AMD discrete GPU market share eroded to less than 20 per cent

[Insofin]

"drivers and being inferior to NV (this is just in people's minds)"
No, it wasn't just in my mind. I had lots of issues with the 6970, blue screens, mouse cursor getting corrupted with 2 displays etc.
To be fair, NV had it's issues as well. Win 10 driver crashing after install, and I'm sure there were other issues which I did not bump into happening to other people.
So, assuming AMD stepped up their game in the driver department (seems they did with the dx12 drivers), thery're on the right track.

Your personal experience isn't really proof of anything I've had AMD since 4800 series and haven't had any of the problems you describe.

Your personal experience isn't really proof of anything I've had AMD since 4800 series and haven't had any of the problems you describe.

Your personal experience isn't really proof of anything because **insert my own personal experience here**....right okay then

Aside of what RyanM said... I must add that back in 2008 I think it was, when the Radeons 5850 & 5870 were the brand new cards, I decided to buy the 5850 version. I spent 1 year getting bluescreens due to the graphics card, and giving AMD the chance to solve that by updating the drivers as soon as they came out... After a year, I decided to go back to my Nvidia Geforce 9500 GT that gave me no problems. From that point I decided I would not buy a single AMD Graphics card until either Nvidia started doing the same (problems with drivers), or AMD stopped making theirs.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Aside of what RyanM said... I must add that back in 2008 I think it was, when the Radeons 5850 & 5870 were the brand new cards, I decided to buy the 5850 version. I spent 1 year getting bluescreens due to the graphics card, and giving AMD the chance to solve that by updating the drivers as soon as they came out... After a year, I decided to go back to my Nvidia Geforce 9500 GT that gave me no problems. From that point I decided I would not buy a single AMD Graphics card until either Nvidia started doing the same (problems with drivers), or AMD stopped making theirs.

You do realise the 9500GT consumes far less power than a HD5850?? I had a late model 8500GT which was the same card and it was bus powered IIRC. The HD5850 required dual 6 pin PCI-E power connectors?? Did you try a GTX460 or similar power consumption Nvidia card to verify it was not a power problem??

If you had a faulty card you should have RMAed it. My GTX960 had issues and I eventually got a refund.

Not a single of my mates had an issue with their HD5850 cards including me. One of them had 9600GSO and a 9800GT beforehand(they never had an AMD or ATI card beforehand and thought that Nvidia were the bestest)and their HD5850 worked with no issues. I had an 8800GTS 512MB and an HD4830 beforehand in two systems. All of the HD5850 cards are still working years later.

My HD5850 sold more secondhand than when I first got it due to crypto-currency,so I made a profit on the card!

Plus my 8800GTS 512MB started having issues and died one month out of its warranty - I didn't suddenly never buy an Nvidia card.

Yet that same system worked for five years and my HD5850 was fine,even when massively overclocked.

Had two cards die - both Nvidia. Meh,it happens and does not stop me suddenly getting another one.

You see,a decade ago I also felt that ATI were rubbish due to all the noise on forums and so on(later it appeared it was the Nvidia Focus Group in disguise),and it took the Nvidia FX for me to consider ATI. Once I tried the 9500 PRO and saw how crap the FX ran HL2,I never bothered with this superiority of brands.

Yep,even then people were banging on how good Nvidia drivers were and how ATI were XYZ,and a number of them it transpired were given free hardware in secret by Nvidia(Nvidia Focus Group). They included even forum mods on some big forums and I believe maybe a reviewer or two(might be wrong on the last one).

This is why I have gotten very cynical when the NV FG line is repeated verbatim(not by you necessarily).

The FX series outsold the 9000 series,and it emerged Valve had to use an alternate rendering path of HL2 so it could run at acceptable framerates in DX9 on the FX cards. Reviews generally panned the FX too as being meh in comparison too.

I have had dozens of ATI,AMD and Nvidia cards since 2003,outside the two hardware issues,I magicaly seemed to have been mostly OK with games.

I think all this superiority of brands is just no different than all the iOS vs Android war or Nikon vs Canon,and so on?

