AMD encouraging retailer price gouging

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

They can offer more money or negotiate expanding production which again, can be done if they pay more than other competitors trying to use the same fabs. Don't tell me there's just nothing that they can do, of course there is. There's just solutions that actually involve a larger commitment on their part and they're betting at just hoping Ethereum crashes instead of putting some money down already.

If the fab is at full capacity then that means there are active signed contracts for supply, that means there is no possibility of negotiating for more capacity without the fab themselves reneging on someone else's contract inviting legal action for breach of contract.

 

If a fab is full then it's a done deal and likely for a long while as they line up production runs very strictly and well in advance, queue jumping is not easy no matter who you are unless you are Intel and own your own fab then you can almost do what ever you want.

 

Say it's going to take 3 months before you can negotiate more capacity at a premium price, do you need it in 3 months? Will those products once shipped to AIB partners and made in to retail products still be selling at the increased volume? Will the increased production capacity actually solve the issue or will it just incur a high production cost with no impact to the overall supply chain?

 

Unfortunately sometimes the only viable solution for all parties involved is to just wait it out until there is a market shift or demand is eventually meet, it's not never ending there is always a point of market saturation. Same situation happened with NAND and the solution for that was wait it out too.

[Drak3]

1 hour ago, Lawliet93 said:

NV is selling a midrange GPU for a high-end price since the Kepler generation and you are ok with it

Probably because consumers are EXTREMELY stupid, and would start shit because NVidia's top dog GPU runs hotter than they think is acceptable.

And consumer high end =/= enterprise high end. Only reason to port over the extremely expensive top dog of the enterprise would be if AMD offered something that powerful for gaming, otherwise Nvidia is burning more money to appease an EXTREMELY niche market.

 

Whereas AMD's stance on the price gouging might be logical, them listing a GFX card for +$100 of MSRP with a bonus of DLC for a F2P game is more than a tad worse than withholding a GPU from a market that realistically doesn't need or really want it.

[HalGameGuru]

I don't think this qualifies as gouging. This is strict supply and demand, fad/trend level pricing. AMD has no obligation to move capital into a risky ramp-up of production. They do not make cancer drugs or toilet paper. They are producing what they can, as they can, and selling it at agreed upon prices. THEY aren't charging more because of miners. They make no more money from miners buying cards or gamers. So you can either let prices reach equilibrium or have shortages. 

 

No one has any right to another's production. You either outbid others and get what you want now, go to a competitor, or wait it out. There are no other legitimate options. 

 

I don't like there being a shortage, I don't like that prices are through the roof. But, I have no greater right to some random GPU than any other person and if someone else is willing to pay a $100 premium while I am not, guess what, that is the entire point of equilibrium pricing. Those who need it, and are willing to pay for it, will get it. Those that don't won't until such time as prices come down or their need becomes dire enough to justify the price.

[samcool55]

4 hours ago, RadiatingLight said:

not really...

also,

if it performs the same as the other team's high-end GPU, it automatically becomes a high-end GPU. doesn't matter what number the die has, or what size it is.

No, AMD can basically only compete up to the mid-end range of nvidia. It's not because AMD can only compete up to a certain performance point that upper point becomes high-end.

 

Nvidia has a complete range of graphics cards with a better GPU chip/design above the 1080 (1080ti and titan Xp) which is the true high-end market, the 1080 is mid-range if you look at the nvidia product range.

 

edit: also don't forget pascal wasn't originally planned. Nvidia would go from Maxwell straight to Volta but because AMD competed so badly they basically took the Maxwell architecture, put it on a new node and called it a day (actually pascal but whatever :p)

[Misanthrope]

@leadeater This goes on the assumption that you can wait it out. Ethereum prices have surpassed all expectations and the coin remains profitable. More over a brand new coin is likely to quickly if not immediately replace it if is no longer profitable: this coins are true Fiat and are whatever people agree on so people that have invested in gpus are likely to quickly agree on a new gpu friendly coin if the need arises.

 

So if mining is permanent AMD has to do something even if it's seemingly impossible (because again it doesn't seems to be for Nvidia, that tells me that a better production supply chain is possible it just takes a more prepared company) 

 

In any case going back on topic one would expect AMD to at least don't make things worst with bad PR moves like this in the meantime. 

[Misanthrope]

5 hours ago, Lawliet93 said:

Screw you guys!!!! AMD is doing (if they have any saying in this situation) the only logical thing. They are milking their fanbase, as does NVIDIA (for fucks sake... NV is selling a midrange GPU for a high-end price since the Kepler generation and you are ok with it). Even if they had a much better architecture (like they did in the past) they would not sell them... Go watch those new videos by AdoredTV, in which he analyses Nvidias and AMDs generations.

