Originally Posted by
cptwhite_uk
The problem is people don't buy AMD even when they offer best products at a similar price point. I remember trying to convince people a 7870 was an amazing high-med range card a couple of years ago. It was powerful, frugal and quiet. Yet people were still defending the nVidia equivalent that was ~ £20 more and ~ 10% less performance as the better option.
When people have that mindset (AMD = Bad drivers and crashing) it's going to be an uphill struggle for them to regain market share they've lost.
Yet the final result will be terrible for consumers if AMD were to lag behind by a significant margin or completely fall leaving only nVidia to buy from.
That is the market though. When you have the fringe features like Physx, 3D Vision and CUDA, people would pay the small extra for those features or "just in case" they wanted to use those features in the future.
I've said for 2 years that AMD need to do their own scheme like nVidia where they go out and work with game devs. Just reading the old stuff from Batman Arkham City (yes, I do mean City) tells a massive story, nVidia were happy to help and AMD were not.......here we are 2 years later and we are seeing a slew of titles with heavy GamesWork usage.....I doubt that is coincidence! The 2 titles where AMD did work closely with devs (BF4 and TR), it showed.
This means the problem is now compounded. If AMD had worked closer with devs, if they had put more effort into their drivers and if they had continued to push Mantle........I believe that they would be in a much better position today....unfortunately they did not and (
IMO) completely dropped the ball and tried to use games bundles to sell cards instead (which probably cost them more than working with devs would have!).
And your correct, the outcome for customers will almost certainly be bad and without a major change in fortunes soon, we are likely to see AMD fail. If that happens, I'd like to think that another company will buy the GPU division and do a better job with it than AMD have.......