AMD Rant (No hate pls)

[GirlFromYonder]

1 minute ago, wcreek said:

Lol why all caps?

Also, I don't know actually where there'll be info about the Nitro 480s.

well i dont like exclamation marks

[DXMember]

1 hour ago, T99 said:

DX12 titles such as Doom.

lel... stopped reading after this one...

 

previous generation - Pirate Islands // Maxwell - AMD completely trashed all nVidia offerings except for 980ti and 950 in all price points

Polaris was never meant to compete with Pascal, it was supposed to bring minimum VR spec at below $250 and it did that flawlessly

[BrightCandle]

AMD has a different strategy and before the 28nm series they stuck to it pretty rigidly. They basically make a 214mm^2 die top card. This sounds remarkably specific but if you go look at the 7970, 6970, 5870, 4870 you are going to see a trend for AMD that is hard to shake. Their stated strategy before 28nm was make a mid range affordable card (small die size as in this 214mm^2 card) and then use crossfire and 2 cards to address the high end that Nvidia held.

 

Nvidia on the other hand tends to launch with a 300-400mm^2 die around the same sort of time and its usually faster, that is their x80 and the cut down x70 series of cards. This is precisely how its played out, the RX 480 is a 214mm^2 die and the 1080 is a 314mm^2 and they perform about where you would expect given the relatively sizes especially since Nvidia gets a little less performance out of a given area of space but they save power consumption by doing so.

 

With 28nm however AMD charged a lot for the 7970, they increased the prices of GPUs substantially as before the 7970 would have been a $200 card but this one they put out as a $400 card and made a killing, the margins were insane. Nvidia actually undercut them. But then 20nm didn't deliver as a process, it wasn't worth moving to and everything got stuck and we got another 2 years at 28nm. Those 2 years allowed TSMC to improve yields for maximum sized dies, which is 600mm^2. So both AMD and Nvidia given no other options developed maximum size GPUs with all the extreme options available and sold them for really high prices. In the past they never bothered, the consumer market wasn't interested in $1000 products before but nowadays they seem to be. Peoples expectations of price for GPUs was changed dramatically by the 300 and 900 series of cards for some reason and so prices now on 16nm are substantially up from 40nm for a given size (and price of manufacturer is driven by die size as is power consumption and performance).

 

I just view this as AMD pursuing their long term strategy to target their audience which is the $200 mark. Vega is likely to be a product trying to steal some of Nvidia's historical customers which are more like $350 purchasers.

[Caeradwyn]

I'm not going to speculate too much into what future plans AMD has for Polaris. For what it (RX 480) was meant to be, a card capable of giving Team Green a run for their money in the mid-range segment, it looks to be a success. This is also where the highest profit comes from, because most people don't go out and buy a flagship card. AMD needs to increase their profits, not prove they have the biggest stick.

Purely looking at naming, there's of course room for a RX 490 and an RX Fury in the Polaris lineup, but I'm not holding my breath.

Nvidia have a lot of strong non-consumer oriented contracts these days, for CUDA devices for use in super computers etc, which is bringing Nvidia a lot of money to spend on R&D, which is a large part of why they are currently ahead in producing high end GPUs. If AMD can manage to grab a larger piece of the mid-range market, there's a good chance they'll be able to spend more on R&D as well, and perhaps we'll see AMD pushing out some stuff that will be more competitive in the high end as well.

 

For those who are disappointed about RX 480 not being a 1080 competitor: Well, that was never the intention. It's not really fair to be disappointed about something not being what it was never intended to be.