Do you know that Apple makes 92% of the profits of smartphone industry and that I have known people even on minimum wage,who still spend £100s on iPhones since Android phones are "buggy" and "I knew a mate who had problems or had one issue with an Android phone which they bought 4 years ago" and so on...

Yet,the bendy iPhones 6,iPhone 4 issues had zero effect on sales or people's perception of how brilliant iPhones are and how crap everything else is..

No different.

The thing is that,I have helped with dozens of builds in real life and 100s on this forum and others since 2006.

Yet,I don't thing anyone has ever come back to me in nearly a decade,complaining about the cards I specced them whether they were ATI,Nvidia or AMD.

It makes me wonder in a double blind test,whether people would really perceive any difference TBH. I doubt it.

[shaithis]

Are you seriously going to try to say that Nvidia does better multi-screen? If so I can assure you I have a whole slew of information proving otherwise.

Never got stuck with a corrupt mouse cursor for 1.5 years due to running dual monitors on a nVidia card. I did when I was running 5870s though.

Never had a dual monitor issue with nVidia though, although I am sure you'll probably "educate" me by listing a bug that was fixed within a month.

[crossy]

Personally I think this "erosion" is due to NVidia being better at marketing than AMD - anyone know the name of the AMD equivalent of TWIMTBP? Also see a general feeling that AMD have lousy drivers (not my experience) and lack of "new" products with NVidia doing something new every year, along with all those nice (?) exclusive features like CUDA, PhysX, etc that "you can only get on Geforce!"

Quite concerned about the recent news about the cutbacks in R&D spend - this is never good news for any company that's selling "innovation".

Also doesn't hurt that the Green Team fanboys are a lot more vocal than their AMD counterparts - keep hearing comments suggesting basically that "buy a Geforce, guaranteed to work". By the way, before anyone starts slagging me off as having drunk Lisa Su's KoolAid - the 7970 that I'm using at the moment is my first non-NVidia card. And yes, it's more power-hungry and noiser than it's predecessors, on the other hand I don't have to do multiple reboots when installing new drivers.

[TooNice]

If I recall correctly, I actually had some issues with a very old game (FF7 non-Steam edition) when I upgraded from a X1800XT (noisy bugger with the retail fan) to a 8800GT. Issues that, if memory serves right did not occur on a separate machine with an HD4850 either. While it -could- be something else, being a separate build, it made me think that it was a driver issue on nVidia's part. I had to pull this example out because I can't really think of any other games I had problem that might be linked to the graphic card driver.

That said, nowadays I pretty much use laptops exclusively. My current laptop is a couple years old so I am not sure how/if things have changed, but at the time, AMD had nothing as "seamless" as nVidia's Optimus. Not to mention that a laptop is more than just the GPU, and there are far more options using the Green Team.

[The Hand]

Personally I think this "erosion" is due to NVidia being better at marketing than AMD

I see more people getting excited by Nvidia's Pascal compared to AMD's Greenland too. It doesn't bode well on the gpu front at least for AMD.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That said, nowadays I pretty much use laptops exclusively. My current laptop is a couple years old so I am not sure how/if things have changed, but at the time, AMD had nothing as "seamless" as nVidia's Optimus. Not to mention that a laptop is more than just the GPU, and there are far more options using the Green Team.

Sadly,outside the MacBooks where AMD has gained some traction,Nvidia has done better. Its basically the fault of AMD as Nvidia has launched GPUs like the GM107(GTX750TI) and GM206(GTX960) which are a good fit for laptops and even OEM desktops. AMD has not done this,as Bonaire XT(HD7790 and R7 260X) and Tonga(R9 285 and R9 380),did not massively improve performance/watt and are still largish GPUs for their classes.

AMD forgot the past as the HD5000 series did well in laptops compared to Fermi and Nvidia obviously learnt their lesson for the last two generations.

Nvidia OTH,has probably seen the collapsing dGPU market and has sucessfully engineered the Maxwell cards to have lower BOM compared to even Kepler.

Actually,these numbers are hiding something else:

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch

The desktop graphics card market is collapsing.

