 2015. Raja announced in June 2016 that they reached a milestone with Vega design. Vega isn't taped out yet, and at the earliest Vega might start production by the end of this year or early 2017 if nothing goes wrong before then. AMD might decide to do another FuryX style launch with extremely limited supply in 1st half 2017 - if the yields are acceptable.

 

Based on the facts at hand, I think its a foregone conclusion that there is no high-end single-GPU card coming from AMD this year.

[Trixanity]

13 hours ago, LAwLz said:

You're comparing apples and oranges. People knowing what an iPhone is doesn't mean they will pick Nvidia over AMD. People knowing what an iPhone is doesn't even mean they will buy an iPhone. Your arguments makes no sense.

 

Actually, she has an LG. But that's an anedcote. What isn't an anecdote is that both Apple and Samsung have been losing marketshare to companies like Oppo and Huawei since 2015.

You greatly overestimate how brand loyal people are.

 

 

What fantasy world do you live in? Maybe people were getting the 970 over the 390X because it offered better price:performance? Both at 1440p and 1080p. Gee... I wonder why people pick Nvidia when they offer better a better product at the same price. Gotta be brand loyalty! Clearly they should be buying the inferior product!

Oh but the 380X was clearly much better than the 960. Just look at how much better it was in terms of price:performance! Oh but excuse me. I am clearly cherry picking (the cards you chose). The 380X does actually win in terms of price:performance when we go up to 2560x1440. It wins by an entire percentage point.

 

 

Recommendation and buying the same thing as their friends are two completely different things. My friends come to me for computer advice all the time and I recommend them widely different things. Stop with the strawman arguments.

 

Retailers push Nvidia products more? They push whichever is the new and exciting product. Did you miss the RX 480 launch when basically every store had their entire front page covered with it? It was pretty hard to miss. The same will happen with the GTX 1060.

But let's look at how valid your claim is that retailers are pushing for Nvidia products to be sold.

 

 

Newegg:

0 Nvidia products featured on the front page, and 1 AMD product featured (the Shell shocker R9 390).

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Amazon's PC components section:

Huge banner saying "Best-selling AMD graphics cards". You have to scroll down to the best selling products to find an Nvidia card.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

OutletPC:

Quite the clusterfuck. Just a bunch of cards listed. Both Nvidia and AMD. Does not seem to favor one over the other.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

NCIX:

Seems to favor Nvidia, but not because of reasons like "people want to buy Nvidia so let's promote them!". It seems like they are getting rid of stock of old Nvidia cards which will make no sense once the 1060 launches in like a week. The "top 10 most popular products" are just high end Nvidia cards where AMD doesn't have any competitor. That's AMD's own fault. They don't have a product to compete with the most popular Nvidia products right now. The rest of the page is in alphabetical order.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

[Citation Needed]

They might need a longer time today than they did ~10 years ago, but back then they only needed 1 good product line and 1 year to regain the lead. Since their competitors have a bigger head start these days my guess is that they would need ~2 years to catch up. The problem is that I think they are too far behind now to be able to dominate as hard as they need to. They need to reverse their position. Right now I don't really see any reason to recommend an AMD processor to anyone. Not at any price point (there might be some edge case but I am making generalizations here). They would need two generations where the roles were reversed. Where it would not make sense to recommend any Intel processor to anyone for two years. The same goes for the GPU market.

If things keep getting worse then might soon need 3 years of dominance to catch up.

 

 

AMD have had inferior drivers for ages. How many years did it take them to fix the cursor corruption bug for multimonitor setups? Like 10 years (it was fixed 1 or 2 years ago)? Remember all the stuttering? It was known for years on the forums I browsed. It wasn't until PCPer started measuring frame times and went "look, AMD is a lot worse" that they did something (and even then it took quite a while for them to improve).

Their GNU/Linux drivers are waaaaay worse than Nvidia's. Even today we constantly see a lot of people coming back to "in DirectX 11, AMD has a lot higher driver overhead than Nvidia".

