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>I'm sure putting up with all of NVIDIA's crap is barely worth it even when making a decent profit It's illustrative to remember who and what started this: nVi
by qball 4y ago
>I'm sure putting up with all of NVIDIA's crap is barely worth it even when making a decent profit
It's illustrative to remember who and what started this: nVidia's practice of intentionally undercutting their manufacturing partners. See, manufacturing partners tend to apply secondary binning of their cards and sell them with an overclock thus delaying their obsolescence for a year or so, and that's bad when you're in the business of selling the chips themselves (while neutral to the secondary manufacturers; you just buy a new GPU from them a year later, who cares).
So it really isn't a surprise that that, combined with artificially limiting supply for the 40-series GPUs (and most of that allocation is likely going to be to, well, themselves), and now the fact that the price that nVidia likely demanded for those GPUs is coming around to bite the secondary manufacturers, meaning that they all bought (or were required to buy) the GPUs at inflated prices, they're leaving the business.
And guess what manufacturer wasn't forced to pay that premium? That's right, nVidia! So they alone have room to drop prices and still make a profit, while making the value proposition even worse for the secondaries (price premiums for overclocking make less sense as they diverge from the base model and those improved coolers are more expensive to make than nVidia's solutions).
EVGA is understandably the first to bow out; they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), and if they say it's no longer profitable even before a primary usecase for GPU compute vanished overnight I'm inclined to believe them.
And sure, there are still going to be secondary manufacturers producing cards, but most of the other manufacturers are either do-all companies (large OEMs more famous for motherboards and laptops), produce AMD cards too (Zotac-Sapphire-Inno3D), or are otherwise diverse enough (PNY) that ramping down production wouldn't kill them as a company...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago> they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), Yep. AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives, their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards, they're nearly useless for computational stuff because most everyone goes for CUDA, and AMD cheated on benchmarks by overclocking/overvolting their cards and slapping huge heatsinks on them so that they'd last just long enough for a benchmark to run before starting to overheat. There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now that Apple is no longer using discreet GPUs unless they manage to bring to bear the sort of enginering might they did for Ryzen (where they're also slipping as Intel pushes back.) NVIDIA can carry on with all their datacenter-class ML products and lose a bunch of money on the consumer side. The problem is...if AMD drops out of the GPU market, that leaves NVIDIA and Intel, and reportedly Intel's product is even worse than AMD. If NVIDIA is insufferable now, imagine them when they're the only game in town...
- ascagnel_ 4y ago> There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. You're forgetting two more, one of which is massive: consoles and high-performance embedded gaming systems (basically, the Steam Deck and other high-end handhelds). Consoles aren't going to be super profitable on a per-unit basis, but AMD is making the chips both Microsoft and Sony are using in their boxes, and they're selling a lot of those boxes (right now, about 36MM since they debuted a little under two years ago). Similarly, the Steam Deck is a pretty damn good first attempt at a cohesive handheld that runs PC titles, and I could see that extending past Valve and into a generalized marketplace (and the fact you can plug in a USB-C cable into a dock and get a real Linux desktop is really, really cool).
- cptcobalt 4y agoand Teslas. Seems like AMD’s play is high performance (somewhat) custom silicon as a service.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoI was very specifically speaking about the market for AMD's GPU cards, in the context of a discussion about GPU cards. I'm not being pedantic here. AMD's embedded GPU unit may do fine, and it would be smart for them to shift their development priority to retain that market share. They lost the desktop/laptop discreet GPU battle years ago.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoReplace GPU with CPU and you sound like someone who was very wrong after 2018 came around. Never say never.
- Jnr 4y agoI just looked at different benchmarks and the general consensus seems to be that latest Radeon and Nvidia cards are quite similar in performance. Nvidia seems to lead in raytracing and upscaling but in my opinion only the upscaling part is really important. And I bet that all GPU makers will have a decent solution available for that soon.
- deaddodo 4y ago> whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever) It wasn’t until the nVidia Geforce 285+295 that they unequivocally regained the performance crown (three years after the acquisition). AMD was still competitive, at the flagship level, until about 4 generations ago; so they were a reasonable alternative, if slightly less performant. It was the constant rehash of GCN cores that screwed them up, with their limited ROP configuration and generally weak Shaders (after the third+ respin).