AMD discrete GPU market share enjoys slight uplift in Q1 2016

[HEXUS]

However the sector as a whole drifted down by 10.2 per cent during the same period.

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[CuTTy]

Well, I wish all the luck for Polaris to rise AMD up in the game, I'm curious to see what's next.
Maybe their new chips will be interesting enough for laptops?

Also, no news on Zen? It's a big year for AMD.

[Afrocomb]

Would it be safe to say that it isn't that AMD is increasing their market share, if my maths is right they sales of discrete GPUs went down, but a case of Nvidia customers being more reluctant to buy with pascal on the horizon?

[bmdc]

Would it be safe to say that it isn't that AMD is increasing their market share, if my maths is right they sales of discrete GPUs went down, but a case of Nvidia customers being more reluctant to buy with pascal on the horizon?

But why would that make anyone more inclined to buy AMD? Pascal around the corner theoretically should mean that ALL GPU sales are down.

[QuorTek]

Hmm they forgot to add consoles into the piece of math... believe that AMD has full power there, so yeah AMD is far from beaten in any platform, mainly as they both deliver GPU + CPU's to those platforms... and how many PS4 and XBOX 1 is there not out there?

[mers]

I tend to look at the sky high prices for graphics cards in amazement. Could build a whole PC for the cost of one card. I don't game as such so it's not in my equation but I tend to think why not lower the prices be a really big amount and make them viable to all. OK R&D takes money but making sales 100% better and quicker would bring more money in at a faster rate. Seems logical to me anyways.

[Corky34]

Hmm they forgot to add consoles into the piece of math...

Consoles don't seem to be helping their finances much.

[jigger]

Consoles don't seem to be helping their finances much.

Why is that?

[Corky34]

IDK you tell me, I'm not going to pretend i know much beyond the fact that AMD has been operating at a loss for what seems like ages.

[DanceswithUnix]

I tend to look at the sky high prices for graphics cards in amazement. Could build a whole PC for the cost of one card. I don't game as such so it's not in my equation but I tend to think why not lower the prices be a really big amount and make them viable to all. OK R&D takes money but making sales 100% better and quicker would bring more money in at a faster rate. Seems logical to me anyways.

Don't think it is quite as simple as that.

Most people who want a graphics card will buy one, the cost of cards says *which* card they buy not if. You can still get a decent card around the £100 mark just like you always could, way way better than integrated graphics.

But the majority of people don't know or care about graphics cards. I have built plenty of PCs where I have been told it will never play games, which isn't true as such machines always end up playing something like The Sims, but at the time of purchase there is flat out denial. That leads to a race to the bottom on pricing on cheap machines so they get a PSU that isn't capable of powering a graphics card and just to make sure don't fit the PCIe x16 socket on the motherboard. Then there are the people who want a laptop, they don't know why but it is what they want. That's pretty hard to retro-fit any graphics card into.

So yes you can spend £1000 on a graphics card if you want, but you don't have to and games are still enjoyable.

[TooNice]

IDK you tell me, I'm not going to pretend i know much beyond the fact that AMD has been operating at a loss for what seems like ages.

Haven't looked at their financial report, but it might be the only thing that's keeping them in deeper water (I was going to say "afloat" but I am not sure if that's quite right) too

Also, the red team is still shrinking amongst Steam users: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Once upon a time, they had almost 33% of Steam users. Though that was before Intel came with their HD series and took a chunk of both the red and green team (a bigger chunk of the red).

[Corky34]

I know a lot of people like to bash Microsoft but personally i believe they played a big part in putting AMD in the corner they now find themselves, that's not to say the fault lies with Microsoft as AMD made the choices they made but if Microsoft had released DX12 some 10 years ago when multi-core CPUs first started hitting the market AMD would have found themselves in a much better position.

[kalniel]

I know a lot of people like to bash Microsoft but personally i believe they played a big part in putting AMD in the corner they now find themselves, that's not to say the fault lies with Microsoft as AMD made the choices they made but if Microsoft had released DX12 some 10 years ago when multi-core CPUs first started hitting the market AMD would have found themselves in a much better position.

And how do you propose Microsoft might have suddenly compressed 10+ years of work into a few months?

[Corky34]

No one can seriously believe Microsoft had been working on DX12 for 10+ years, it seemed like they didn't even bother with it until AMD had spent considerable resources developing Mantle, since multi-core CPUs hit the market we've had two versions of Direct X that could have had the multithreading aspects of DX12 and (IMO) if we had that AMD would've found themselves in a much better position.

[shaithis]

No one can seriously believe Microsoft had been working on DX12 for 10+ years, it seemed like they didn't even bother with it until AMD had spent considerable resources developing Mantle, since multi-core CPUs hit the market we've had two versions of Direct X that could have had the multithreading aspects of DX12 and (IMO) if we had that AMD would've found themselves in a much better position.

You could argue that AMD should have created Mantle 10 years earlier then

I really don't think Microsoft had much, if anything, to do with AMDs predicament. They were pretty reactive with scheduler updates when the lop-sided BD cores released and I haven't ever seen anything regarding slowing or hindering by Microsoft......and that makes sense as they would have nothing to gain from it.

[Lorcaran]

The current generation of consoles yielded a lower profit margin. I remember seeing articles around Nvidia not wanting the PS4 contact as it was not profitable enough. Leaving AMD picking up the deal.

Launch price PS3 was $200 more than PS4, I'm guessing AMD can do a complete SoC for better margins than Nvidia but probably doesn't equate to massive profits.