Corporations aren’t your friend.
My rig is full AMD (5800x/5700xt), but that’s purely because they happened to be the better value at the time. The second they get a lead in the consumer GPU market (which they likely will since nvidia simply doesn’t care about it vs the ML market now) prices are going to rise again.
And don’t pretend that these prices are anything resembling affordable. That would be when you could get a legitimately mid-range card for ~$150 (rx580).
GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.
Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.
Corporations are not our friends. 🤷♂️
I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…
something many people overlook is how intertwined nvidia, intel and amd are. not only does the personnel routinely switch between those companies but they also have the same top share holders. there’s no natural competition between them. it’s like a choreograhped light saber fight where all of them are swinging but none seem to have any intention to hit flesh. a show to make sure nobody says the m word.
…mayfabe?
Say it loud and say it proud, cooperations are no one’s friend!
We’ve come a long, long way, baby.
Am I having a stroke, or does that actually say “here’s the our source code”?
we’ll let you peak 🗻
My problem when buying my last GPU is that AMD’s answer to CUDA, ROCm, was just miles behind and not really supported on their consumer GPUs. From what I se now that has changed for the better, but it’s still hard to trust when CUDA is so dominant and mature. I don’t want to reward NVIDIA, but I want to use my GPU for some deep learning projects too and don’t really have a choice at the moment.
I’ve become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don’t rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia’s market share. It makes sense.
The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it’s just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don’t seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they’re doing. Thus, the constant idea that people “buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing”.
But if AMD cards can’t really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn’t certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven’t thought of yet. I guess they’re right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that’s all they ever do.
If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren’t that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they’re worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven’t bought, yet. I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I’ve never heard the reverse. I’ve never heard somebody say they’d like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.
The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that’s the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.
I’ve also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.
No, dummy, AMD can’t run a lot of important shit that you don’t care about. There’s more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