Well I think we can answer that concern in part with what others have said so far:

4 hours ago, HalGameGuru said:

I don't think this qualifies as gouging. This is strict supply and demand, fad/trend level pricing. AMD has no obligation to move capital into a risky ramp-up of production. They do not make cancer drugs or toilet paper. They are producing what they can, as they can, and selling it at agreed upon prices. THEY aren't charging more because of miners. They make no more money from miners buying cards or gamers. So you can either let prices reach equilibrium or have shortages. 

 

No one has any right to another's production. You either outbid others and get what you want now, go to a competitor, or wait it out. There are no other legitimate options. 

 

I don't like there being a shortage, I don't like that prices are through the roof. But, I have no greater right to some random GPU than any other person and if someone else is willing to pay a $100 premium while I am not, guess what, that is the entire point of equilibrium pricing. Those who need it, and are willing to pay for it, will get it. Those that don't won't until such time as prices come down or their need becomes dire enough to justify the price.

If what Hal here says is true for AMD then it's also true for Nvidia: why would they price their "mid range" cards any cheaper if AMD wasn't able to respond? It was well over a year before Vega 56 and 64 came and they're still not without issues of both supply and performance and even a rushed release (It makes no sense that enthusiasts are able to fix a lot of issues by undervolting AMD should have been able to figure this out before releasing to public)

[Misanthrope]

2 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Forget it.. they state MSRP they get called a liar. They state actual pricing they get accused of condoning price gouging. What price should they put then? 

If you want to talk supply, the extraordinary amount of cards snatched up for mining is not AMD's fault and youd be an idiot to think they have the capability of supplying enough chips to make the cards go back down to their originally intended price. 

They didn't just state the actual price, they called it a deal. 100 over MSRP they consider that a great discount somehow. That's just aggravating. What you're saying is imo accurate as I've been discussing, but you still don't basically promote and call attention all on your own to a shitty situation. Also the bundled game is ridiculous as well: Both an early access and just premium content for a free game.

[Misanthrope]

11 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Its a deal if its cheaper than elsewhere. According to Amazon anything can be a deal even if its priced the same as everywhere. Bundled game has been around before the card supply got shafted. It is not some makeshift excuse for the high price. AMD intended for Polaris to have excellent perf/price against Nvidia as a selling point. How do suppose they advertise that now? 

They shouldn't advertise at all: they have no problems selling all of their supply anyway, advertisements are for when you want to sell more, they can't sell more because they can't make more so why even advertise? 

[Notional]

As Gamers Nexus pointed out, there might be legal issues, forcing AMD to co market these tweets/"sales". I don't like it any more than the next, but AMD might not have a choice. Gawd I hate miners. Useless people, doing useless things, having an insane impact on pollution and GPU prices. If you mine, go step on one.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

So you deem AMD as a special snowflake company that should not advertise? Thats a first... 

Going out of your way to say something bad about AMD

That made absolutely no sense at all as a reply to what I said.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, Notional said:

As Gamers Nexus pointed out, there might be legal issues, forcing AMD to co market these tweets/"sales". I don't like it any more than the next, but AMD might not have a choice. Gawd I hate miners. Useless people, doing useless things, having an insane impact on pollution and GPU prices. If you mine, go step on one.

I'd be surprised if they couldn't get out of said advertising deal by just saying "You gotta be at MSRP or lower for us to follow through" Again is not like companies can do nothing to curve down on mining, it's just that AMD doesn't wants them since they do want retailers to sell to miners after all.

[goodtofufriday]

This is sensationalism at its finest.

[PlayStation 2]

Welcome to the free market. 

When there is high demand and people are willing to pay the piper for it, you can take advantage of it as long as it's within legal bounds.

[Notional]

Just now, Misanthrope said:

I'd be surprised if they couldn't get out of said advertising deal by just saying "You gotta be at MSRP or lower for us to follow through" Again is not like companies can do nothing to curve down on mining, it's just that AMD doesn't wants them since they do want retailers to sell to miners after all.

Depends on the contracts written I'm sure. Changing things after the fact can be quite difficult. But it would have been better if AMD had done that. But in the end, AMD just wants to sell their GPU's either way. Adoredtv had an interesting perspective: A lot of people want AMD to be competitive, so they can get cheaper NVidia cards (Hint: that's not how supply and demand work you morons), but that is not happening anymore. AMD isn't going to play the cheaper alternative game anymore. And as long as they are selling everything they make (to miners, pros and such), they don't have to either.

 

Of course, the current situation sucks for consumers. Ryzen might have given us some competition on the CPU side, but with DDR4, GFX (both GPU and GDDR5) and SSD prices being insanely high, it's just not a good time to buy a new computer at all.

