Jesus, they really are one of the most egregiously lock-in focused and monopolistic companies around. It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards. 90% market dominance in gaming and probably at least that in GPGPU workloads.
All the while AMD tries to sell their cards on supporting / creating open standards like Freesync, FSR and Vulkan but because they don’t have CUDA (since it’s proprietary) they virtually can’t be bought by prosumers that want to do some GPGPU stuff as a hobby and gamers buy Nvidia for brand recognition, Ray tracing which they are stronger in (but I argue isn’t really all that outside a few notable exceptions like Alan Wake 2) and DLSS being ahead of FSR. But look at non-RT $/FPS and AMD wins easy at all price points and they don’t shaft the people who bought their cards by not giving them the new version of DLSS like Nvidia do. It’s just sad.
Vote with your wallet they scream, while everyone votes for the alternative that openly wants to squeeze every penny out of them because they are slightly better…
It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards.
It doesn’t help that AMD isn’t competing that much price-wise. Their only saving grace is higher VRAM, and while that is nice, raw performance is becoming less relevant. FSR also does not compete with DLSS, it’s strictly worse in every way. They also barely exist in the laptop market, I was just considering buying a new gaming laptop and my options are an RTX 4060 or paying more for the one laptop with a weaker AMD GPU.
I would argue Intel is shaping up to be the real competitor to Nvidia. They had a rough start but their GPUs are very price-competitive. Their newer integrated GPUs are also the best currently, they’re good for gen AI, their raytracing performance trumps AMD, and XeSS is a lot better than FSR. If I were in the market for a new GPU I’d probably grab the Intel A770. I’m looking forward to their next generation of cards.
Since XeSS can run on AMD cards I feel that point is a bit moot. Further the best Intel can offer (in discrete GPUs) is miles and miles behind AMD even. As for Price / Performance the 6600 XT is neck and neck with the ARC 770 at basically the same price, depending on card and the day. Where I’m at the 6600 XT is generally the cheaper one. And that’s not even talking about the 7600 XT which demolishes the ARC 770 at also the same price point…
Nothing, rumor wise even, is indicating Intel will bring anything to the table to challenge 4070 or up.
To sum it up in my opinion it really is only the ARC 380 that I’ve been impressed by. Very cheap card with excellent server performance for stuff like Jellyfin. But for gaming? No AMD is by far the better option from a value perspective.
As for laptops it’s not that AMD doesn’t make the chips, the laptop makers know consumers want the Nvidia part.
Vote with your wallet
I did.
I bought my 3080 back in 2020, because I knew AI was the future of graphics, based on all the R&D and white papers nVidia was pumping out up to that point.
No regrets.
Not my problem nVidia was the only one to invest in the tech, while AMD relied solely on TSMC to shrink their dies.
It has nothing to do with brand loyalty or fanboys or any of that shit.
It’s just straight up better tech.
If you train AI models then you probably rely on CUDA and you’re really left without any meaningful choice. It also wouldn’t matter if AMD jumped 100% on AI even 5 years ago because CUDA has been so intensely adopted by the industry and AMD would need to do something completely novel and extremely impressive to have any chance of making a meaningful dent in just 5 years time.
As such I don’t really blame you, as I said in my above post as well. I blame the gamers, the people that don’t use CUDA and just play video games, the people complaining about how expensive GPUs have become while still fucking buying nVidia cards. The fact that AMD can deliver a product that costs less at the same performance point (without RT) is pretty impressive given their miniscule volumes compared to nVidia.
