Here’s a link to the Tom’s Hardware post about AMD’s new GPU strategy, cited in the GN video.
Some thoughts after watching this part of the video:
- Sounds like AMD is hitting the point where AMD cards are a complete afterthought for devs, because NVIDIA has both dominant market share and the best performance by all metrics except price. But devs don’t care about what consumers are paying for cards, they only care about developing for the card that most users have. And so, AMD is giving up on the top-end to focus on clawing back market share in the mid and entry level where NVIDIA doesn’t compete as hard.
- AMD is essentially swapping rivals, from NVIDIA to Intel, as Intel is targeting the same market that AMD is pivoting to. It’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out.
- NVIDIA will essentially have a monopoly on the top-end GPU market. I am not looking forward to that.
That is quite unfortunate. However it seems like it could lead to more affordable gpus that do well enough? That would be nice at least
I think this is a net positive for sure. Two manufacturers competing to be the most affordable can only mean lower prices overall!
I wonder what they think of as high-end GPUs, though. I’ve been using a GTX 1060 to run my games for around two or three years and am mostly happy with performance vs quality. Would a GTX 1060 today be out of AMD’s scope already or are we talking rivaling Nvidia’s 40xx series today?
Edit: If the video answers that, I apologise. I’m at work and can’t watch it immediately
The 1060 is an eight year old mid-range card, lacking almost all of the features that are setting nvidia apart from AMD these days. It has CUDA, but on its own, that’s mostly useful only for non-gaming applications. AMD is lagging behind, but they are not lagging that far behind. AMD has trouble keeping up with 20xx cards and newer, especially when it comes to ray-tracing and upscaling. FSR, while supporting older cards and being manufacturer-agnostic (that’s why even your old Nvidia card is supported), is a crutch that comes with serious visual downgrades, whereas DLSS improves both performance and visuals. This matters in all market segments. Ray-tracing meanwhile is mostly a mid-range and up thing - and while newer AMD cards support it, their performance relative to otherwise equivalent Nvidia cards is lagging far behind.