Nvidia's drivers are by no means perfect. They got their fare share of issues too (mainly their tendency to blow cards up), but I don't think it would be incorrect to say that their drivers are far superior in a lot of ways (mainly well known issues getting fixed in a timely manner and performance).

 

AMD has a ton of marketing material too which gets posted over and over.

I think I debunked your "front page of retailers" quite hard already.

AMD products gets recommended by the same people that recommends Nvidia all the time.

Their presence in OEM machines is from time and effort spent with retailers and PC makers. It is not something Nvidia got handed to them on a silver platter.

 

 

To call it an uphill battle is an understatement. It's more like climbing a wall. Personally, I don't care about their situation. The only thing I care about is getting the best product for my money. A few years ago that was my 7850. In a few weeks that will probably be the GTX 1060 (again, I am really hoping Nvidia lives up to their modest goals, because the RX 480 was a huge disappointment in my eyes).

I won't buy something out of pity, and neither will most people.

 

Maybe it would be best if they just got bought by someone. The company is already split up. It would be interesting to see how the market would change if the CPU division got sold to Nvidia, and the GPU division got sold to Intel.

It's quite funny that you went down this path all because of a joke that really struck a nerve. 

 

Apples and oranges in your opinion (citation needed perhaps?). We're talking about brands here. More specifically tech brands. The rules are fairly similar between product segments. That we a small shift does not mean the market gets turned upside down as you would have us believe.

At best we have a Huawei who might beat Samsung at their own game but that remains to be seen. At worst we have the status quo. Her having an LG phone is an outlier. I have an LG phone. It's an outlier. 

 

Regarding price to performance. You do realize you're funny when you cite old graphs. We need to look at new and updated graphs. Cute attempt though. There is also the metric of absolute performance. The AMD cards are better and the way the market is going, I'd rather have the 8 GB of VRAM of the 390(X) than the 3.5 GB of the 970 for example (do I need to give you a source on this too?)

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfdollar_1920_1080.png

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfdollar_2560_1440.png

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png

 

Your example of recommendation is anecdotal. Buying what your friends have is an extension of what a recommendation is. Your friend wouldn't buy a product and be satisfied without being seen as an implicit recommendation. You have the expertise to guide someone to a purchase but as usual: not everyone has. A person might own a gaming PC. It has a GTX 980 in it. It works well. Friend asks for recommendation for a new PC. He says buy the one I have. It's good. Recommendation. 

Pre-built PC. Often I find the default config to be Intel + Nvidia. That's what people will buy.

 

I also like how you put links that confirm your point of view but none that disprove it. Confirmation bias (isn't it fun to throw rhetorical concepts around like we all have Ph.Ds? The internet is amazing). I pretty much see this little shit where ever I go.

And I still see it often.

 

I saw this little shit for like 5 days after launch and it's completely gone from most sites I look at:

 

You know what's also funny. That one retailer had a Vive page and it only linked to the Nvidia's Pascal GPUs. Why is that funny despite it being one-sided? The cards can't run the Vive over DisplayPort - they are in fact the only ones on the market that can't run the Vive over DisplayPort.

 

I also just checked around various European sites. Didn't know you as a Swede shopped exclusively at North American sites? Or was it the only sites that confirmed your argument? 

The German sites seem to have Nvidia cards primarily on the front page but an RX 480 or two also with one having full banner/background Pascal ad.

OC.UK is doing almost the opposite with full banner/background AMD ad.

My local retailers have primarily Nvidia with an RX 480 or two. Some with Pascal banner ads.

 

How on Earth would someone be able to provide sources on the future? We can only make assumptions. Assumptions that are often based on the past. Kinda like the weather reports which are frequently inaccurate.

I have my doubt that AMD would need less than five years of constant dominance to achieve a majority market share. Any of the years they've been dominant never lead to much more than a 45-55% market share in either CPU or GPU markets. Can you provide sources that my assumptions are wrong? Seems not. Citation needed, amirite? In any case your assumptions are just as valid or hollow as mine. Citation needed etc etc. 

