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> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seri

> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears.

selectodude 3y ago
Yeah I'm not sure how a GPU can be both slow and uncompetitive and also the best GPU available at any price. That would imply that they're extremely competitive. Some people just have an ax to grind and will contort their facts to agree with preexisting thoughts and feelings. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
- photonerd 3y ago
  > the best GPU available at any price That’s… very debatable. Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely competitive at all levels but AMD absolutely is too & very arguably is better in some cases.
  - deelowe 3y ago
    Are we discussing gaming or AI? When it comes to AI solutions, AMD isn't even close.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Not really. Market also says otherwise.
    - photonerd 3y ago
      Market says nothing of the sort! AMD is extremely popular still. Plus while cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 rank very highly they cost 60+% more than the extremely comparable AMD RX 7900 XTX. That’s definitely not “best at any price”.
      - Keyframe 3y ago
        When you say AMD is extremely popular still, yet Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share.. what are we actually talking about here in the context of "market talks"?
        tomnipotent 3y ago
        > Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share That's the PC consumer market. Every Xbox and PlayStation shipped in the past decade has had an AMD GPU.
        Keyframe 3y ago
        Yes, and that's a great ArtX doing and legacy tracing roots to SGI and Nintendo64 cooperation which ATI bought (into). However, it's not at all relevant since consumers aren't buying those for AMD GPUs, they are specialized (to consoles), and they're buying it for the brand of consoles themselves not because they have AMD GPU in it. Same parallel could then be drawn for intel's integrated GPUs. We're talking discrete GPU cards where market directly picks and chooses and it chose Nvidia that it's not even a contest anymore it seems. Even HPC area is done for almost.
        photonerd 3y ago
        The market however IS buying those. The market has spoken, remember?
        Keyframe 3y ago
        That's not how it works. But I'll bite since you seem to follow a religion here - you can follow market talks from other end, revenue. It tells the same story, eerily so in fact.
        tomnipotent 3y ago
        > It tells the same story, eerily so in fact. NVIDIA had $11bln in 2022 revenues from graphics vs. AMD's $6bln.
  - pokerface_86 3y ago
    [dead]
- pxc 3y ago
  There are two senses of 'competitive' in play here: the sense in which a market can be 'competitive' or not by featuring alternatives that are comparable and whose successors leapfrog one another in various virtues over time, and the sense in which a product can be 'competitive' within a market by being more or less at least as good as whatever else is out there. NVIDIA is definitely not 'competitive' in the sense of participating in a competitive market, or in the sense of being characterized by furious striving for rapid and continuous improvement. Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' with their own cards from a generation or two ago. It's extremely clear to me what people mean when they say that NVIDIA or their GPUs are not meaningfully 'competitive'. I don't think it's that hard to see, actually.
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    > Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' The 4060 is the only card this generation that's a flop, and I wouldn't consider one in four being "many". > I don't think it's that hard to see, actually. It is if you're not looking or trying to be disingenuous. Every generation has introduced new features and had noticeable impacts on the consumer products in its category (games). DLSS alone has been a game-changer, pun intended.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  AMD Radeon RX 7600 review: Another water-treading midrange GPU for $269 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7600-is-a-good-1080p-card-but-the-rtx-4060-looms/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7... “AMD fails again: RX 7600 review” https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0 https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0
- stcroixx 3y ago
  By having no competition and no reason to aggressively innovate.
andrewstuart 3y ago
This is the newest Nvidia card: The brand new Nvidia RTX 4060 “can be slower than it’s predecessor in some cases”. “ Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) review: Disappointing for $400” https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8gb-review.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4... “Do not buy” “The Nvidia RTX 4060 ti is a waste of sand.” https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U
- paulmd 3y ago
