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The Loyalty to AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is Decreasing

85 points by boxerbk 10y ago

boxerbk 10y ago
We all know AMD is losing market share to Intel and Nvidia, but it's interesting to see that there was so much loyalty to AMD GPUs among people who bought AMD CPUs. This is starting to decrease as Nvidia wins more of the GPU market. AMD CPUs were only included in 11% of PC builds in the last six months on PCPartPicker.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  High end I don't know, but for low end gaming (where my builds always fall into) I'd never dare to buy anything but intel/nvidia, bangs-for-bucks there simply is no comparison especially if you live in a place where kWh are expensive. The new architecture may change things, but for now, that's it. They might have started losing market due to shady tactics from the competitors, but the nail in the coffin was the botched bulldozer. that had consequences felt on every series down the road, including unrealistic power consumption per unit.
- toss1941 10y ago
  I believe AMD's market share in consumer PC's is about to double or more with Zen, if their demo is to be believed. Their supposed < $500 CPU is on par in performance with Intel's $1100 CPU with a TDP of 95W instead of Intel's 140W.
  - phren0logy 10y ago
    Agreed. And with both lower power usage and ubiquitous support for ECC memory, I think we will be seeing a lot of them in server rooms.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      If Zen ends up mopping the floor with the E3 and E5 Xeons I will be one of the first to replace gear in my homelab. The amount of money Intel wants for a second E5-2403v2 (a really weak cheap in comparison to my similarly priced i5-4570 in my desktop) to go in my ThinkServer TD430 is insane. Not to mention they're still gimping the memory capacity and PCI-E support of the low-end E3 chips, even though they can cost almost as much as a low-end E5/E7 with similar clock speeds (this part is extremely annoying for my FreeNAS box which is an HP ML10, I could really use support for more than 32GB of RAM).
- twblalock 10y ago
  I built a new gaming PC in June and I considered AMD. AMD's current CPU lineup is very confusing and there seems to be a lot of overlap. I ended up going with Intel, but if I had decided to go with AMD, I would have spent a while figuring out which CPU to go with. I hope AMD simplifies its product line when Zen comes out and gets rid of the confusing nomenclature and the low-end crap that clutters everything up.
  - m-p-3 10y ago
    To be fair I find the Intel product lines equaly confusing, especially when dealing with several generations of i3/i5/i7. There's a shit-ton of them.
zelon88 10y ago
I am still loyal to AMD CPU's, but I haven't been loyal to AMD GPU's since they were ATI. I always found their driver stack to be more cumbersome in the past, and I had a rash of bad cards that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not sure if it's changed since, but I still have faith in their CPU's. The way I see it, the benefit of supporting innovation that drives Intel to improve outweighs the benefit of having an arguably faster computer for arguably the same amount of money. Without Chevrolet we'd be driving Model-T's. Without AMD we'd by running 8080's. Support the little guy, even though they've historically not always made the right choices.
larrik 10y ago
I used to be quite loyal to AMD (and I'm typically not loyal to any companies), but their latest chips are meh. Their GPUs perform very good in benchmarks, but are buggy and poorly supported otherwise.
- lettergram 10y ago
  I'd recommend checking out their newest chips (I don't know if they hit market), they seem pretty good, and cheaper than Intel.
- louhike 10y ago
  I often had a lot problems with the drivers on AMD GPUs. Sometimes it took 2 months to be fixed. Two months during which my laptop heated too much and I was unable to play games and had problems on Youtube.
- m-p-3 10y ago
  They fixed that with Crimson.
digikata 10y ago
That's funny, I just built my first new home Linux desktop in maybe 7-8 years, and installed an AMD RX 480 GPU into it, because the increased openness in their devices is finally really allowing for a first class open source driver for Linux to be written for this generation of GPU. At this point it really seems to be just starting to pay off in the performance & stability departments. If they keep it up, there will be good reason (at least on Linux) to favor AMD video cards. Here's to hoping the new AMD CPU does well too, it's good for the market that Intel has competition.
- boxerbk 10y ago
  AMD is much more open. We've been building on top of their APIs. It was so much easier than supporting the opaque APIs of Nvidia.
- philippnagel 10y ago
  Seconded. A few months ago I built my first desktop computer in ages. An Intel i7 6700K and AMD RX 480 run smoothly under Ubuntu 16.04 ever since.
- maksimum 10y ago
  I'm also using a RX 480 on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine. We only got free-sync support very recently, and there is no overclocking/fan control or GUI of any kind. Also, as far as I understand the open source driver is only included with Linux Kernels 4.7+ while Ubuntu 16.04 is on 4.4 (16.10 is on 4.8). So if you want to use the open source driver you have to pick your distribution carefully.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    I don't use Ubuntu, so I'm curious; is there a reason someone wouldn't upgrade from 16.04 if 16.10 is out and has drivers they need?
    - wjnc 10y ago
      16.04 is a LTS-version (long term support) while .10 is not - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
ihsw 10y ago
The data sample is for the past six months -- from my limited understanding, most big-ticket items have their prices raised prior to the Christmas holiday shopping frenzy so that grandiose claims of price cuts can be met with a straight face. Perhaps most AMD GPU products have seen a higher price raise in the past six months in preparation for this shopping frenzy?
