[TT]AMD's GPU market share drops again, even after the release of Fury X

[tential]

Ya rs I feel a lot of users here are out of touch with main stream gaming. Charts/graphs do not work for me when talking performance on other forums. Unless I have a YouTube forget it.
I've seen people look at fps counters side by side with no idea what the average, minimum, settings etc. On a 30 fps youtube and definitely say x card is faster than y even if every test says different because reviews like how we read are becoming a thing of the past.

I'd make a blog but I'd probably fail. It's youtube and other forms and honestly I don't think youtube is a good medium for this stuff at AL.

 

[railven]

Ya, that's why we should take AMD/NV marketing slides with a grain of salt but it took 3 pages until someone called them out.

I am shocked that AMD has actually gained mobile dGPU market share and it has nearly 35% market share in the mobile segment vs. just 23.6% on the desktop. Who is even buying laptops with AMD's dGPUs in them now? This is very surprising to me that their mobile dGPU division is doing miles better than their desktop cards because their desktop cards are actually very competitive in the $100-400 segments but their mobile dGPUs are not at all. I would have guessed that by now nV has > 90% mobile dGPU market share and I was way wrong.

If I had to guess most likely Apple products that sport mobile AMD chips. They are relatively popular among buyers.

 

[5150Joker]

Damn, spot on. A lot of the young and upcoming kids who are entering PC gaming aren't the same as we were when we started building PCs at 14-19. I feel they don't do as much research as we did. They are far more likely to listen to YouTubers, Twitch players or responses on Reddit than to actually spend time researching professional GPU reviews and compare things objectively. I have a feeling they aren't interested in reading boring long reviews on the Internet and just want to hear a quick 5-10 minute opinion from their favourite youtubers. If the youtubers they follow all receive free NV cards and are very favourable towards NV, these young and coming PC DIY builders will choose NV for sure without even reading a single proper hardware review from sites like Computerbase, AT, TechPowerup, PCGamesHardware, Sweclockers, GameGPU, etc.

Given AMD's massive drops in desktop dGPU market share from Q2 2014->Q2 2015 (before R9 300/Fury even had time to penetrate the market), it's quite clear that the R9 200 series had a forever tainted image. It sounds crazy but even if AMD sold R9 290X at $99, AMD would not get to 50% desktop dGPU market share because the average PC gamer didn't want anything to do with R9 200 series since the media and fan***s brainwashed them to think that all R9 200 series are hot, loud and require a nuclear reactor to run.

It doesn't help AMD at all when some of the top PC gaming/hardware YouTubers mostly prefer NV. And if a major YouTuber is objective but is famous, chances are NV will send him/her a free 980Ti/Titan X sample to review anyway or they would build the fastest rig because it's their hobby. Unfortunately, with the crowd/sheep mentality today, I bet most gamers assume that if 980Ti/Titan X is the greatest GPU out, then every single GTX900 series card is actually better than any AMD card at any price levels. Hence the benefit of the halo/flagship card in terms of indirect marketing/PR.

Some twitch kid (liric or whatever, I don't watch twitch much) was sponsored by cyberpower pc or whatever and given a choice of his dream build. He ended up getting a top end 5960x system equipped with 3 Titan X's. I have friends that hardly know anything about GPUs and they hopped on TeamSpeak and were like, "man did you hear?? Liric has a godly system!" So I asked what it was and they said. "Well he's got THREE NVIDIA Titans! So jealous!". So even if NVIDIA isn't directly involved, the perception and marketing is definitely there. I doubt anyone would have been as impressed if he had used 3 x Fury X.

The problem is AMD has a "budget" reputation because they pursued a strategy of trying to undercut NVIDIA prices for far too long. Instead they should have added premium features and marketing to their brand a LONG time ago and marketed themselves on equal footing. Premium features like Mantle could have helped them quite a bit if they hadn't pursued a strategy of giving the API away and instead partnered with EA to continue to support it. Imagine if all future EA titles had Mantle support with Fury X showing 20% gains over DX 11, it would have convinced a lot of people on the fence to go AMD. But thanks to brilliant management, they decided to stop spending money and resources on R&D and instead let the industry adopt it.

I also remember back when they used to offer cool stuff like All In Wonder cards that differentiated the brand and then they just stopped. Also, ATi was hurt when AMD took them over and decided to stamp their name on every product and remove the ATi branding that had been around for so long. I agree with Raghu that AMD drove ATi into the ground and I've been saying for a long time that the merger was the worst thing that ever happened to ATi. They would have been better served merging with a different company or going it alone--just the loss of their mobile IP to Qualcom alone is one of the biggest blunders ever in the tech world.

