Technology

Yup, it's the classic name-brand tax. That, and Nvidia also wins on features, like RTX and AI/compute.

But most people don't actually use those features, so most people seem to be buying Nvidia due to brand recognition. AMD has dethroned Intel on performance and price, yet somehow Intel remains dominant on consumer PCs, though the lead is a lot smaller than before.

If AMD wants to take over Nvidia, they'll need consistently faster GPUs and lower prices with no compromises on features. They'd have to invest a ton to get there, and even then Nvidia would probably sell better than AMD on name recognition alone. Screw that! It makes far more sense for them to stay competitive and suck up a bunch of the mid-range market and transition the low-end market to APUs. Intel can play at the low-mid range markets, and AMD will slot themselves as a bit better than Intel, and a better value than Nvidia.

That said, I think AMD needs to go harder on the datacenter for compute, because that's where the real money is, and it's all going to Nvidia. If they can leverage their processors to provide a better overall solution for datacenter compute, they could translate that into prosumer compute devices. High end gaming is cool, but it's not nearly as lucrative as datacenter. I would hesitate to make AI-specific chips, but instead make high quality general compute chips so they can take advantage of whatever comes after the current wave of AI.

I think AMD should also get back into ARM and low-power devices. The snapdragon laptops have made a big splash, and that market could explode once the software is refined, and AMD should be poised to dominate it. They already have ARM products, they just need to make low-power, high performance products for the laptop market.

The 6000 series from AMD were so great because they picked the correct process node. Nvidia went with the far inferior Samsung 8nm node over TSMCs 7. Yet Nvidia still kept up with AMD in most areas (ignoring ray tracing).

Even the disastrous GTX 480 outsold ATI/AMD's cards in most markets.

The “disastrous” Fermi cards were also compute monsters. Even after the 600 series came out people were buying the 500 series over them because they performed so much better for the money. Instead of picking up a Kepler Quadra card in order to get double precision you could get a regular ass GTX 580 and do the same thing.

Yes, they were, and that highlights the problem really. Nvidia's grip on mind share is so strong that AMD releasing cards that matched or exceeded at the top end didn't actually matter and you still have people saying things like the comment you responded to.

It's actually incredible how quickly the discourse shifted from ray tracing being a performance hogging gimmick and DLSS being a crutch to them suddenly being important as soon as AMD had cards that could beat Nvidia's raster performance.

The 6000 series is faster in Raster but slower in Ray Tracing.

Reviews have been primarily pushing cards based on RT since it has become available. nVidia has a much larger marketing budget than AMD, and ever since they have been able to leverage the fact they have the fastest Ray Tracing, AMD share has been noise diving.