Question Why does the overall gaming GPU market treat AMD like they have AIDS?

[VirtualLarry]

I guess I get the (sub-liminal) "The way it's meant to be played" ads from NVidia, along with the recurring FUD tropes about "AMD drivers", but I honestly don't get the sales disparity, especially for the price.

I've owned both NVidia-powered as well as AMD powered GPUs, and IMHO, AMD is (generally) just as good. Maybe 99% as good.

Edit: And I think that there's something to be said about the viability of AMD technologies, when they're in both major console brands.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

There is a few things they have been involved with, not a one off case. XFX public statements claim they did nothing wrong.

They were (allegedly) mislabeling GPUs to get around customs (marking them as cheaper cards than they were).
They were (allegedly) bypassing store fronts and selling directly to miners. Its the reason XFX RX 5x0 and RX 5x00 cards were almost non-existent in store fronts.
They were (allegedly) reselling cards that had been mined on, without stating that they were previously mined on. They basically repackaged them. The story here is China banned GPU mining. So all the GPUs were sent out to countries with cheap power. Once mining crashed, the cards were then repackaged and they tried to reimport them to China in order to sell them. This is when they got caught the most recent time. Its not clear if XFX owned all the cards, and were basically building cards to mine for their own profit.

Its worth noting that XFX is owned by the Pine Group. And is not a standalone company.

-AIBs selling to miners has been more or less an open secret for the last two years. Not just XFX but EVERYONE. AIBs saw $$$ and went for it. Hardly a reason to cut anyone off.

I'm more curious about the attempt to resell mined XFX cards as brand new *By XFX* cause when I look for XFX controversy I see a lot of stories about the first issue (mislabeled cards) and nothing about the second (XFX trying to pass mined GPUs as new).

 

[Mopetar]

I'm not really sure what AMD could actually do about it. First sale doctrine type laws limit a manufacturer from telling a retailer (or more generally a purchaser) what they're allowed to do with what they've just purchased. Believe me that we don't want to get into any kind of situation where we're "licensing" our GPUs instead of purchasing them.

Skirting import laws is also outside of AMD's purview and it would be up to the government of some jurisdiction to go after a company for that.

Let the market decide if they don't like a company and to shun them and their products. Let AMD and NVidia focus on making cards instead of wasting time trying to police the downstream use of them.