  It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on. The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe, 128b memory bus) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, 64b memory bus, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!) In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just how this product segment is now. And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance, or the 6700XT being $300-320... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening. Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of selling them a $200 GPU is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore and sandbag. We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. They will make the products they can make, and if the demand is low enough that it's not economical to continue developing products for that segment, they'll stop and continue in the segments that are still profitable. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled due to excessive costs) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. Yes, it can get slower. And again, this doesn't mean "NVIDIA is leaving gaming", any more than they left gaming after the $100-150 market died. You can still make something in the 4070-class product very profitably at $600 and slimmer margins at $500, and the market access the gaming products provide is foundational for capturing the innovation happening in the other segments (it's why NVIDIA keeps being showered in money with stuff like AI while AMD is left out of the rain, you don't get to be in the segments like AI or OptiX without doing the work in gaming). But they can’t do the 4070 at $329 like it’s 2014 on a mature 28nm anymore. And the $200 market is as toast as the $100 market before it, if that's your budget then buy a console and benefit from the cost-reductions of integration and reduced modularity and fixed/stable hardware specs. But gamers are “”emotionally unprepared”” for living in a world where there isn’t automatic progress at each price point. People do think of it as the privilege of AMD and nvidia getting to sell you an upgrade… the vendors see it as the “”privilege”” of selling you the lowest-margin product in their lowest-margin product family (all of that 6nm wafer is 10x as profitable for AMD doing literally anything else already). If it sucks oh well, and if you don’t buy it then they’ll stop making it, and it’s not malicious or conspiratorial, it’s just not where the tech is going in that price segment. People want cost-inefficient Lego-style modular product design even in the lowest-end product segments, and then get mad when it’s expensive, and start spewing conspiracies about collusion etc. That’s easier for people emotionally than just admit they’re wrong and being irrational. Also there’s really no segment where any product here regressed. The predecessor to the 4060 isn’t the 3060 ti, a card that was a $400 MSRP / $450 street price even after mining. It’s the 3060, and the 4060 is way faster in all scenarios. The predecessor to the 7600 is the 6600, the 6700XT is a $480 MSRP card. People love to do this “it’s actually 2% slower (at a res nobody plays on those cards) than a card that’s only 20% faster” bit - and again this includes reviewers too. Nothing is actively regressing, it’s just not advancing as fast as people want, but they’re so emotionally immature they have to turn that into “2% slower than a card that’s 20% faster / 50% higher msrp” to express their frustration. It’s not slower than anything other than your expectations, but people emotionally love the framing of it somehow being a regression. After 5 years of these reviews and discourse (everything post Pascal and even Pascal itself tbh) I’m just kinda tired with it. If you apple Moores law era standard then everything is going to suck going forward, period, with rare “this one is ok” for truly great ones. If everything is awful nothing is.
gxs 3y ago
He might be comparing to some of their older models that held up really well for a long time vs some of the disposable crap we get now.
mpreda 3y ago
I use GPUs for FP64 (64-bit floating point) compute, and the best AMD GPU right now is still Radeon VII, which was released in 2019. Since then AMD split the GPU business into two lines, CDNA and RDNA, the point being to be able to charge much higher prices for the GPUs that provide good compute (i.e. CDNA). The RDNA line is targeted at gamers. The reasoning apparently being "let's be careful that these RDNA GPUs are bad enough so they can't really be used for anything else but games; if the user is into compute, they should pay the big money for CDNA GPUs". This is also reflected into the ROCm situation. ROCm has good support for CDNA GPUs, which is the hardware that is deployed in the huge national-lab GPU projects, where money is not an issue. The problem with that approach? normal people do not have access to CDNA GPUs that cost a multiple of 10000 USD apiece.
- AstralStorm 3y ago
  Indeed, you do need kind of a loss leader weak compute GPU to get people interested and experimenting with your platform. Cloud does not fulfill that purpose being too expensive, too limited and not secret enough. Normal gaming nVidia GPUs fill that role. You need big guns, you buy a lot of their compute cards next. AMD had decent compute capabiliites in their CDNA line, but they didn't follow through with drivers. The cards were pretty bad to try to use for compute with early ROCm, and just as bad for gaming.
  - arein3 3y ago
    You don't need a loss leader, just make the full drivers open source and I'll pay a premium
DeathArrow 3y ago
> I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears. I think he meant Nvidia GPUs are more expensive than Nvidia GPUs from previous generations.

