Well their still trading and if they didn't aquire ATI for Apu's, I have my doubts they'd still be in the cpu game as the AMD acquisition money wouldn't have made a difference in the Intel Juggernaut anyway as Intel would have released faster than what we have now anyway.
RTG is now clawing sales back off Nv with Polaris-sure Nv's still selling more than Polaris, but AMD's up ~7%(?), I'm surprised they've clawed back so much in a short space of time.
RX 480 is a sold card. It also has the “mindshare” for being released on the market first ahead of the GTX 1060 and doing pretty well in DX 12 and Vulkan beating nVidia’s equivalent in many games.
Problem is that with the RX 480 AMD is still not making much profit on those as told by AMD’s RTG head as they are a low margin product and it shows in their recent Computing and Graphics segment revenue which is still below what they had when compared to when the R9 290 series launched which had higher margins because the profit margins are fatter on $550 - $400 graphics cards as opposed to $250 graphic cards.
It's possible that ATI could have secured funding through a share issue, bonds or a regular bank loan back in 2006 which would have given them time to turn things around. ATI were by no means a bad company they just got screwed over by Nvidia and Microsoft over DX10 (to borrow Athlon1800 Dallas analogy it's like when JR Ewing used one of pals to convince Cliff Barnes to invest into a potential oil field that was nothing more then a dust bowl). The problem is comapnies like Nvidia and ATI were ripe for takeovers and ATIs cash position just made them more of a target.
Again ATI’s cash position was not in dire straits. They had over $300+ million in profits in the prior years to the merger.
I think AMD should stop chasing the £400+ market, they don't sell enough GPU's in that segment anyway.
Let Nvidia have it, they already do and there is no way AMD can take it from them.
So put all R&D into making good sub £400 GPU's.
That's a terrible idea. This is the kind of thinking that got their CPU division in the hole. You should never chase the bottom, you should have a product that can compete in all segments and I would argue that it is dangerous to begin with. nVidia can easily produce say a cut down version of the GTX 1070 and produce a chip in the $250 - $300 market segment that could decimate the RX 480. When you have superior technology you have so much options in your arsenal. That is what intel kind of did to AMD. They were doing very good with the R9 290/R9 290X when they launched because they were very competitive with the GTX 780/780 Ti and they made a lot of money. Look at their revenues it was nearly $2.5 billion during that time period.
I would argue that was their last really good competitive product that was going head to head and even beating nVidia.
Fury X despite being good didn't nearly have the impact against the GTX 980 Ti. It was kind of like the HD 2900XT which was okay but fell short going against the 8800 GTX and the HD 2900 series in general didn’t fare will in terms of sales against the 8800 series in general (and it shows in their 2007 revenue) similar to the Fury series which didn’t bring as much revenue as the HD 290 series.
Surely this strategy would put them right back into the budget GPU maker image, that they have been trying to get out of.
Exactly! Even AMD’s CEO Lisa CEO mentioned they are trying to shake the image of budget option. That’s why they are gunning for the 6700K/6900K with Zen.
And to everyone who is talking about Polaris being the budget card. According to interview on PCPER post launch of the RX 480 the goal of the RX 480 was to gain back market share and to a certain extent get developers to focus on developing games focused on GCN GPUs. If they don’t have the market share or if it was less than say 20% like they were Q2 2015 it gives less incentive for developers to optimize games for AMD GPU’s when less than 80% of the market uses AMD GPUs. AMD called it their water drop strategy. I think it’s a good idea. Look at the newer games using DX 12 AMD is beating nvidia in their price range of competing GPUs with the exception of GTX 1070/1080 and smashing nVidia in Vulkan in Doom.
Their next plan is to follow that up with Vega targeted for the high end.
ATI were awesome at some point and made really good cards. I am not sure how they managed to screw that up so royally. I always used to have ATI cards until they screwed up the drivers. I remember I had to keep the same old drivers for about 2 years because had I upgraded I would have lost any 3D functionality. Pathetic.
Never had major issues with respect to drivers on AMD graphic cards. People are still peddling this myth. Was previously a nVidia guy but switched to AMD had been using them over the past 8 years or so. Only major issue was with a R9 290X I used to own which was mostly due to it running on an old AMD 780G motherboard, worked fine on a intel Core i7 MB. Rather I had “Display Driver stopped responding” on a Gaming laptop with nVidia card switched to AMD graphics card on a newer Gaming laptop and the problem went away. So rather had issues with nVidia graphics cards rather than nVidia.
I never said it was AMD, I was talking about ATI. I don't remember the exact year to be honest, but this was a long time ago, pre 2000 possibly. Not 100% sure anymore. At that point I was using exclusively AMD processors and ATI cards.
Pre-2000 makes sense. I remember an article on Boot magazine (now Maximum PC) which compared graphical images in Quake 2 against the Voodoo 2 and other makers in the late 90's and a piece of the rail gun in Quake 2 was complete missing on a ATI Rage Pro graphics card. Their drivers were
**** poor but around the 9700 series ATI revamped their driver team and had Catalyst series and they have been great for the most part.
I've had Ati cards around 2007 and that had shocking first release drivers - couldn't even play movies smoothly (and two different cards that did this around same period 4850 I think and 5770), and in both cases it took a few driver releases to fix). I don't think Ati's drivers are rubbish generally, but their initial drivers have often been tripe at least. Talk about rush jobs. I know it's easy to download the latest drivers but when it leaves a bad product impression when the first few driver releases are not great, cannot play movies smoothly etc.
I hope one day to try their products again, but after having the previously mentioned driver issues, only one graphics card so far that has been DOA (AMD card), and one unstable CPU (AMD CPU) in my entire component buying life it puts me off, but I will try again when they release something that does seem to stand ahead of the competition. I don't care about pricing so putting out cheaper products doeesn't interest me, I want perrrrfoorrrmmmaaance
Hmm...I have a HD 4850 (brought it because it was single slot card with excellent performance for playing older games Pre-2010) on one of my HTPC and hadn't had issues with it so far. HD 4870 was my first ATI card and had 0 issues with it.
I know you didn't but I would hazard a guess that after all these years it still puts you off. The drivers for ATI's best remembered best remembered cards were not bad though as in 9700/9800/x800/x1900/4870/5870/7970/290 yet this bad driver thing still gets talked about.
Exactly. It seems like people who usually mentions this are as the user mentioned still have this image from the Pre-2000 era. Not saying ATI/AMD drivers are perfect but they have come a long way. Look at Crimson drivers now. I would argue they are as good if not better than nVidia’s. I brought a nVidia GPU this summer and giving compared the UI of Crimson and nVidia, nVidia pales in comparison.