- boxerbk 10y ago
  The data is for Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, so you would expect the same from all, no? It's more about relative market share amongst the three.
paulmd 10y ago
That's no surprise. AMD's CPUs are now objectively inferior except for a few narrow use-cases: highly threaded workloads, VM hosts that need lots of physical cores to pin to machines, maximum iGPU performance, ECC RAM support on a budget (note that i3 also supports this), or very cheap fileservers/media PCs (especially AM1). A high-end FX-8350 is going to significantly underperform an i3-6300 while gaming - especially in minimum frametimes. The single-threaded performance of AMD's construction cores (Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator) has always been abysmal. The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall. Nice if you want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming, and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU. AMD's future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen. Right now they essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive mobile/server market, productivity users, or gaming). They run the games, the averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly and they use a lot of power. Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the cumulative frametime charts here (both are "badness" metric for measuring stutter) and you can see that AMD's single-threaded performance really torpedoes some games far beyond expectations. The FX-8350's 99th-percentile frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5). http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/5 http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-rev... AMD's GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive - although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games). The RX 480 is a solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM. In particular, there's a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs. AMD's GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred pairing. Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing minimum frametimes rather than averages. They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there's still a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements. Conversely NVIDIA's driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on good single-threaded CPU performance. So perversely, if you are running on an AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU. Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now by far. The CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don't but the Asus AM1M-A does. It makes a nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.
brilliantcode 10y ago
I've always supported AMD because they were the underdogs. However, overtime the cost advantage disappeared for it's GPU. I will continue to buying AMD CPU but I've already switched to Nvidia for GPU. I will switch back if the next offering is something like Maxwell cards, silent, low power consumping GPUs.
LandoCalrissian 10y ago
I still purchase AMD CPUs since the price difference between Intel is so huge. I have however given up on AMD GPUs, the price and performance are usually around Nvidia, but it's just always a little crappier or buggy. I always want them to do well, since I don't want just on company running the x86 market.
distantsounds 10y ago
AMD's CPU offerings have been lackluster in recent years, Intel has taken the cake in that department. I'm not surprised people are building Intel more and more. Ryzen is going to change all that, though. AMD is squaring that up to be the next big competitor. On the GPU front, the 8GB RX480 is making quite a dent in the market. It's beating out NVidia's 6GB GTX1060 in DX12 games, creeping towards the 1070's benchmarks, while costing less than $250. They aren't catering to the high-end market that the GTX1080 latches onto, but the price for performance is hard to beat. I surmise Ryzen to play out the same way.
- SamUK96 10y ago
  A major cost of that good price per performance metric with AMD cards however is their incredibly eye-watering TDP per performance (and their poor heat dissipation solutions). The electricity cost will in itself mean in maybe a year or so they'll cost more than an equivalent Nvidia/intel card. Also not sure how the hotter-running AMDs affect their life, but it's possible it's considerable...
- speeder 10y ago
  I recently bought a new 380X... Being honest, AMD disappointed me, it was my first AMD GPU, that I purchased after all the pain of nVidia Optimus, and... AMD managed to outdo nVidia in how shitty they are. * All cards and models have terrible power usage and heat. * Drivers, both on Windows and Linux still aren't decently stable, on my Windows I had to switch drivers SEVERAL times depending on what game I wanted to play, because with each game it had a different serious bug. * AMD software (not just drivers) crash a lot on my machine. No other software behave like that. * AMD tried to "pretend" they don't have too much power usage, on the 380X case they just put a tiny TDP limit for a beastly GPU, so it all the time keeps throttling due to power limits (even when increasing them... I am looking now for information on how to edit the TDP beyond the card defaults), the 380X TDP is the same as the 380, despite it having double the RAM and having more transistors to power. * AMD RX480 "tdp cheat" instead was to add only a single cable, pretend the card didn't had too much power usage, and let it melt people's PCI-e slots by pulling 7.7A from slots rated to 5.5A * AMD distribution network is terrible, they make zero effort to sell around the world, meanwhile nVidia and Intel trounces them, not only in marketing, but by reaching local companies to do distribution deals, for example I paid for my 380X the same price as a GeForce 970... (this