There is no evidence to suggest AMD can quickly turn it around with product dominance as the past denies it.

AMD CPUs are shit right now and that's because of the lack of resources and the length of time it takes to develop a new architecture. It seems AMD likes to gamble and they apparently aren't good gamblers. The CMT paradigm or at least the execution on it was awful and they have had a hard time digging themselves out. And with the GPUs I already told you that the prime you spoke about resulted in a 55% market share which is the all time highest. That's a bit embarrassing if the GPU itself was so superior, isn't it (I really haven't looked at the benchmarks. I'm only entertaining myself here)?

 

Nvidia's closed source drivers on Linux are fairly decent (except Linux community hates them and still finds fault with them if I recall correctly). Their open source are a joke.

Right now AMD's closed and open source drivers are almost at parity if I recall. So it goes Nvidia closed > AMD closed > AMD open > Nvidia open.

 

AMD has some work to do. Definitely but it's not the mess that people like to point out. Whether they'll actually fix the overhead is unknown but they did have a job offering for someone to work on it. It seems like they might just put all their bets on DX12/Vulkan. Their OpenGL performance is abysmal too. Both have bugs that are left unfixed. Even old ones. Especially on older titles. They just get abandoned with bugs if it doesn't get fixed when it's "relevant". I have had trouble with both in that regard.

 

Citation on the ratio of Nvidia and AMD marketing being on equal footing?

I don't think you've debunked much of everything. I've looked at sites that back of my claims and I've looked at those that back up yours. The Pascal banner ads seem more ubiquitous and more persistent.

 

I still never said Nvidia didn't work their way to get where they are but apparently that gets ignored as being inconvenient (straw man, right?). I'm saying AMD will have a hard time getting the same people to break away from Nvidia in cases where you can't have both. Why would they? Nvidia can match and beat any offer AMD can make if they wanted to. That's the nature of the business. AMD has been beaten down to the point where they have the scraps and need to work their way up against a tsunami.

 

There is an uneven split in what gets recommended. I personally buy the best value regardless of brand but I also recognize where we are heading. A duopoly as you and others hope for is awful. I'd rather there were more competitors than now but the entry barrier is insurmountable. AMD is barely hanging on. The market needs a strong AMD but few people recognize this in favor of supporting silly notions such as "shit drivers" or looking at a banner ad and saying "I'll get that". Informed consumers are the best consumers but despite the internet, it's still a rare trait. Or even holding on to the idea of "I've owned this brand once, so why not buy that again and again and again". 

 

I could probably put in even more paragraphs but I do have other things to do than humor you

Now is there anything else? Or will you continue this play, old chap?

[Khvarrioiren]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

-snibeti snab-

The banner you aptly named "this little shit" is plastered on EVERY SINGLE Finnish etailers banner. Last time I even saw an AMD banner was because there was a promotion going on 3 years ago on the very site the image is from.

[BingoFishy]

@LAwLz People are more biased than you might think. For example, I have a friend who's mom won't buy him a phone because they're too expensive, but isn't willing to buy anything that's not an iPhone

 

[AlTech]

12 minutes ago, BingoFishy said:

@LAwLz People are more biased than you might think. For example, I have a friend who's mom won't buy him a phone because they're too expensive, but isn't willing to buy anything that's not an iPhone

 

Well then why don't you tell the mom the price of the iPhone 6s Plus?

[LAwLz]

46 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

It's quite funny that you went down this path all because of a joke that really struck a nerve. 

What path, and what joke? Oh right, the joke where you called me daft for not thinking that Nvidia gets business handed to them on a silver platter, regardless of what they do. The joke where you were saying buying AMD products was the better choice even though it was demonstrably wrong with the products you listed.

Sorry but I did not find your "jokes" funny.

 

 

54 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Apples and oranges in your opinion (citation needed perhaps?). We're talking about brands here. More specifically tech brands. The rules are fairly similar between product segments. That we a small shift does not mean the market gets turned upside down as you would have us believe.