AMD’s shipments of desktop heterogeneous GPU/CPUs, i.e., APUs, increased 25.0% from the previous quarter, and were down -53.5% in notebooks. AMD’s discrete desktop shipments decreased -33.33% from last quarter, and notebook discrete shipments decreased -9.1%. The company’s overall PC graphics shipments decreased -25.8% from the previous quarter.


Intel’s desktop processor embedded graphics (EPGs) shipments decreased from last quarter by -7.4%, and notebooks decreased by -7.3%. The company’s overall PC graphics shipments decreased -7.4% from last quarter.


Nvidia’s desktop discrete shipments were down -12.03% from last quarter; and the company’s notebook discrete shipments decreased -21.6%. The company’s overall PC graphics shipment decreased -16.2% from last quarter. The company saw strength in gaming from Western Europe and China which helped it buck a down quarter for the industry.


Total discrete GPU (desktop and notebook) shipments from the last quarter decreased -17.07% and decreased -26.27% from last year. Sales of discrete GPUs fluctuate due to a variety of factors (timing, memory pricing, etc.), new product introductions, and the influence of integrated graphics. Overall, the CAGR from 2014 to 2017 is now -6%.

If AMD had launched a decent midrange GPU they probably would have held their marketshare,and the GTX750TI was an indication of where things would go with Nvidia. The worst thing is that they have yet to release fully enabled Tonga for the desktop too,since it probably would get close to an R9 290 at 1080p.

TBH,the current AMD dGPU line-up is a mess.

Plus the Fury X launch was a shambles.

A lot of these issues,AMD could have managed FAR better.

[qasdfdsaq]

"drivers and being inferior to NV (this is just in people's minds)"
No, it wasn't just in my mind. I had lots of issues with the 6970, blue screens, mouse cursor getting corrupted with 2 displays etc.

I've had blue screens, mouse cursor getting corrupted with 2 displays etc. with my GTX 970 too, and the finger can't be pointed at Windows 10 in that case.

Given both manufacturers have the same problems, what makes one inferior?

[Jimbo75]

Maybe I've misunderstood what shaithis said/meant, but I don't think he was saying AMD don't work with devs, I think he meant AMD don't put as much effort into working with devs as their competitor, and it shows.

They have different devs they work with. How much effort has Nvidia put into Ashes of the Singularity for example? AMD has over 100 game development partners for gaming evolved.

Simple fact is, you don't bother looking or conveniently "forget" games like Alien Isolation, Dirt Rally, BF4, Hardline, Beyond Earth, Deus Ex, Dragon Age, Sniper, Thief etc etc that Nvidia is barely involved with if at all. Not hard really because we only hear about Nvidia's involvement when they're complaining about something.

What is a myth though is that nvidia sabotages AMD performance, that's unless you have information to the contrary.

Erm...what?

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-hairworks...3-performance/

“We’ve been working with CD Projeckt Red from the beginning. We’ve been giving them detailed feedback all the way through,”

“Around two months before release, or thereabouts, the GameWorks code arrived with HairWorks, and it completely sabotaged our performance as far as we’re concerned. We were running well before that… it’s wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.”

It's testament to the sad state of the current tech press when WCCFtech are making articles 100x better than Hexus. Of course Hexus aren't even asking any questions about Nvidia at all so it's not like they'll ever be doing stuff like this.

Most games are developed on AMD hardware? That's not the title of this thread seems to indicate.

You think that PC discrete GPU market share is what matters to games devs when the vast majority of their sales are in consoles?

I've also never seen any evidence of Nvidia paying money to devs, would you have any evidence to backup those accusations?

You don't want to see evidence of it that's why.

Never had a dual monitor issue with nVidia though, although I am sure you'll probably "educate" me by listing a bug that was fixed within a month.

A month? Lol. Try 5 years.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...urround-gaming
https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...-painful-way-/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...3263/#4133263/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...26973/#4226973
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=357484
http://forums.evga.com/nVidia-Profil...g-m521213.aspx
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1590030
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1682979
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1579279
http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=25246

Don't even bother buying Nvidia for Surround, it's the most broken POS you can imagine. You'd have to imagine it of course as you can't reasonably expect the tech press to tell you about these things even after 5 years.