was one month before RX480 launch). When nVidia launched the 1080 they called the local media, and told them what price the retailers were supposed to sell the 1080 (even if they ran out of stock), a price that was slightly cheaper than AMD Fury cards... * AMD and partners support just suck, I asked the SIZE of my card, and their support instead told me to "RMA" it, I tried to explain I wanted information, not an RMA, and they refused to help... when I asked about the TDP, then thigns got worse, they got even more staunch that I should just return the card (and eat the shipping costs to US myself!) * AMD official forums has employees spouting bullshit (like claiming in a huge thread of people complainign about the 380X, that it was the hardware on the complainers machines that was defective, withotu realizing that he just accidentally painted the whole 380X product line as shitty, since there is lots of people complaining of common issues, and if lots of people have the same issues, and is a hardware issue, then the hardware that is crap... also, on the forums making ANY negative comment about AMD, get you attacked, people claim you are nVidia shill or worse, I even got banned from AMD chat after I asked how to circunvent a driver bug that was preventing me from setting my CRT resolution correctly, because they didn't wanted me talking in public about negative things).
user5994461 10y ago
Never had any loyalty to any manufacturer. When I need a new CPU or a new GPU, I just open the latest benchmark and go for the best price/performance ratio for gaming.
- chc 10y ago
  In AMD's case, I think at least some of the loyalty to them is more than fanboyism. They're the only competitor to Intel in the desktop CPU space and Nvidia in the GPU space, and they're in a much more precarious financial position than either competitor. If AMD go away, both of those markets become completely monopolized. So in a way, it is to everyone's benefit to disproportionately support AMD.
hayitsbacon 10y ago
The lack of a competitive consumer CPUs from AMD gave the year to Intel when it came to new gaming systems. With RYZEN and Vega GPUs coming Q1 2017, AMD’s 80%+ rally in the market, and Intel’s lack of innovation, I expect a comeback for AMD in the gaming PC market. Their move back into the Professional and HPC GPU market will also be a huge financial push for AMD to get back where they want to be.
hayitsbacon 10y ago
The lack of a competitive consumer CPUs from AMD gave the year to Intel when it came to new gaming systems. With RYZEN and Vega GPUs coming Q1 2017, AMD’s 80%+ rally in the market, and Intel’s lack of innovation, I expect a comeback for AMD in the gaming PC market. Their move back into the Professional and HPC GPU market will also be a huge financial push for AMD to get back where they want to be.
zarraya 10y ago
I don't know how many of you here keep up with AMD but their drivers have lately been great, on par with Nvidia at least. The Crimson edition showed a change toward quality. I still think that for the price AMD cards are competitive.
chrisp_dc 10y ago
I was loyal to AMD's CPU from 1999 - 2013. Price and not nerfing advanced features (overclocking, VM extentions) kept me coming back. However, there aren't many recent server/workstation options. So I begrudgingly switched over to Intel Xeon chips. I bought an AMD RX 480 this year. I hadn't bought a discrete GPU in decade. I looked at Nvidia, but saw you needed Quadro/Grid to use with VT-d. AMD's GPU work with VT-d out of the box. It'd be a damn shame to lose a company like AMD that doesn't disable features for marketing reasons. I'll happily buy another AMD CPU if the zen line comes close to the hype.
vectorEQ 10y ago
its funny its decreasing now... because now Vulkan is released which put amd back in the market tbh with power consumption and performance. the cpu's i've ditched after i couldn't get the octa core properly stable. but i'm learning towards their gpu's now as it's less than half price for same performance...
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Vulkan is yet to be widely deployed.
paulmd 10y ago
The really interesting "loyalty" aspect I've seen recently is AMD users (/r/amd, etc) buying into AMD stock, big time. It's not just loyalty on hardware purchases anymore, it's literally propping up their stock price. Of course they seem to have been correct that AMD was way underpriced where it was before - but at some point it'll come back down too.
faragon 10y ago
My last 3 discrete GPUs for PC were AMD, and while AMD keep reasonable prices, Linux Kernel support, and supporting standards on Linux (OpenGL, OpenCL), I'll continue buying from them.
jobu 10y ago
My kids and I game on the family computer some, but nothing that requires bleeding edge technology. To me the performance of AMD GPUs is good enough, but they produce a ton more heat and require more active cooling than a comparable NVidia GPU. Even with very good fans there is no way to get a quiet PC that performs well using AMD GPUs.
Sephr 10y ago
It's pretty obvious why: Nvidia's top 5 GPUs wipe the floor with every current AMD offering. The GTX 1070, GTX 1080, Titan XP, Quadro P6000, and Tesla P100 are all faster than every AMD GPU in similar price brackets. Additionally, GloFo 14nm (used by AMD Polaris) is generally thought to be less efficient than TSMC 16nm FF+ (used by Nvidia Pascal).
urlwolf 10y ago
Are there any deep learning libs that work ok AMD cards? Looks like CUDA totally owns that market.
amiga-workbench 10y ago
After a AMD driver update removed audio pass through over HDMI on my HTPC build I'm not going back for more, Nvidia seem to support their gear for longer too.
dogma1138 10y ago
Not counting Zen there are considerably more reasons to buy an AMD GPU than a CPU. Everyone I know with an AMD GPU has an Intel CPU (Core i5/7) since buying AMD GPU's for gaming is an utter waste of money. The CPU's are slower, and the platform is old and buggy, not modern PCIE, storage performance is garbage, and USB 3/3.1 support is laughable.

