So you are saying FX5200-5900, GTX450/550Ti, GeForce 7 sold well because they were great products? Your graph does not disprove that many NV buyers are sheep. You can admit it or not but there are many NV cards that were absolute turds and remained so for their entire useful lives. FX5000 series is probably the most famous of all. Of course ATI/AMD has many of those too. Both companies have sheep but time and time again has shown that even when NV produces worse products, people still buy them. Even when NV is late by 6-8 months to market, people still wait to give them their $, ignoring completely the opportunity cost of gaming on a slow GPU despite AMD providing a reasonable option. The same rarely happens with AMD cards. If AMD flops a generation, by far the majority of AMD owners would jump ship to NV. If AMD is 6-8 months late, there is no way the majority of AMD enthusiast on this forum are going to be waiting that long. But we see this repeated time and time again for many people who continue to buy only NV cards.
I think most people on this sub-forum care only about desktop discrete GPU parts. You just linked a
notebook dGPU market share graph, assuming no one else would notice. It's just too bad you left the original source link available for everyone to see. I went there and I noticed the chart is showing notebook market share only. So now I am asking how relevant is this to anything that goes on here regarding
desktop HD7000 vs. GTX600 discussions? I'll go a step further though.
Bias is not just favouring one brand over another no matter what (FX5900/GeForce 7 series), but intentionally posting misleading information without disclosing pertinent information that explains the other side of the story. As a perfect example, in your post you selectively used a notebook GPU market share graph to insinuate that "Because [mobile] NV GPUs sell better and AMD is losing market share, then because more people on our forum recommend [desktop] AMD cards and call NV buyers sheep, then AMD members on this forum must be biased because they can't admit or see the great value of NV's [desktop] products."
It's logical to conclude then that NV's GPUs must be superior on the whole (for those here who weren't aware that your graph has nothing to do with desktop parts), or otherwise why would AMD be losing so much market share? It can't be that millions of NV buyers are sheep, or maybe there is another good explanation?
If you wanted to be objective, you would have posted the
source article that explains why a lot of that market share was lost - and if you did, the readers on our forum would have known your causation of quality/performance that NV offers has little to do with why this market share was lost. AMD voluntarily gave up market share to NV because they couldn't afford to secure those design wins.
"In a bid to cut costs, Advanced Micro Devices claims it is turning down certain low-volume deals that require it to invest into implementation of its products. While such approach leads to a significant decrease of market share, it naturally means leaner financial structure of the whole company. Nvidia is now the No. 1 supplier of notebook GPUs (based on data from Mercury Research provided by Nvidia) because of AMDs reluctance to help integrate its Radeon Mobility products based on the recent architecture. The policy of cutting implementation and other costs has reduced the companys operating expenses from circa $610 million to about $450 million per quarter this year. For a struggling company, $160 million in cash is a significant amount of money."
It's probable that some of that market share was lost because NV's Kepler parts are superior for the mobile market in terms of performance/watt but it appears you intentionally omitted a significant part of what that graph depicts.
In summary:
1) You managed to depict notebook dGPU market share as desktop dGPU market share;
2) You didn't link to source doc which explained reasons other than performance or price/performance, but instead assumed it has everything to do with NV's cards being superior;
3) Market share and sales data alone do not prove whether one product is superior to the other. Plasma vs. LCD/LED is the perfect example why an inferior product can be vastly more popular.
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Some people might try to claim that VC&G sub-forum is AMD biased but what have AMD GPUs provided in the last 4 years ? Very good price/performance, and overclocking/enthusiast features (dual-BIOSes, safe bios flashing, price/performance of HD4000/5000/6000 series) and actually prior to HD7000 series, superior performance/watt since 2008.
As was already mentioned before, most people who recommended AMD GPUs over years continue to focus on these qualities and would have no problems switching sides at any point. I can't say the same about certain NV users.
This generation was no exception as HD7900 series were hardly recommended until the prices dropped, new drivers were released, their performance improved and game bundles followed. At the same time, how can anyone be blamed for recommending 28nm HD7770-7870 cards when NV took 6-8 months to launch their respective competitors? Were we supposed to tell people to buy slower and more power hungry 40nm NV parts?
If anything, this generation has made it more evident who the fanboys are. Bias was blaming AMD for ripping off consumers but not only did NV deliver the least impressive generational increase ever with GTX680, but also ignoring that GTX280 depreciated worse than HD7970 did. Bias was defending NV locking voltage control as a great measure for enthusiasts to save them from RMA. Bias was shifting goal posts of not caring about performance/watt for 3 generations to this being the most important factor this round. Bias was discussing amazing overclocking of GTX460/470/560/560Ti parts and ignoring it for the most part for HD7000 series, claiming it to be luck of the draw. Bias was claiming that AMD drivers were very poor, while ignoring that Fermi drivers needed at least 6 months to get up to speed. Bias was more or less blaming AMD for high prices of this generation but ignoring that NV publicly admitted that they prioritized its mobile customers and as a result of wafer shortages delayed their sub-$300 desktop GPU roll-out by 6-8 months. As such, NV just as much ripped us off by underdelivering with the 680 and is at least partially responsible for allowing AMD to maintain higher prices of HD7900 for 2.5 months before 670/680 launched and thereafter for sub-$300 desktop parts by being MIA for 6+ months. Bias was shown again by ignoring NV's ridiculous prices of 8800GTX Ultra or GTX280 cards. I mean if we are going to be fair, even GTX480 was more of a rip-off than HD7970 was. It was 6 months behind HD5870 with only 20% more performance but 35% higher cost ($499 vs. $369). HD7970 was 20% faster than GTX580 and was 22% more expensive ($549 vs. $449). There are many more examples of double standards exhibited by Team Green, and yet they call our VC&G forum biased?
If anything, many AMD "biased" members have remained consistent by focusing on price/performance and overclocking, and I would say a larger weighting assigned to higher resolution (>1920x1200) for more expensive GPUs. Many pro-NV members here just shift goal posts every generation to whatever metric is winning in a given time. You can count on 1 thing - if NV cards are losing, everything will shift to driver quality and PhysX, guaranteed.
For many AMD owners this round, perhaps the biggest trump card of all was bitcoin mining. Sure, PhysX sounds nice but ignoring bitcoin mining by NV users was a real eye-opener. Who can argue that someone is biased because they got a $500-$1000 of GPUs for free, or nearly free? That to me beat out just about anything NV had on the table this generation. That's not bias, but saving $ to get a very similar gaming experience.
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