We should all be wishing and hoping AMD does something that does not involve a foot long 300 watt card weather one is a fan of them or no, not unlike the CPU position with Intel. Otherwise, bend over for Intel and NV. Any sort of real competition is good for the consumer, and I could totally imagine AMD brass deciding to pursue less high level hardware the way things have been going.
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In the case of 780's vs 290's. The Nvidia offerings were simply more elegant and robust than AMD's offerings. They were worth the extra money.
AMD's cards have always been for the enthusiasts looking for the best bang for buck who don't mind tinkering with stuff to get it to work right. Not saying NVidia has never had any issues, but not compared to what ATi and then AMD users have had to deal with.
From an AMD user perspective, I am speaking from over a decade of experience. The last NVidia card I have had in my main system was a Geforce 2 256. I only kept it for maybe a month or 2, then gave it to my sister and went back the Voodoo5 5500 I had been previously using. Since retiring my beloved Voodoo card, I have had at least a dozen Ati/AMD video cards including my current 7970. However, barring something completely unexpected from AMD in the next few weeks, I'm set to buy either a 970 or 980 very shortly because I have grown tired of the quirkiness of AMD's cards. I just want something that works and is quiet while still delivering top notch performance.
If AMD doesn't get their act together soon, their video cards are going to follow the path of their CPU's. I was a loyal AMD CPU user for years, until Intel released their new Core architecture. Ever since, it has been nothing but Intel for users seeking the high end.
Not since custom cards. A Tri-X or PCS+ R290 is on par with R290X out of the box, so its already faster than 780. Its also a very quiet & cool card. So those metrics were in favor of the R290. Here, they were $100-150 cheaper than typical custom designs for 780s.
Only completely loyal fans would have gone with the 780 for that much more $, but yet, they sold extremely well.
My point is NV have got a huge loyal fanbase, maybe they earnt it, I am not debating that. Merely adding this point into the discussion, so people can understand where my "doom & gloom" for AMD is coming from. If AMD screws up with GCN 2, they are dead.
I feel like people are going a bit overboard with comments like these. The reason few touch AMD CPU's anymore is because they can't compete on a performance basis at all. AMD's GPU's on the other hand do just fine performance wise and usually cost less as well. So AMD is still occupying that space in the graphics segment like they did previously with their CPU's. It really all depends on where they end up pricing the R9 290/290X. If you could grab an R9 290 for $250-279 that would be a steal.
DominionSeraph
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- Jul 22, 2009
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That's just stating the obvious. If it turns out they can't compete, then they are in dyer straights for sure. There's nothing to support that belief though. AMD and nVidia have competed back and forth all along. GCN offered better perf/$. Hawaii added better perf/mm. Pitcairn offered better perf/W. There is no reason to assume they won't continue competing. GCN1 competed fine against nVidia and in all likelihood so will GCN2.
Also, keep in mind that GPU's are used for more than VGA. In many compute functions GCN is still ahead of Maxwell. Nobody is worried though that nVidia will die in the compute market because of it. That's something that is reserved only for AMD if they fall behind in any metric.
I'm sure you've noticed that anytime there is a metric that nVidia holds an edge in we have people acting like it's the only metric that matters and AMD no longer is capable of competing with nVidia because of it. Any metric that AMD has an advantage in is of no consequence to these same people.
AMD was first to DX11 and it didn't matter because there weren't many DX11 games. nVidia is used to demonstrate DX12 though and it means doom and gloom for AMD. It doesn't matter that DX12 was still reportedly 1.5 years away from there being even a single game to use it.
Where AMD is concerned there are people who make mountains out of molehills. Every time Freesync is mentioned you get people just jumping in all over it as vaporware etc. Did you see anyone start a single thread because Gsync was delayed to simply create negative drama surrounding the nVidia brand? No. If it was AMD I promise you we would have had negativity to no end.
You can likely do a for and against bullet point presentation for each brands advantages (real advantages not these subjective advantages people throw out there) and it would be a fairly even back and forth.
The 290x was an ergonomic disaster at release. Obviously pushed to the limits of what AMD was able to cool. It took AIB makers to make the 290x a viable option for users, and even then, there still wasn't much room to overclock and it was still producing furnace levels of heat.
There are already rumors that the next SINGLE gpu highend card from AMD will come with some sort of watercooling solution. This while NVidia just significantly improved the efficiency of their highend card which now reuses an overkill elegant cooling solution from the last generation card and has ridiculous overclocking headroom.