85 points by boxerbk 10y ago

We all know AMD is losing market share to Intel and Nvidia, but it's interesting to see that there was so much loyalty to AMD GPUs among people who bought AMD CPUs. This is starting to decrease as Nvidia wins more of the GPU market. AMD CPUs were only included in 11% of PC builds in the last six months on PCPartPicker.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
High end I don't know, but for low end gaming (where my builds always fall into) I'd never dare to buy anything but intel/nvidia, bangs-for-bucks there simply is no comparison especially if you live in a place where kWh are expensive. The new architecture may change things, but for now, that's it. They might have started losing market due to shady tactics from the competitors, but the nail in the coffin was the botched bulldozer. that had consequences felt on every series down the road, including unrealistic power consumption per unit.
toss1941 10y ago
I believe AMD's market share in consumer PC's is about to double or more with Zen, if their demo is to be believed. Their supposed < $500 CPU is on par in performance with Intel's $1100 CPU with a TDP of 95W instead of Intel's 140W.
- phren0logy 10y ago
  Agreed. And with both lower power usage and ubiquitous support for ECC memory, I think we will be seeing a lot of them in server rooms.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    If Zen ends up mopping the floor with the E3 and E5 Xeons I will be one of the first to replace gear in my homelab. The amount of money Intel wants for a second E5-2403v2 (a really weak cheap in comparison to my similarly priced i5-4570 in my desktop) to go in my ThinkServer TD430 is insane. Not to mention they're still gimping the memory capacity and PCI-E support of the low-end E3 chips, even though they can cost almost as much as a low-end E5/E7 with similar clock speeds (this part is extremely annoying for my FreeNAS box which is an HP ML10, I could really use support for more than 32GB of RAM).
twblalock 10y ago
I built a new gaming PC in June and I considered AMD. AMD's current CPU lineup is very confusing and there seems to be a lot of overlap. I ended up going with Intel, but if I had decided to go with AMD, I would have spent a while figuring out which CPU to go with. I hope AMD simplifies its product line when Zen comes out and gets rid of the confusing nomenclature and the low-end crap that clutters everything up.
- m-p-3 10y ago
  To be fair I find the Intel product lines equaly confusing, especially when dealing with several generations of i3/i5/i7. There's a shit-ton of them.

