Where are AMD pro'sumer and gaming card variants?

[lavaheadache]

As a AMD stock holder I'm quite disappointed how the company keeps missing what the competition just does better. How has AMD not realized that they need to release a "pro'sumer" cards too?

This would allow them to lob off that compute performance that miners love about them, and just sell "gaming" cards so they can increase their gaming market share. That is what the goal is , right? Radeon is gaming? :whiste:

They have all the talent in the world. Honestly, Amd reference cards, along with Ati, have always been built like tanks. They also, with exceptions, have always rivaled Nvidia quite competitively.

Why don't they ever seem to be able to make good use of leads and pull off a strong upper hand?

There is a lot of money to be made for them selling mining cards akin to the Titan prestige, and also moving a good deal of gaming cards at the same time to the market share they are trying to capture. Instead, the retail stores are making bank.

Amd is missing out on all the glory, while handing out tons of free games to the card hoarders who are double dipping into Amd's profits by reselling the games too.

Ugh....

 

[DaveSimmons]

I buy stock index funds instead of individual stocks, but as an indirect-via-index shareholder I'll disagree.

Mining is tulip mania, gold fever and/or a pyramid scheme. The people making money are at the tip of the golden pyramid, on the surface of a tulip-scented bubble. Spending millions to design and market mine-cards would be a huge waste of money and a dead loss when the card-based mining bubble pops. Even if the bubble doesn't pop by then, ASICs will take over.

Sure, people will keep adding new coin types and intentionally making them card-friendly in the hope of being at the tip of the next pyramid, but each new coin will be a smaller pyramid or less fertile tulip valley.

 

[Stuka87]

Not sure what you are meaning. Currently they have FirePro's which are pro cards. But these are based on the same cards that are already currently available to gamers. An R9 290/290X is AMD's GK110 equivalent card.

While nVidia may charge a lot of money for Titans, it makes up an extremely small percentage of sales.

Sure they may not get the same glory for having the worlds fastest gaming card, but I am not really sure it is worth the money to invest in developing a card to fill that extremely niche market.

 

[lavaheadache]

Not sure what you are meaning. Currently they have FirePro's which are pro cards. But these are based on the same cards that are already currently available to gamers. An R9 290/290X is AMD's GK110 equivalent card.

While nVidia may charge a lot of money for Titans, it makes up an extremely small percentage of sales.

Sure they may not get the same glory for having the worlds fastest gaming card, but I am not really sure it is worth the money to invest in developing a card to fill that extremely niche market.

I mean that all the 290x's are way over retail price right now due to miners buying the cards in droves affecting the gaming market. Amd's core focus right now. If they sold cards with that miners didn't want but were competitive to the competition it would give them better market penetration

 

[Hitman928]

I believe Lava's point (correct me if I'm wrong) was that if AMD dedicated a "pro-sumer" type card for those that want high GPGPU capabilities (aking to Nvidia's Titan), then they could strip the high GPGPU stuff out of the rest of their high-end cards and give them better FPS/W or FPS/$ since they would be focused on gaming performance.

The main problem I see with this, Lava, is that AMD's overall goal/vision is to expand GPGPU use more and more into the consumer sphere, mostly to help strengthen their APU's going forward and make their GPU's more attractive, even in non-gaming systems. I don't see how they could do this and convince others to follow if they then only offer good GPGPU performance on a top tier card. I actually agree with you and would like to see what you suggest, but I think that is the rationale anyway.

 

[DaveSimmons]

You mean design gaming-only cards with (feature X) stripped away at a lower price?

These cards were designed as gaming cards, to compete against nvidia's gaming cards. AMD didn't put in any separate "made for mining" features as such, so what features would they take out without hurting gaming performance?

 

[3DVagabond]

Where would they get these additional GPU's from? If they had the GPU's I think the best thing they could do would be to make some dual GPU variants and charge a premium for them. The miners would buy them because of the kh/slot. Of course, there would still be those who would complain there weren't any duallies for the gaming market, but it would be better than we have currently.

 

[spat55]

I buy stock index funds instead of individual stocks, but as an indirect-via-index shareholder I'll disagree.

Mining is tulip mania, gold fever and/or a pyramid scheme. The people making money are at the tip of the golden pyramid, on the surface of a tulip-scented bubble. Spending millions to design and market mine-cards would be a huge waste of money and a dead loss when the card-based mining bubble pops. Even if the bubble doesn't pop by then, ASICs will take over.

Sure, people will keep adding new coin types and intentionally making them card-friendly in the hope of being at the tip of the next pyramid, but each new coin will be a smaller pyramid or less fertile tulip valley.

I agree with this. I am not sure if this is just a craze in the U.S.A but here in the UK the prices have stayed at the RRP, you can get a R9 290 for £300 with postage