I think you're confusing AMD with the state of FinFET. I doubt NV's GP104 flagship will be much faster than 20-30% of the 980 Ti either. So you're basically holding AMD to a much higher standard and what for?
Am I? Where did I say that? I'm saying AMD has a bigger mountain to climb than NV. NV can sit 5% faster than AMD and have no issues. AMD had a card that was almost 20% faster than it's rival card costing 10% more and they still lost market share.
For AMD to win, it has to basically be much better than it used to be. It's enough to be on-par with NV on the hardware side but their key selling arguments will be better drivers and the free ecosystem, look at the increasing viability of Freesync.
AMD has to change its perception. They've been the bargain brand for years. They try to say "no we're also premium" and then fall flat on their face.
IE, for AMD to try to get away charging what NV is charging, they have to be at minimum on par. But instead they trout out a slower, hungrier, with less memory card and try to sell "but it's a technical marvel, HBM!" HA.
Some, presumably like you, will likely cling to NV no matter what, but there's plenty of people in the middle who will go back to AMD if they get their ship in order and offer a clearly better alternative to NV on issues like driver performance over several years, which they are already doing, and their cheaper/fairer ecosystem approach(Freesync, GPU open etc).
Que? Amigo, you don't know me. I've only given NV money for a card I bought for myself twice in my 20+ years of PC gaming. I'd gladly go back to AMD. I still prefer their products. But like people here love calling NV buyers sheep, it be more sheepish to buy an inferior product (using the criteria of performance at my resolution, power consumption in my usage, and total VRAM available to me) as being blind.
GPUOpen can suck an egg if it doesn't get put into the games I play. Why do I care if AMD is improving the future for all gamers if the games I play they completely ignore? To make you, and what it seams the average AMD user, I need to suck it up and deal with inferior performance for the games I play just to promote AMD over NV? Screw that. And that doesn't translate to "hooraah NV is the best!" My time and money are both limited. I'm going to buy the product that makes best use of both.
If AMD continues to execute on the software side and eliminates the deficits with NV on the hardware side, that alone will bring them more market share. If they want to have a majority market share, that will take time. Right now, it has to be to regain the lost ground and stabilise. What comes after that, comes after that.
Here is my question. What happened to the AMD of 2012-2013? When they were partnering up with game titles on the ying yang? They were securing titles like Bioshock, Battlefield, Thief, FFXIV, Tomb Raider? Is it the lack of funding? Because if it is, they are in for a long road to turn this around. They can improve their software stack all they want, but when NV rolls up with a bag of dollars and devs are creating exceptions for them, AMD is boned.
You're making the assumption that the large increases in selling price for the GCN GPUs translated into increased revenue for AMD. Additional units obviously would increase revenue, but without knowing more you can't say that Newegg selling a 290 for $600 put any more money in their pockets than one Newegg sold at $400.
No, that's what you're interpreting. I said the inflated price hurt AMD because they didn't see any of it. And when the bubble burst that new inventory they brought to market to capitalize on the bitmining craze was cannibalized by the used market. So AMD got shafted.
1) by inflated [EDIT:vendor] prices that they didn't see a dime off, which put the cards squarely in the hands of miners, not gamers
2) miners who would later unload these cards at discount prices stealing sales away from the fresh batch of cards from AMD (remember the cards were also in short supply and were often selling fast [to miners] so when a plethora of used cards hit the scene, they sold rather well].
3) NV's price cut to cards directly competing with them
My mentioning of AMD raising the price was to draw a comparative to how I felt they botched Fiji. They raised the price of Fiji going with the "premium" concept. When they had a product that would actually sell, ie bit miners would have bad stupid amounts of money for those cards) they left the MSRP low and allowed vendors to rake in the dough. But Fiji's turn around, they had no issues trying to fleece their biggest supports (ie again, selling something on many metrics inferior to their rival at the same price point).
Unfortunately for them, there's not a whole lot they can do about that as there really wasn't a way to segment mining sales from gaming sales. The abrupt collapse of the market and the flood of used cards is something AMD would have had limited options to counteract. They could have kept MSRP up at $400/$550, but by the time the glut of used/refurb cards cleared out Hawaii would have been facing GM204, and that's a losing battle at the same prices.
Or, they could have upped MSRP, got more money from it, that would have countered when the bubble burst. I mean, Nvidia already had a card on the market for $1,000? Hey AMD :
"For the bitminer who wants the best hash, introducing the AMD Radeon Bitminer Edition! MSRP $1,000!"
I bet it would have sold out. When the bubble burst (or supply got higher) bring out the 290X. I mean, what does it matter if only a handful of gamers were lucky enough to get a 290X before the vendors jacked up the price?
I wouldn't exactly call Hawaii botched either, other than the loud reference blower, and the review clock speed issue. Hawaii competed very well against GK110, and it wasn't until a year later when GM204 was released that Hawaii really started losing out.
When your card is selling easily for almost double MSRP and you aren't seeing a dime of it - yeah, you botched it. Who ever over at NV said "we can sell big Kepler for $1,000 to a market that doesn't exist" probably got a promotion. Meanwhile, AMD HQ is salivating at their cards selling out but they're only see a fraction of that money.