zelon88 10y ago

I am still loyal to AMD CPU's, but I haven't been loyal to AMD GPU's since they were ATI. I always found their driver stack to be more cumbersome in the past, and I had a rash of bad cards that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not sure if it's changed since, but I still have faith in their CPU's. The way I see it, the benefit of supporting innovation that drives Intel to improve outweighs the benefit of having an arguably faster computer for arguably the same amount of money. Without Chevrolet we'd be driving Model-T's. Without AMD we'd by running 8080's. Support the little guy, even though they've historically not always made the right choices.

larrik 10y ago

I used to be quite loyal to AMD (and I'm typically not loyal to any companies), but their latest chips are meh. Their GPUs perform very good in benchmarks, but are buggy and poorly supported otherwise.

lettergram 10y ago
I'd recommend checking out their newest chips (I don't know if they hit market), they seem pretty good, and cheaper than Intel.
louhike 10y ago
I often had a lot problems with the drivers on AMD GPUs. Sometimes it took 2 months to be fixed. Two months during which my laptop heated too much and I was unable to play games and had problems on Youtube.
m-p-3 10y ago
They fixed that with Crimson.

digikata 10y ago

That's funny, I just built my first new home Linux desktop in maybe 7-8 years, and installed an AMD RX 480 GPU into it, because the increased openness in their devices is finally really allowing for a first class open source driver for Linux to be written for this generation of GPU. At this point it really seems to be just starting to pay off in the performance & stability departments. If they keep it up, there will be good reason (at least on Linux) to favor AMD video cards. Here's to hoping the new AMD CPU does well too, it's good for the market that Intel has competition.

boxerbk 10y ago
AMD is much more open. We've been building on top of their APIs. It was so much easier than supporting the opaque APIs of Nvidia.
philippnagel 10y ago
Seconded. A few months ago I built my first desktop computer in ages. An Intel i7 6700K and AMD RX 480 run smoothly under Ubuntu 16.04 ever since.
maksimum 10y ago
I'm also using a RX 480 on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine. We only got free-sync support very recently, and there is no overclocking/fan control or GUI of any kind. Also, as far as I understand the open source driver is only included with Linux Kernels 4.7+ while Ubuntu 16.04 is on 4.4 (16.10 is on 4.8). So if you want to use the open source driver you have to pick your distribution carefully.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  I don't use Ubuntu, so I'm curious; is there a reason someone wouldn't upgrade from 16.04 if 16.10 is out and has drivers they need?
  - wjnc 10y ago
    16.04 is a LTS-version (long term support) while .10 is not - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

ihsw 10y ago

The data sample is for the past six months -- from my limited understanding, most big-ticket items have their prices raised prior to the Christmas holiday shopping frenzy so that grandiose claims of price cuts can be met with a straight face. Perhaps most AMD GPU products have seen a higher price raise in the past six months in preparation for this shopping frenzy?

boxerbk 10y ago
The data is for Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, so you would expect the same from all, no? It's more about relative market share amongst the three.

paulmd 10y ago

That's no surprise. AMD's CPUs are now objectively inferior except for a few narrow use-cases: highly threaded workloads, VM hosts that need lots of physical cores to pin to machines, maximum iGPU performance, ECC RAM support on a budget (note that i3 also supports this), or very cheap fileservers/media PCs (especially AM1). A high-end FX-8350 is going to significantly underperform an i3-6300 while gaming - especially in minimum frametimes. The single-threaded performance of AMD's construction cores (Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator) has always been abysmal. The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall. Nice if you want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming, and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU. AMD's future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen. Right now they essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive mobile/server market, productivity users, or gaming). They run the games, the averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly and they use a lot of power. Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the cumulative frametime charts here (both are "badness" metric for measuring stutter) and you can see that AMD's single-threaded performance really torpedoes some games far beyond expectations. The FX-8350's 99th-percentile frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5). http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/5 http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-rev... AMD's GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive - although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games). The RX 480 is a solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM. In particular, there's a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs. AMD's GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred pairing. Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing minimum frametimes rather than averages. They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there's still a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements. Conversely NVIDIA's driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on good single-threaded CPU performance. So perversely, if you are running on an AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU. Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now by far. The CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don't but the Asus AM1M-A does. It makes a nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.