[goodtofufriday]

5 minutes ago, Notional said:

Depends on the contracts written I'm sure. Changing things after the fact can be quite difficult. But it would have been better if AMD had done that. But in the end, AMD just wants to sell their GPU's either way. Adoredtv had an interesting perspective: A lot of people want AMD to be competitive, so they can get cheaper NVidia cards (Hint: that's not how supply and demand work you morons), but that is not happening anymore. AMD isn't going to play the cheaper alternative game anymore. And as long as they are selling everything they make (to miners, pros and such), they don't have to either.

 

Of course, the current situation sucks for consumers. Ryzen might have given us some competition on the CPU side, but with DDR4, GFX (both GPU and GDDR5) and SSD prices being insanely high, it's just not a good time to buy a new computer at all.

Because of DDR4 prices I've held off on finishing my ryzen build for two months now lol.

[Notional]

1 minute ago, goodtofufriday said:

Because of DDR4 prices I've held off on finishing my ryzen build for two months now lol.

Derp. You already have the CPU/mobo? Because then it's not worth the wait. If you don't, then I get it.

[Misanthrope]

5 minutes ago, Notional said:

Depends on the contracts written I'm sure. Changing things after the fact can be quite difficult. But it would have been better if AMD had done that. But in the end, AMD just wants to sell their GPU's either way. Adoredtv had an interesting perspective: A lot of people want AMD to be competitive, so they can get cheaper NVidia cards (Hint: that's not how supply and demand work you morons), but that is not happening anymore. AMD isn't going to play the cheaper alternative game anymore. And as long as they are selling everything they make (to miners, pros and such), they don't have to either.

 

Of course, the current situation sucks for consumers. Ryzen might have given us some competition on the CPU side, but with DDR4, GFX (both GPU and GDDR5) and SSD prices being insanely high, it's just not a good time to buy a new computer at all.

Well as I said if AMD can't be competitive they should perhaps focus only on miners and drop consumer cards altogether. Of course they won't cause they want the loyalty and the mountain of excuses so many have brought forth here, they want the kind of customers that would lecture me endlessly about the free market and how this is an unsolvable issue instead of buying a better fucking card for the same money in the case of the 1060 6gb.

 

But that's just not gonna fly: this hobby also has brand agnostic people that will continue to point out how fucking shit they are until they either go away or get better. If you guys wanna take this hyper capitalist stance then here's my capitalist answer: There's no fucking trying there's just doing.

[goodtofufriday]

Just now, Notional said:

Derp. You already have the CPU/mobo? Because then it's not worth the wait. If you don't, then I get it.

Already got everything except ram. Particularly because I want 32gb b-die. Just been hunting on ebay/reddit for some.

[Notional]

1 minute ago, Misanthrope said:

Well as I said if AMD can't be competitive they should perhaps focus only on miners and drop consumer cards altogether. Of course they won't cause they want the loyalty and the mountain of excuses so many have brought forth here, they want the kind of customers that would lecture me endlessly about the free market and how this is an unsolvable issue instead of buying a better fucking card for the same money in the case of the 1060 6gb.

 

But that's just not gonna fly: this hobby also has brand agnostic people that will continue to point out how fucking shit they are until they either go away or get better. If you guys wanna take this hyper capitalist stance then here's my capitalist answer: There's no fucking trying there's just doing.

Well AMD is competitive on the low and mid end. They are selling their chips at competitive prices. I even think the vendors are selling at competitive prices. The retailers, however, are not. There's just nothing to do about it until either supply or demand evens out properly.

 

Either way, it goes back to AMD's lack of R&D funding. NVidia can afford to do to separate lines of architectures: 1 for gaming and 1 for compute/pros. That way they can tune the amount of compute for the right task. That's why NVidia cards are just more optimized for gaming and AMD's cards are just better at compute. Hopefully with the success of Ryzen/TR/EPYC, as well as RadeOn group selling everything they make, hopefully, we will see more R&D in RadeOn. Specifically splitting architectures and putting a LOT more into driver development. I mean Vega having disabled features due to a lack of driver support is just idiotic.

Just now, goodtofufriday said:

Already got everything except ram. Particularly because I want 32gb b-die. Just been hunting on ebay/reddit for some.

Uff, that's a lot of money sitting there doing nothing. I'd honestly bite the bullet because that old FX CPU is holding you back a LOT. 

[one-sixty]

I would say this because of the hard hit to prices due to cryptomining, nvidia got hit just as hard but their prices are coming back, if this is why AMD did this "deal" then its a poor way to go about it. You could atleast sell it with a triple A game instead of an early access so it comes close to that extra $100 they put on it. I dont blame AMD completely because then again the prices might still be hit for them but they need go fix this.