Yes, AMD is still in the same performance ballpark, but you get the impression that is only true because NVidia isn't going for the throat. Can you imagine what the 980's could do if NVidia completely ignored power and noise like AMD does or slapped a watercooler on it? How close do you think performance would be then?
With the last couple generations of cards, AMD seems to be stretching their designs closer and closer to the brink of functionality while NVidia is leaving plenty in the tank just to knock AMD down a peg whenever they get close.
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It wasn't obvious when this thread started, some people think I am exaggerating doom & gloom, but certainly now its more obvious. NV can mess up one generation or even two and will come out okay. AMD?
Not in their current financial crisis and a dying CPU/APU consumer division & a dead HPC/server CPU market.
Now they will have to price R290/X at basement prices to remain competitive, that isn't going to do well for their situation.
And whenever GCN 2 is debuted, it better damn well be a true next-gen leap and not a minor iteration.
Maxwell is over twice the perf/w as Tonga, and it has significantly more performance per die area on the same node. The consequences for mobile applications should be obvious, but even on the desktop, quiet video cards are desirable, and more efficient architecture means less money needs to be spent on power delivery and cooling. AMD can match performance by cranking TDP up for a little while, but it costs them more to make each card, and without a much more efficient architecture, they'll have no answer for a bigger maxwell die.
They've been selling R9 series gpu's fairly well (extremely well for the first 6 months due to mining demand) for about a year now. Having to cut GPU prices after 12 months doesn't spell doom for them. I haven't been following the situation with tsmc, but if AMD could make the jump to 20nm for it's next gen GPU's next year - I don't think they'll be in too bad of a spot.
AMD is good and Nvidia needs AMD to compete with them and let Nvidia know there weakness and which was price.
Big and huge problem is AMD fan base is very low in population and they demand only raw power and performance and if AMD again only focus on raw power than people like u who see value of both sides will choice Nvidia of course.
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tbh I'd say if anything this is a side effect of the console wins. Basically I bet a large % of their very bright gpu people went to making xbox 1 and ps 4 work, not developing the next gen of gpu's. The win in consoles has put them behind in the gpu race.
U can even See how console are struggling to run at 1080p at high setting and just to get 30 fps and this is the worst generation of console eve low end Pc are better than Xbox one.
KitGuru said:
Asset-light strategy has nothing to do with it. Asset-light was AMD management strategy to deal with the ATI screw up. They couldn't come up and say "folks, we screwed up the ATI acquisition, we paid far more than we should have, especially when Intel had Conroe and its wings and forced us to cut the price of our processors by up to 60%, so now we won't have the money to keep our fabs in a bleeding edge state", so they had to come up with these not-so-clever marketing names for what was a run to the hills situation.
This time, the reasons are more organic. With AMD CPU and GPU business shrinking in terms of volumes, they have to ponder how they are going to approach the 10nm and 7nm nodes. The economics of that node will be far different than those of 28nm today but what is certain is that AMD will need *far* more volume than they have today, and if projected volumes for AMD are shrinking, they simply won't be able to get into the club. What's the point of having bleeding edge IP when they don't have the volumes needed to pay for the node R&D? So there's AMD answer, start to make partnerships in order to reduce their costs.
That is certain to have a price for them, maybe in terms of integration with their designs or in terms of performance of the IP they are acquiring, but the volumes are what they are, and this kind of of deal will allow them for live to fight another day.
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That all looks good from the end buyer POV, but if AMD are forced to constantly and drastically lower prices for their products to sell well, that is not a healthy sign. They need profit to stay alive and I dont think they can make it if doing this for extended periods.
AMD cannot sell R9 290 under $400 or even $350 because of GTX 970 and it is better in all terms u can name it.So they have to bare the loss and move on to admit and make a better product that is all.
Oh come on. In the past several months nearly every time someone comes with a "What GPU should I buy?" question and has any hint of an indication of wanting to be efficient with their budget, the forum recommended an AMD product. That may change with 970, but you can't deny that history.
I suppose you could argue that you're only talking about the die-hard green-blooded shills, but you can't possibly be justified in generalizing that to "NV fans" overall. After all I could make the same about the truly fanatical AMD shills and claim you're just the same because you said anything good about AMD ever, but it would be just as flawed.
Yup poor AMD, maybe the 970/980 will be enough for to make them fold up camp and close their doors!! That would be great!
You have derailed enough discussions. Bye.
-Rvenger
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im sry but this is all i can think of after reading this post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEkWH8DB7b0
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