selectodude 3y ago

Yeah I'm not sure how a GPU can be both slow and uncompetitive and also the best GPU available at any price. That would imply that they're extremely competitive. Some people just have an ax to grind and will contort their facts to agree with preexisting thoughts and feelings. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.

photonerd 3y ago
> the best GPU available at any price That’s… very debatable. Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely competitive at all levels but AMD absolutely is too & very arguably is better in some cases.
- deelowe 3y ago
  Are we discussing gaming or AI? When it comes to AI solutions, AMD isn't even close.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  Not really. Market also says otherwise.
  - photonerd 3y ago
    Market says nothing of the sort! AMD is extremely popular still. Plus while cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 rank very highly they cost 60+% more than the extremely comparable AMD RX 7900 XTX. That’s definitely not “best at any price”.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      When you say AMD is extremely popular still, yet Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share.. what are we actually talking about here in the context of "market talks"?
      - tomnipotent 3y ago
        > Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share That's the PC consumer market. Every Xbox and PlayStation shipped in the past decade has had an AMD GPU.
        Keyframe 3y ago
        Yes, and that's a great ArtX doing and legacy tracing roots to SGI and Nintendo64 cooperation which ATI bought (into). However, it's not at all relevant since consumers aren't buying those for AMD GPUs, they are specialized (to consoles), and they're buying it for the brand of consoles themselves not because they have AMD GPU in it. Same parallel could then be drawn for intel's integrated GPUs. We're talking discrete GPU cards where market directly picks and chooses and it chose Nvidia that it's not even a contest anymore it seems. Even HPC area is done for almost.
        photonerd 3y ago
        The market however IS buying those. The market has spoken, remember?
        Keyframe 3y ago
        That's not how it works. But I'll bite since you seem to follow a religion here - you can follow market talks from other end, revenue. It tells the same story, eerily so in fact.
        tomnipotent 3y ago
        > It tells the same story, eerily so in fact. NVIDIA had $11bln in 2022 revenues from graphics vs. AMD's $6bln.
- pokerface_86 3y ago
  [dead]
pxc 3y ago
There are two senses of 'competitive' in play here: the sense in which a market can be 'competitive' or not by featuring alternatives that are comparable and whose successors leapfrog one another in various virtues over time, and the sense in which a product can be 'competitive' within a market by being more or less at least as good as whatever else is out there. NVIDIA is definitely not 'competitive' in the sense of participating in a competitive market, or in the sense of being characterized by furious striving for rapid and continuous improvement. Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' with their own cards from a generation or two ago. It's extremely clear to me what people mean when they say that NVIDIA or their GPUs are not meaningfully 'competitive'. I don't think it's that hard to see, actually.
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  > Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' The 4060 is the only card this generation that's a flop, and I wouldn't consider one in four being "many". > I don't think it's that hard to see, actually. It is if you're not looking or trying to be disingenuous. Every generation has introduced new features and had noticeable impacts on the consumer products in its category (games). DLSS alone has been a game-changer, pun intended.
andrewstuart 3y ago
AMD Radeon RX 7600 review: Another water-treading midrange GPU for $269 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7600-is-a-good-1080p-card-but-the-rtx-4060-looms/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7... “AMD fails again: RX 7600 review” https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0 https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0
stcroixx 3y ago
By having no competition and no reason to aggressively innovate.

andrewstuart 3y ago

This is the newest Nvidia card: The brand new Nvidia RTX 4060 “can be slower than it’s predecessor in some cases”. “ Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) review: Disappointing for $400” https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8gb-review.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4... “Do not buy” “The Nvidia RTX 4060 ti is a waste of sand.” https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U