IF AMD has any sense left in them, they will start leaking performance benchmarks of their next gen parts about 1 month before release and getting the hardware into every major twitch/youtubers hand and marketing it like crazy. They also need to add some fancy name to their drivers for PR purposes and work closely with AAA + upcoming alpha game devs to make sure they have day one driver + crossfire profile support. They'd also need to push driver releases back to monthly or at least bimonthly to change the perception that they lack driver support. Taking all that will require money and if they are serious about staying in this shrinking industry, that's what it would take. Personally I don't think AMD will do any of this as I get the feeling their management really has no clue what it should do.

Ya rs I feel a lot of users here are out of touch with main stream gaming. Charts/graphs do not work for me when talking performance on other forums. Unless I have a YouTube forget it.
I've seen people look at fps counters side by side with no idea what the average, minimum, settings etc. On a 30 fps youtube and definitely say x card is faster than y even if every test says different because reviews like how we read are becoming a thing of the past.

I'd make a blog but I'd probably fail. It's youtube and other forms and honestly I don't think youtube is a good medium for this stuff at AL.

Yep, talking about FCAT, frametimes and all that is just boring academic stuff to the new generation of gamers. I play with a lot of guys in the 19-24 year old age range and they don't really care about these long winded reviews or technical discussions. They just turn on garbage like Linus Tech Reviews to see what the flavor of the month is in technology and even that is a lot of work for them. Most of the time they just go by word of mouth and that is where NVIDIA has dominant power over AMD. Two of my friends recently started looking at new graphics cards and it didn't take much to convince them to grab the Zotac 980 Ti Amp Extreme despite their initial reluctance to spend that much cash on a video card. I just showed them a few benchmark graphs, especially compared to Fury X and they were excited as hell. Word of mouth, it works, especially from a trusted source.

 

[ocre]

Ya, that's why we should take AMD/NV marketing slides with a grain of salt but it took 3 pages until someone called them out.

I am shocked that AMD has actually gained mobile dGPU market share and it has nearly 35% market share in the mobile segment vs. just 23.6% on the desktop. Who is even buying laptops with AMD's dGPUs in them now? This is very surprising to me that their mobile dGPU division is doing miles better than their desktop cards because their desktop cards are actually very competitive in the $100-400 segments but their mobile dGPUs are not at all. I would have guessed that by now nV has > 90% mobile dGPU market share and I was way wrong.

Looks to me like the data is pretty close, actually. Just shifted over as one represents sell in and the other sell out.
One data set is the units sold to partners, the "sell in". Partners are shipped batches all at once and they will then have to be sold to the consumer. They will adjust depending on how well they sell.

Isn't it strange how close the data is, if you shift it over a quarter. This is because the other one is trying to represent the sell out figures. But this one is actually not a real number, it is not the amount of units sold to customers. The Mercury sell out figures are not actual units but an attempt to represent real data by averaging. It's a 4 quarter average by volume in attempt to smooth out heavy swings that would occur if a partner stocked up majorly with anticipation but then find the product failed to sell as well as they thought. In the end, it doesn't matter much because the partner will end up ordering less next time and the data will reflect that in the next quarter. Mercury's attempt to smooth out by a 4 quarter average is not more accurate and nvidia's data "not to be trusted", as you are trying to make it out to be. You just have to understand what each one is. Mercury's averaging method could be great accept it has one major flaw, if AMDs marketshare really does plummet, their average of the last four quarters is actually boosting up this drop off and smoothing it over. The Mercury's method only works if there are no real large swings in market share. So their attempt to smooth out possible swings from large orders a partner may make isn't the correct way to do it, it's just a 4 quarter average.

Using the actual numbers shipped to partners is real data. The draw back is that those units are just filling channels and stock on shelves, they haven't been sold to the consumer yet. The beautiful thing is that if these units don't sell, the partner will not order. So the data sorts itself out, when the partner doesn't order again. The boost up from the order will either actually be sold or it will be met with a dip when they aren't shipped another large quantity. But the data will reflect that. The numbers are real and it all sorts itself out. You just may see more bumps if a product fails to sell as expected. But unless these partners are totally incompetent, the bumps won't all that large.

Mercury average of 4 quarters can smooth out those bumps but it's not actual sell data for that quarter. It's an average of the last 4 quarters. The worst possible scenario in a 4 quarter average is a sudden and fast drop off. Then their data doesn't reflect this, it simply isn't a good method when a company is loosing market share fast. You just won't see it.

That's why the data doesn't look as bad, it's not because nvidia is lying or cheating. It is because Mercury is giving you the a 4 quarter average and 2 of those quarters AMD had close to 40% market share.

I hope you are capable to see this, the Mercury method is not the better way in this case. It is actually more flawed than looking at partner shipments. And if nvidia partners over ordered, then next quarter it will sort itself out. There will be a corresponding dip.

