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Originally Posted by Iota
Keep up!! That is this thread alone. One person who refuses to buy AMD due to "drivers" and another who says they need CUDA due to the software they use. The issue is Nvidia has Nvidia users by the privates now,as like with Apple if they know you can't switch away,then you are trapped and they will dictate to you what price you will pay. Now I can appreciate the CUDA angle,but I would argue for consumer GPU sales which make up 2/3 of Nvidia's revenues,it's probably not a really big factor historically.
This is why if you are a "budget" iPhone user,you are stuck with spending at least £400~£500 on a phone,whereas with Android,its more like £100,for something that will last you years.
This is why card prices have gone up - the company which pushed £1000 graphics card as the norm,was Nvidia and it worked as people just paid it,instead of just waiting until Nvidia dropped prices. The reason we have the market we have now is as I even told you years ago,this is what would happen. People didn't buy on price/performance and that is the same back in the day as the Nvidia FX. The ATI 9000 series had ATI actually LOSE sales marketshare to Nvidia. The HD4000/HD5000 series were sales share failures longterm.
ATI/AMD tried it several times,and in the end it didn't work out as well as it should have done......people just made excuses and used it to buy cheaper Nvidia cards even with rubbish like the FX,and subpar series such as Fermi. People waited 6~9 months to buy Fermi loyally.
It also leads to the scenario where AMD has realised,if you are value orientated,they simply need to offer a slightly lower price,a bit more VRAM,etc and that will be enough. They won't be doing what they did with Ryzen,as they know it won't matter and this means AMD GPU prices are going up.
It shows you what they did with Navi. Leaked information indicated it was called the RX680. But it appears AMD decided to do a rebrand and push it up a tier.....it still was "better value" than Nvidia as it offered more VRAM,and a bit extra performance over equivalent Nvidia SKUs.
If people won't use an AMD card due to whatever reasons,you are locked to Nvidia. AMD dropping prices or making better cards will have a minimal effect. That means Nvidia dictates the price you are willing to pay,and with so many Nvidia cards pushing past £400 to £500,that tells me they have succeeded in making people spend more and more money. Even look on forums,there are RTX2080 users,who supported the increased pricing tiers,ie,the RTX2080 was over £700 at launch,with less VRAM than a GTX1080TI,and software features which didn't work very well for quite a while(yet AMD gets criticism for drivers,etc).
As much as people complained about Turing increasing prices,Nvidia margins are as high as when mining was the rage....without mining.With Nvidia having 70% of the sales market,and 2/3 of their sales from gaming GPUs,that tells me people have voted with their wallets saying Turing prices were acceptable.
You see it elsewhere too on a few forums,people steadfastly paying beyond the odds for more expensive Nvidia cards in terms of performance,saying they would never buy AMD for whatever reasons,and "hoping" AMD would be more competitive so their own Nvidia cards would be cheaper.
So in the end AMD hasn't bothered to drop pricing much now,and in fact has decided to just realistically join Nvidia,and "slightly" undercut them,ie,offer slightly lower pricing,a bit extra VRAM,etc. I said this is what would happen years ago when the Titan and HD7900 series launched. If AMD offering good products at decent price/performance didn't help them in the past,longterm they would try and maximise what they could get,and they would start to also rise prices.
This is why they said they didn't want to be seen as the "budget brand" because being the cheaper alternative apparently just lost them money.
In the end if you know you will get X sales irrespective of pricing,why bother dropping prices?? You only drop prices and margins if you know it will mean more sales. Hence why Ryzen was cheaper.
Now if you are not even that bothered about brand you are screwed either way....so realistically the best way to go is not bother with any of these companies products,unless price/performance improves a lot,and stick with what you have.
Except it won't work,as gamers are weak willed - look at the amount of money people throw at half finished alpha/beta games. Even people who buy phones are reacting to the price increases by keeping them longer,and Android users have reacted by buying more of the value orientated brands(look at the marketshare increase of Chinese companies for example),but companies have realised the gaming market is an easy target. Hence why you see gaming oriented products creeping upwards in price,way past inflation.
Things could even get worse in terms of pricing next year too,especially with the way many of our electronics supply chains are orientated,and I hardly think the government is going to care about import duty relief on computing parts!
Basically if you want cheaper pricing it will require the "generosity" of either AMD or Nvidia to start a price war. The only remote chance of that happening is because of the new consoles and both are wary of people buying a new console instead of a new GPU. So I suppose you have your value for money GPU made by AMD right there.....a console with an AMD APU!It is why as much as people laugh at Intel GPUs,we really should wish they can make competitive stuff even at the entry level. The same as things like Stadia.
OpenCL was an open standard pushed by Apple since 2009,but for many years Nvidia on purpose never bothered supporting it properly,to push CUDA. Seem familar?
Also,I think also you need to consider how much Nvidia was entrenched even a few years ago due to CUDA,etc in supercomputers,etc. However,you are starting to see more and more wins from AMD in this area,which tells me it must be due to Nvidia starting to take the mickey with realworld pricing. If they are doing moves like Turing with gamers,then what do you expect with commercial users and governments with bigger pockets? It tells me the US government buying AMD Vega GPUs is probably to make sure any further Nvidia purchases are done with improved pricing. This is why they started using newer companies for payload launches,ie,to break the monopoly due to ULA!
During the FX series,ATI lost marketshare quarter on quarter,and that is despite Valve telling people the FX series was rubbish in HL2! The ATI 9500 PRO was the first ATI GPU I had,and to this day I never understood why people bought the Nvidia FX in droves!
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