I honestly have no idea how you think this is relevant to our conversation. You are trying to compare the phone purchasing habits of my mom with the purchasing habits of people who build their own computers. That's why I called it apples and oranges. When did I say the market was getting turned upside down? Please don't resort to strawman arguments. Your argument was based on the (wrong) assumption that people would unquestionably buy an iPhone or Samsung phone today, because they get business regardless of what they do. This is clearly not the case because they have actually both been losing market share this last year. Lesser known brands are stealing their sales right now by offering products that are more appealing.

 

 

59 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Regarding price to performance. You do realize you're funny when you cite old graphs. We need to look at new and updated graphs. Cute attempt though. There is also the metric of absolute performance. The AMD cards are better and the way the market is going, I'd rather have the 8 GB of VRAM of the 390(X) than the 3.5 GB of the 970 for example (do I need to give you a source on this too?)

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfdollar_1920_1080.png

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfdollar_2560_1440.png

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png

Cute attempt at what? I just googled the price:performance of the cards you mentioned and it was the first result. I hope you realize that the graphs you linked shows the same thing though. The 970 gives better price:performance than the 390X (6 percentage points higher at 1920x1080, and equal at 2560x1440). So my "cute attempt" at what I assume you were trying to dress up as cherry picking from me showed accurate results after all. Can't compare the 380X vs the GTX 960 on the graphs you linked because the 380X is not in them.

 

Oh boy another logical fallacy. Now you noticed that the 970 gives better price:performance than the AMD counterpart so let's change the subject to something else! I thought than you were above this.

 

And don't give me crap about "where the market is going". You should always buy what you need, when you need it. Buying an inferior product today in the hopes that it might become better than the alternative in several years time is basically gambling. If you think 8GB cards will be more useful in the future then buy an 8GB card in the future when it is needed. It doesn't make sense to sacrifice performance today in the hopes of getting more further down the road.

 

Real world example time. I am going to buy a 6-core Intel processor soon. The programs I use and the work I do benefits from more than 4 cores today. Do you think I regret buying the quad core Sandy Bridge chip over the 8 core Bulldozer chip? There is a chance that the bulldozer chip would perform better than my Sandy Bridge in some of the tasks I do today (but at the time it did not). Do you think I regret having had superior performance for ~5 years just because today, my other choice might have performed slightly better? Of course I don't regret it, because by the time I started needing the extra cores it was already time for another upgrade. The same will most likely be true for GPUs. By the time 8GB of VRAM is necessary I am fairly sure the people who bought the 380X will be due for an upgrade.

And that is why future proofing is bullshit.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Your example of recommendation is anecdotal. Buying what your friends have is an extension of what a recommendation is. Your friend wouldn't buy a product and be satisfied without being seen as an implicit recommendation. You have the expertise to guide someone to a purchase but as usual: not everyone has. A person might own a gaming PC. It has a GTX 980 in it. It works well. Friend asks for recommendation for a new PC. He says buy the one I have. It's good. Recommendation. 

Pre-built PC. Often I find the default config to be Intel + Nvidia. That's what people will buy.

And want to know why Pre-built PCs often have Intel + Nvidia components in them? They got better relationships with the computer builders. AMD could have had that too, but for one reason or another they do not. So again, even if we assume people just buy what everyone else has (I am sure that is true to some degree, but not at all enough to cause this type of disparity in market share) the initial sale has to been caused by something other reason.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

I also like how you put links that confirm your point of view but none that disprove it. Confirmation bias (isn't it fun to throw rhetorical concepts around like we all have Ph.Ds? The internet is amazing). I pretty much see this little shit where ever I go.

No it was not confirmation bias. Wanna know how I decided on which stores to link to? I went on PCPartPicker and clicked on all the different stores I could find when I searched for some graphics cards. I picked the biggest and most popular stores. No confirmation bias and no cherry picking involved at all. The reason why the evidence I presented aligns with my stance on this is because it is the truth. Meanwhile, your statement was grabbed out of thin air and turned out to be false.