[Corky34]

Erm...what?

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-hairworks...3-performance/

Seriously? Your idea of a reliable source is WCCFTech.

And articles based on what one someone working for AMD SAID about the competition.

Perhaps reading this article on PCPer would give you a more rounded opinion, at the end of the day AMD and/or CD Project Red (or any other dev) could have optimised their game or drivers to work better on AMD hardware, just like they did with GTA5, that they choose not to so is not a fault of GameWorks or Nvidia (IMHO).

You think that PC discrete GPU market share is what matters to games devs when the vast majority of their sales are in consoles?

Do you mean those game consoles that have only had AMD hardware in for the last year and a half, versus those that had Nvidia hardware in them for the last 10+ years?

You don't want to see evidence of it that's why.

What makes you think I don't want to see the evidence? If you can provide some I'm more than happy to read it.

[Jimbo75]

Seriously? Your idea of a reliable source is WCCFTech.

And articles based on what one someone working for AMD SAID about the competition.

Perhaps reading this article on PCPer would give you a more rounded opinion, at the end of the day AMD and/or CD Project Red (or any other dev) could have optimised their game or drivers to work better on AMD hardware, just like they did with GTA5, that they choose not to so is not a fault of GameWorks or Nvidia (IMHO).

I guess you didn't even bother to read the article then? Maybe take what CD Projekt *themselves* said?

CD Projekt told ***********:

“Unsatisfactory performance may be experienced, as the code of this feature cannot be optimised for AMD products,”

I mean how much proof do you need?

As for PCPer - you just linked an article with Nvidia's side of the story only after claiming I linked one based on AMD's side which actually had both sides discussing it? Then had the gall to call the PCPer one "more rounded"? Do you think we're all stupid or something?

Do you mean those game consoles that have only had AMD hardware in for the last year and a half, versus those that had Nvidia hardware in them for the last 10+ years?

Erm...what? are these for?

What makes you think I don't want to see the evidence? If you can provide some I'm more than happy to read it.

The above is proof that you are absolutely blind to anything AMD does. If you think that PCPer article is "more rounded" because it gives Nvidia's pov on the game compared to the WCCFTech one which gives AMD's *and* Nvidia's point on the game then frankly, that just says it all about you.

[shaithis]

CD Projekt told ***********:

“Unsatisfactory performance may be experienced, as the code of this feature cannot be optimised for AMD products,”

And it is somehow nVidias fault that CDP decided to go with nVidia gameswork. I guess they must have paid them off......

Don't even bother buying Nvidia for Surround, it's the most broken POS you can imagine. You'd have to imagine it of course as you can't reasonably expect the tech press to tell you about these things even after 5 years.

Like most people, I have no experience of using surround. The long lasting bug AMD had effected you while just using multi-monitor on the desktop!

[kalniel]

For all the fears about hairworks in TW3, it actually seems to be working better on AMD hardware than nVidia for the most part, certainly for pre-maxwell products.

[Jimbo75]

And it is somehow nVidias fault that CDP decided to go with nVidia gameswork. I guess they must have paid them off......

Are you seriously trying to tell me that adding this crap to their game 2 months before launch was a smart move? Why on Earth would they do that *unless* they were getting highly paid for it?

How do you feel about the 960 beating the 780 in that game?

[Jimbo75]

For all the fears about hairworks in TW3, it actually seems to be working better on AMD hardware than nVidia for the most part, certainly for pre-maxwell products.

Yes because GameWorks is designed to gimp GCN *and* Kepler. Easiest way to get the mugs to upgrade in future, just keep on adding more and more tessellation that nobody can see! Guess what GameWorks 2 on Pascal will be like compared to Maxwell?

[kalniel]

Yes because GameWorks is designed to gimp GCN *and* Kepler. Easiest way to get the mugs to upgrade in future, just keep on adding more and more tessellation that nobody can see! Guess what GameWorks 2 on Pascal will be like compared to Maxwell?

I said it works great on GCN. That's the opposite of being gimped.