paulmd 3y ago
It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on. The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe, 128b memory bus) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, 64b memory bus, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!) In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just how this product segment is now. And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance, or the 6700XT being $300-320... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening. Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of selling them a $200 GPU is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore and sandbag. We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. They will make the products they can make, and if the demand is low enough that it's not economical to continue developing products for that segment, they'll stop and continue in the segments that are still profitable. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled due to excessive costs) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. Yes, it can get slower. And again, this doesn't mean "NVIDIA is leaving gaming", any more than they left gaming after the $100-150 market died. You can still make something in the 4070-class product very profitably at $600 and slimmer margins at $500, and the market access the gaming products provide is foundational for capturing the innovation happening in the other segments (it's why NVIDIA keeps being showered in money with stuff like AI while AMD is left out of the rain, you don't get to be in the segments like AI or OptiX without doing the work in gaming). But they can’t do the 4070 at $329 like it’s 2014 on a mature 28nm anymore. And the $200 market is as toast as the $100 market before it, if that's your budget then buy a console and benefit from the cost-reductions of integration and reduced modularity and fixed/stable hardware specs. But gamers are “”emotionally unprepared”” for living in a world where there isn’t automatic progress at each price point. People do think of it as the privilege of AMD and nvidia getting to sell you an upgrade… the vendors see it as the “”privilege”” of selling you the lowest-margin product in their lowest-margin product family (all of that 6nm wafer is 10x as profitable for AMD doing literally anything else already). If it sucks oh well, and if you don’t buy it then they’ll stop making it, and it’s not malicious or conspiratorial, it’s just not where the tech is going in that price segment. People want cost-inefficient Lego-style modular product design even in the lowest-end product segments, and then get mad when it’s expensive, and start spewing conspiracies about collusion etc. That’s easier for people emotionally than just admit they’re wrong and being irrational. Also there’s really no segment where any product here regressed. The predecessor to the 4060 isn’t the 3060 ti, a card that was a $400 MSRP / $450 street price even after mining. It’s the 3060, and the 4060 is way faster in all scenarios. The predecessor to the 7600 is the 6600, the 6700XT is a $480 MSRP card. People love to do this “it’s actually 2% slower (at a res nobody plays on those cards) than a card that’s only 20% faster” bit - and again this includes reviewers too. Nothing is actively regressing, it’s just not advancing as fast as people want, but they’re so emotionally immature they have to turn that into “2% slower than a card that’s 20% faster / 50% higher msrp” to express their frustration. It’s not slower than anything other than your expectations, but people emotionally love the framing of it somehow being a regression. After 5 years of these reviews and discourse (everything post Pascal and even Pascal itself tbh) I’m just kinda tired with it. If you apple Moores law era standard then everything is going to suck going forward, period, with rare “this one is ok” for truly great ones. If everything is awful nothing is.

gxs 3y ago

He might be comparing to some of their older models that held up really well for a long time vs some of the disposable crap we get now.

mpreda 3y ago

I use GPUs for FP64 (64-bit floating point) compute, and the best AMD GPU right now is still Radeon VII, which was released in 2019. Since then AMD split the GPU business into two lines, CDNA and RDNA, the point being to be able to charge much higher prices for the GPUs that provide good compute (i.e. CDNA). The RDNA line is targeted at gamers. The reasoning apparently being "let's be careful that these RDNA GPUs are bad enough so they can't really be used for anything else but games; if the user is into compute, they should pay the big money for CDNA GPUs". This is also reflected into the ROCm situation. ROCm has good support for CDNA GPUs, which is the hardware that is deployed in the huge national-lab GPU projects, where money is not an issue. The problem with that approach? normal people do not have access to CDNA GPUs that cost a multiple of 10000 USD apiece.

AstralStorm 3y ago
Indeed, you do need kind of a loss leader weak compute GPU to get people interested and experimenting with your platform. Cloud does not fulfill that purpose being too expensive, too limited and not secret enough. Normal gaming nVidia GPUs fill that role. You need big guns, you buy a lot of their compute cards next. AMD had decent compute capabiliites in their CDNA line, but they didn't follow through with drivers. The cards were pretty bad to try to use for compute with early ROCm, and just as bad for gaming.
- arein3 3y ago
  You don't need a loss leader, just make the full drivers open source and I'll pay a premium

DeathArrow 3y ago

> I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears. I think he meant Nvidia GPUs are more expensive than Nvidia GPUs from previous generations.