 

I am not going to disagree that you will end up seeing the Nvidia logo more often than the AMD one. What I disagree with is your explanation for it. I don't think you see more Nvidia logos because retailers plaster their front page with it (before you try to move the goal post, remember that this was your original claim). I think you see it more because Nvidia spends more on advertisement than AMD. There is a huge difference between spending money on getting ads (which I think is what is happening) and your original claim that retailers favor Nvidia and plaster their website.

Making and buying ad space is not the same as getting sales regardless of what you do. There is time and money involved.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

I also just checked around various European sites. Didn't know you as a Swede shopped exclusively at North American sites? Or was it the only sites that confirmed your argument? 

The German sites seem to have Nvidia cards primarily on the front page but an RX 480 or two also with one having full banner/background Pascal ad.

OC.UK is doing almost the opposite with full banner/background AMD ad.

My local retailers have primarily Nvidia with an RX 480 or two. Some with Pascal banner ads.

I used American stores in my example because it is the biggest market.

If you want some links to Swedish retainers then here you go:

NetOnNet - Has both the "BetterRed" and "10 Gaming perfected" banners in a slide show.

DustinHome - RX 480 banner at the top, and everything below it is best selling products.

Webhallen - No banners or anything. Just lists the 3 most popular products right now (which at the time of writing happens to be the 970 and 1070)

Alina - Has both AMD and Nvidia taking up exactly the same amount of space.

Inet - Has an Nvidia campaign and the AMD "BetterRed" slide in their slide show. So one is a company actually giving away things for free to get the slide show space, while AMD gets it just because.

Komplett - Listing based on the amount of views a product has gotten. Right now it is dominated by 1080 (again, a card which AMD has no equivalence for).

 

You can probably find a few stores here and there which advertise Nvidia more than AMD, but the opposite is true as well. That's why I completely disagree with your statement that retailers are biased for Nvidia and give them free promotion without Nvidia doing anything.

Also, of course you will have seen the Nvidia 10 series banner more than the AMD one. Nvidia has launched two products (soon to be 3) in the 10 series while AMD has launched 1 product in the 400 series. It would be weirder if retailers hadn't been showing the Nvidia banner twice as much as the AMD banner. Halo products also get more of the spotlight than lower end products, so don't expect the 460 to get the same kind of attention as the 1080 did. It's not because of Nvidia bias from the retailers. They would have done the same thing if the roles were reverses.

 

 

2 hours ago, Trixanity said:

How on Earth would someone be able to provide sources on the future? We can only make assumptions. Assumptions that are often based on the past. Kinda like the weather reports which are frequently inaccurate.

Yes, and if we make assumptions based on the past then AMD would need 1 or 2 years to catch up, not 5 years like you said.

2 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I have my doubt that AMD would need less than five years of constant dominance to achieve a majority market share. Any of the years they've been dominant never lead to much more than a 45-55% market share in either CPU or GPU markets. Can you provide sources that my assumptions are wrong? Seems not. Citation needed, amirite? In any case your assumptions are just as valid or hollow as mine. Citation needed etc etc. 

There is no evidence to suggest AMD can quickly turn it around with product dominance as the past denies it.

Here you go:

AMD vs Intel - AMD went from 27.6% marketshare in 2005, to 48.4% marketshare in 2006. Here is another source from November 2005 which states that AMD overtook Intel's marketshare in the US.

AMD vs Nvidia - Picture in the spoiler. AMD went from 37 vs 62 marketshare (with AMD being 37%) to 55.5 vs 41.5 (with AMD being 55.5%) in 1 year years.

Spoiler

 

Again, AMD would need to dominate the entire product spectrum, and they would need to do it hard, but if they did then I don't see it taking them 5 years to catch up again (majority means above 50%, I am not saying they could flip it and get ~80% market share in 2 years). If the previous numbers are anything to go by, they could gain around 15 percentage units in a single year. Add to that their existing ~20% marketshare and they would only need 2 years to catch up.

At this point it's very improbable, but it's not impossible.

 

 

3 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Nvidia's closed source drivers on Linux are fairly decent (except Linux community hates them and still finds fault with them if I recall correctly). Their open source are a joke.