brilliantcode 10y ago

I've always supported AMD because they were the underdogs. However, overtime the cost advantage disappeared for it's GPU. I will continue to buying AMD CPU but I've already switched to Nvidia for GPU. I will switch back if the next offering is something like Maxwell cards, silent, low power consumping GPUs.

LandoCalrissian 10y ago

I still purchase AMD CPUs since the price difference between Intel is so huge. I have however given up on AMD GPUs, the price and performance are usually around Nvidia, but it's just always a little crappier or buggy. I always want them to do well, since I don't want just on company running the x86 market.

distantsounds 10y ago

AMD's CPU offerings have been lackluster in recent years, Intel has taken the cake in that department. I'm not surprised people are building Intel more and more. Ryzen is going to change all that, though. AMD is squaring that up to be the next big competitor. On the GPU front, the 8GB RX480 is making quite a dent in the market. It's beating out NVidia's 6GB GTX1060 in DX12 games, creeping towards the 1070's benchmarks, while costing less than $250. They aren't catering to the high-end market that the GTX1080 latches onto, but the price for performance is hard to beat. I surmise Ryzen to play out the same way.

SamUK96 10y ago
A major cost of that good price per performance metric with AMD cards however is their incredibly eye-watering TDP per performance (and their poor heat dissipation solutions). The electricity cost will in itself mean in maybe a year or so they'll cost more than an equivalent Nvidia/intel card. Also not sure how the hotter-running AMDs affect their life, but it's possible it's considerable...
speeder 10y ago
I recently bought a new 380X... Being honest, AMD disappointed me, it was my first AMD GPU, that I purchased after all the pain of nVidia Optimus, and... AMD managed to outdo nVidia in how shitty they are. * All cards and models have terrible power usage and heat. * Drivers, both on Windows and Linux still aren't decently stable, on my Windows I had to switch drivers SEVERAL times depending on what game I wanted to play, because with each game it had a different serious bug. * AMD software (not just drivers) crash a lot on my machine. No other software behave like that. * AMD tried to "pretend" they don't have too much power usage, on the 380X case they just put a tiny TDP limit for a beastly GPU, so it all the time keeps throttling due to power limits (even when increasing them... I am looking now for information on how to edit the TDP beyond the card defaults), the 380X TDP is the same as the 380, despite it having double the RAM and having more transistors to power. * AMD RX480 "tdp cheat" instead was to add only a single cable, pretend the card didn't had too much power usage, and let it melt people's PCI-e slots by pulling 7.7A from slots rated to 5.5A * AMD distribution network is terrible, they make zero effort to sell around the world, meanwhile nVidia and Intel trounces them, not only in marketing, but by reaching local companies to do distribution deals, for example I paid for my 380X the same price as a GeForce 970... (this was one month before RX480 launch). When nVidia launched the 1080 they called the local media, and told them what price the retailers were supposed to sell the 1080 (even if they ran out of stock), a price that was slightly cheaper than AMD Fury cards... * AMD and partners support just suck, I asked the SIZE of my card, and their support instead told me to "RMA" it, I tried to explain I wanted information, not an RMA, and they refused to help... when I asked about the TDP, then thigns got worse, they got even more staunch that I should just return the card (and eat the shipping costs to US myself!) * AMD official forums has employees spouting bullshit (like claiming in a huge thread of people complainign about the 380X, that it was the hardware on the complainers machines that was defective, withotu realizing that he just accidentally painted the whole 380X product line as shitty, since there is lots of people complaining of common issues, and if lots of people have the same issues, and is a hardware issue, then the hardware that is crap... also, on the forums making ANY negative comment about AMD, get you attacked, people claim you are nVidia shill or worse, I even got banned from AMD chat after I asked how to circunvent a driver bug that was preventing me from setting my CRT resolution correctly, because they didn't wanted me talking in public about negative things).