[Coaxialgamer]

Dat disconnect between the PR and retail teams though

[goodtofufriday]

13 minutes ago, Notional said:

Well AMD is competitive on the low and mid end. They are selling their chips at competitive prices. I even think the vendors are selling at competitive prices. The retailers, however, are not. There's just nothing to do about it until either supply or demand evens out properly.

 

Either way, it goes back to AMD's lack of R&D funding. NVidia can afford to do to separate lines of architectures: 1 for gaming and 1 for compute/pros. That way they can tune the amount of compute for the right task. That's why NVidia cards are just more optimized for gaming and AMD's cards are just better at compute. Hopefully with the success of Ryzen/TR/EPYC, as well as RadeOn group selling everything they make, hopefully, we will see more R&D in RadeOn. Specifically splitting architectures and putting a LOT more into driver development. I mean Vega having disabled features due to a lack of driver support is just idiotic.

I think its pretty fair to say the Vega is a card strictly aimed at the work space. The Instinct cards are insane.

But since AMD needed a gaming gpu, they did what they could to make it game at an affordable price. 

13 minutes ago, Notional said:

Uff, that's a lot of money sitting there doing nothing. I'd honestly bite the bullet because that old FX CPU is holding you back a LOT. 

Truth be told I'm nervous about even firing it up. My secondary build is/was a 4970k that I swapped with a 6700k. I was so extremely disappointed by the minimal perf difference that I wanted to just return it all. Ended up making the 6700k into a 3rd build.

 

[Notional]

1 minute ago, goodtofufriday said:

I think its pretty fair to say the Vega is a card strictly aimed at the work space. The Instinct cards are insane.

But since AMD needed a gaming gpu, they did what they could to make it game at an affordable price. 

 

Truth be told I'm nervous about even firing it up. My secondary build is/was a 4970k that I swapped with a 6700k. I was so extremely disappointed by the minimal perf difference that I wanted to just return it all. Ended up making the 6700k into a 3rd build.

2

It's difficult to say about the VEGA, since a lot of features for gaming are not actually unlocked yet. I think we could see a general 10-30% performance increase over the next year or so. But that is speculation of course.

 

If you game at all, you should see a big difference. Any multi tasking should be vastly better on the Ryzen (which model did you get?). Haswell to SKylake is not a huge increase either. Especially since both are 4 core 8 threads. Tiny architecture increases and a tiny clock rate increase. It's really the platform that is the biggest upgrade there. Not sure you will see a huge difference between a Ryzen and the Skylake, of course depending on your work (more multi tasking and the Skylake will shit itself). But going from an FX to a Ryzen. Night and day.

[goodtofufriday]

19 minutes ago, Notional said:

It's difficult to say about the VEGA, since a lot of features for gaming are not actually unlocked yet. I think we could see a general 10-30% performance increase over the next year or so. But that is speculation of course.

 

If you game at all, you should see a big difference. Any multi tasking should be vastly better on the Ryzen (which model did you get?). Haswell to SKylake is not a huge increase either. Especially since both are 4 core 8 threads. Tiny architecture increases and a tiny clock rate increase. It's really the platform that is the biggest upgrade there. Not sure you will see a huge difference between a Ryzen and the Skylake, of course depending on your work (more multi tasking and the Skylake will shit itself). But going from an FX to a Ryzen. Night and day.

Is the rasterizer still not enabled? Im planning on asus dual die vega. Hoping prices level out by then... 

 

Ive got the 1800x and the asrock taichi board. I guess ill borrow some ram from work to test it at least. Ive personally not felt terribly behind with the 9590, but i dont know if thats because im so used to its perf, or because of my monitors res. 

[cj09beira]

11 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

The beef is more specific than that: AMD dodged the critic of them being unable to address supply by implying vendors are just free to price gouge (basically not accepting that they are the ones unable to produce proper supply and that vendors are just scum, again implied)

 

But now this is a full 180. AMD simply needs to accept that they're fucking up: They can't keep up with demand. Demand from mining is not going away and mining on their cards remains popular and isn't going to let down they need to just ramp up production even if it costs them due to an Etherum crash. They are no longer interested in addressing mining problems they just want to pass down their supply problems to the consumer.

go inform yourself on what happend in the last mining craze

Spoiler

amd ramped up production and when the bubble eventually bursted they were stuck with a lot of unsold inventory and that cost them a lot of money.

 

 

btw vega is not a bad product at all, just not the best for gaming, and right now if i was the head of radeon i would not focus on gamers at all as they have proven time and time again that they wont buy amd gpus even when they are the better product (i am not going to speculate on why thats the case).

vega is a beast at compute work, being faster than P100 at everything except fp64 so with vega amd will enter a market that is filled with people that inform themselves before buying products