Right now AMD's closed and open source drivers are almost at parity if I recall. So it goes Nvidia closed > AMD closed > AMD open > Nvidia open.

Last time I checked (which was not too long ago, maybe 2-3 months), AMD's "open source" drivers weren't even fully open source. Their OpenGL implementation is closed source so you have to use Mesa's OpenGL implementation unless you want to use drivers full of binary blobs. On top of that, AMDGPU-Pro is closed source. Not even their implementation of Vulkan and OpenCL was open source last time I checked. So they are at feature parity unless you want to use OpenGL, OpenCL or Vulkan (unless something has changed in the last month or so).

Nvidia's doesn't even make open source drivers. They provided some documentation to Nouveau but that's it. Nouveau are third party drivers developed though reverse engineering.

 

So yes, AMD are much better when it comes to open source drivers (Nvidia aren't even trying to compete), but I'd rather just use closed source ones which are actually decent. If you don't care about whether or not your drivers are open/closed source then the Nvidia ones are superior. If you do care then you should probably use Intel GPUs (but not Skylake).

 

 

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Citation on the ratio of Nvidia and AMD marketing being on equal footing?

I don't think you've debunked much of everything. I've looked at sites that back of my claims and I've looked at those that back up yours. The Pascal banner ads seem more ubiquitous and more persistent.

How did the conversation end up about marketing? Nvidia does way more marketing than AMD does. Not going to disagree with that. Marketing is not the same as retailers pushing Nvidia products on their own will because "customers want the Nvidia brand" though, and that's what you were arguing.

 

 

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I still never said Nvidia didn't work their way to get where they are but apparently that gets ignored as being inconvenient (straw man, right?). I'm saying AMD will have a hard time getting the same people to break away from Nvidia in cases where you can't have both. Why would they? Nvidia can match and beat any offer AMD can make if they wanted to. That's the nature of the business. AMD has been beaten down to the point where they have the scraps and need to work their way up against a tsunami.

That's a VERY different tone from your previous posts. You were comparing Nvidia to Apple, saying that they would get customers regardless of what they did. Matching and beating any off AMD makes is the complete opposite of "getting customers no matter what they do".

I completely agree that AMD has been stomped to the ground and it's less "David vs Goliath" and more "squirrel vs T-Rex" these days. That is not what you said in your original post though. Nvidia is winning customers over by offering better products, and they do that with ease thanks to their vastly bigger resource pool. What I disagreed with was your statement that Nvidia gets customers because they are Nvidia, and everyone hands them everything on a silver platter. Maybe you didn't intend for your post to be read that way, but that's the way it came out (in my and several other peoples' opinions).

 

 

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I could probably put in even more paragraphs but I do have other things to do than humor you

Now is there anything else? Or will you continue this play, old chap?

I can continue this play for a long time.

I don't think there is any point though. In the end I think we are on the same page and agrees about the current state of the market. The things we don't agree on are the details (like your examples of AMD cards which have worse price:performance than Nvidia cards) and how some things were presented (I thought your posted sounded like "Nvidia can do whatever they want and still get served customers on a silver platter without trying").

Since I am sure you could write another long reply to this post I will just leave the thread with this:

 

[Ineffable]

I hope this card is so awesome it crushes the current best performance, and then I hope Nvidia responds with a card that crushes it, and so on and so forth. Team performance! w00t! (yeah, I w00ted, what?)

[BingoFishy]

57 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Well then why don't you tell the mom the price of the iPhone 6s Plus?

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

 

But yes, the top model goes for $1049.99

[AlTech]

18 minutes ago, BingoFishy said:

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

 

But yes, the top model goes for $1049.99

Yeah. Tell that to the mom buying the iPhones instead of similarly expensive or less expensive phones.

[BingoFishy]

12 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Yeah. Tell that to the mom buying the iPhones instead of similarly expensive or less expensive phones.

I can't think of any other phones that aren't super weird/have special features that most people don't need (like the lambo phone) that costs near that much.