user5994461 10y ago

Never had any loyalty to any manufacturer. When I need a new CPU or a new GPU, I just open the latest benchmark and go for the best price/performance ratio for gaming.

chc 10y ago
In AMD's case, I think at least some of the loyalty to them is more than fanboyism. They're the only competitor to Intel in the desktop CPU space and Nvidia in the GPU space, and they're in a much more precarious financial position than either competitor. If AMD go away, both of those markets become completely monopolized. So in a way, it is to everyone's benefit to disproportionately support AMD.

hayitsbacon 10y ago

The lack of a competitive consumer CPUs from AMD gave the year to Intel when it came to new gaming systems. With RYZEN and Vega GPUs coming Q1 2017, AMD’s 80%+ rally in the market, and Intel’s lack of innovation, I expect a comeback for AMD in the gaming PC market. Their move back into the Professional and HPC GPU market will also be a huge financial push for AMD to get back where they want to be.

hayitsbacon 10y ago

zarraya 10y ago

I don't know how many of you here keep up with AMD but their drivers have lately been great, on par with Nvidia at least. The Crimson edition showed a change toward quality. I still think that for the price AMD cards are competitive.

chrisp_dc 10y ago

I was loyal to AMD's CPU from 1999 - 2013. Price and not nerfing advanced features (overclocking, VM extentions) kept me coming back. However, there aren't many recent server/workstation options. So I begrudgingly switched over to Intel Xeon chips. I bought an AMD RX 480 this year. I hadn't bought a discrete GPU in decade. I looked at Nvidia, but saw you needed Quadro/Grid to use with VT-d. AMD's GPU work with VT-d out of the box. It'd be a damn shame to lose a company like AMD that doesn't disable features for marketing reasons. I'll happily buy another AMD CPU if the zen line comes close to the hype.

vectorEQ 10y ago

its funny its decreasing now... because now Vulkan is released which put amd back in the market tbh with power consumption and performance. the cpu's i've ditched after i couldn't get the octa core properly stable. but i'm learning towards their gpu's now as it's less than half price for same performance...

pjmlp 10y ago
Vulkan is yet to be widely deployed.

paulmd 10y ago

The really interesting "loyalty" aspect I've seen recently is AMD users (/r/amd, etc) buying into AMD stock, big time. It's not just loyalty on hardware purchases anymore, it's literally propping up their stock price. Of course they seem to have been correct that AMD was way underpriced where it was before - but at some point it'll come back down too.

faragon 10y ago

My last 3 discrete GPUs for PC were AMD, and while AMD keep reasonable prices, Linux Kernel support, and supporting standards on Linux (OpenGL, OpenCL), I'll continue buying from them.

jobu 10y ago

My kids and I game on the family computer some, but nothing that requires bleeding edge technology. To me the performance of AMD GPUs is good enough, but they produce a ton more heat and require more active cooling than a comparable NVidia GPU. Even with very good fans there is no way to get a quiet PC that performs well using AMD GPUs.

Sephr 10y ago

It's pretty obvious why: Nvidia's top 5 GPUs wipe the floor with every current AMD offering. The GTX 1070, GTX 1080, Titan XP, Quadro P6000, and Tesla P100 are all faster than every AMD GPU in similar price brackets. Additionally, GloFo 14nm (used by AMD Polaris) is generally thought to be less efficient than TSMC 16nm FF+ (used by Nvidia Pascal).

urlwolf 10y ago

Are there any deep learning libs that work ok AMD cards? Looks like CUDA totally owns that market.

amiga-workbench 10y ago

After a AMD driver update removed audio pass through over HDMI on my HTPC build I'm not going back for more, Nvidia seem to support their gear for longer too.

dogma1138 10y ago

Not counting Zen there are considerably more reasons to buy an AMD GPU than a CPU. Everyone I know with an AMD GPU has an Intel CPU (Core i5/7) since buying AMD GPU's for gaming is an utter waste of money. The CPU's are slower, and the platform is old and buggy, not modern PCIE, storage performance is garbage, and USB 3/3.1 support is laughable.