You should also know that the sell in data, the shipments to the partners, those would have happened. Your insistence that the 300series has no impact is just wrong here, because partners order and fill the channels long before you can buy one. And this is also the reason why you are wrong about the 980 and 970 surge, the market share data does reflect maxwell just as expected. The partners would have ordered and filled the channels long before the actual cards launched. So saying that maxwell didn't cause the market share shift last yr in Q3 is just wrong. It's clear you don't/didn't understand how this works. It I am pretty sure you will ignore the facts and just carry on.

 

[Silverforce11]

If I had to guess most likely Apple products that sport mobile AMD chips. They are relatively popular among buyers.

Do desktop numbers count iMacs? There's plenty of AMD GPUs in those too, along with workstations.

Also the notebook numbers are a surprise, I too, was expecting like 10% vs 90% ratio since the last time I checked it was pretty crap and on a downward trajectory.

Edit: Similar to their HPC marketshare, out from nowhere, they grabbed 25% last year.

 

[shady28]

You're about the mindshare/marketing. Most times I see on other forums people recommend cards, it's nothing to do with the performance. They can't quote performance numbers like we do. They buy the cards everyone else has and that's Nvidia. People follow the crowd.

If AMD wants to get marketshare back, they need to market well, and personally I think the best way to do that, beyond BETTER products, is getting it into the hands of people gamers watch/follow on twitch/youtube/etc. and ensuring as many of those figures use AMD cards as possible. AMD needs to get back into the marketing game.

THe 300 series is what the 200 series should have been in terms of release. If AMD can continue that in the 400 series with good coolers, better perf/watt, good dx12 perf, etc. we may see some small hope in 2016 for a competitive market.

Otherwise, like said above, we're doomed/slaves to Nvidia share holders...

BRB adding some nvidia stock to my portfolio now?

Marketing might have something to do with it, but people thinking that the consumer is stupid gets old.

If we go back 3 years ago, a time when AMD had not only competitive but generally superior GPUs to Nvidia, this is what the market share looked like :

http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases...ased-2.5-over-last-quarter-and-5.5-over-last-

August of 2012 : 22.7% AMD vs 14.8% Nvidia


The GPU consumer is not a mindless sheep, if they were then the above trend would have simply been maintained. However, the consumer most definitely has different priorities compared to people who hang out on GPU forums. If AMD were to come out with a great product across multiple dimensions (power & heat, noise, price, performance) the consumer would once again buy their product. It's happened repeatedly in the past.

The problem AMD's GPU area has is that the company is focused on APUs, not GPUs. They are a CPU company that happens to have a GPU division, whereas Nvidia is a GPU company that happens to have a SoC division.

Most likely all available resources are poured into Zen. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has 1 engineer working on their GPUs for every 20 working on Nvidias.

 

[Abwx]

Do desktop numbers count iMacs? There's plenty of AMD GPUs in those too, along with workstations.

Also the notebook numbers are a surprise, I too, was expecting like 10% vs 90% ratio since the last time I checked it was pretty crap and on a downward trajectory.

Edit: Similar to their HPC marketshare, out from nowhere, they grabbed 25% last year.

Look like AMD is gaining marketshare since they launched Furys and the Hawai refresh, otherwise we wouldnt have Nvidia using past numbers as if they were for the current quarter, there s no smoke that appears randomly..

 

[ViRGE]

I know everyone's already been discussing the numbers for total GPU sales, but JPR's Q2'15 add-in board report is out as well.

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/add-in-board-report/

JPR found that AIB shipments during the quarter behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality, but the increase was less than the 10-year average. AIB shipments decreased -16.81% from the last quarter (the 10-year average is -8.7% ).


Total AIB shipments decreased this quarter to 9.4 million units from last quarter.


AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipments decreased -33.3%.


Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter unit shipments decreased -12.0% Nvidia continues to hold a dominant market share position at 81.9%.

 

[RampantAndroid]

It doesn't help AMD at all when some of the top PC gaming/hardware YouTubers mostly prefer NV. And if a major YouTuber is objective but is famous, chances are NV will send him/her a free 980Ti/Titan X sample to review anyway or they would build the fastest rig because it's their hobby. Unfortunately, with the crowd/sheep mentality today, I bet most gamers assume that if 980Ti/Titan X is the greatest GPU out, then every single GTX900 series card is actually better than any AMD card at any price levels. Hence the benefit of the halo/flagship card in terms of indirect marketing/PR.

I suspect that if release dates were a bit different, AMD would be ahead. As in, if the Fury X that we have today had released in say...February. Before the 980ti. Because it would have been king (forgetting the Titan X) and anyone wanting a top tier system would have wanted a Fury X. I think if AMD wants to be competitive, they need to drop the image they've had lately of playing catch up, and instead lead a new generation, if even for a few months. The resulting reviews and media fallout would probably net them a lot of positive attention.