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A history of why AMD has lost.

I was going to post that the Radeon wasn't even that good and that the Geforce coming out first didn't make that much of a difference, but actually checking back on old reviews it seems it was better than I remembered it. Seems like it was better than the previous gen i.e. TNT2u / Voodoo3. So maybe there is some truth in the suggestion that people looked down on ATI at one stage (to be fair their drivers were pretty shoddy back in the day).

That said, when the 9700pro came out I don't think many people were under any illusions as to who was top dog. I had historically only owned 3dfx/NV cards but switched to ATI with the 9800AIW (softmod to Pro). Went back to NV for several years before my most recent two cards (7950/RX480).
On the CPU front, again when Athlon came out that was very competitive and lots of people got them for gaming/overclocking, likewise Athlon64 (my first AMD cpu). As above, then back to Intel for years due to the performance of Core 2 / i5 architecture before last year going with Ryzen.

So I guess in spite of me favouring Intel/NV overall I currently have an exclusively AMD setup. If I was building a new system from scratch today I'd almost certainly go AMD cpu (1800x at under £200 looks appealing) and as for GPU, probably 1060 6GB now that prices have came back down to reasonable levels.
 
ubersonic said:
Yes but they were always seen as second best (even when they were firmly winning), this is essentially because Geforce launched a couple of months before Radeon, and so Nvidia became known as the company that slayed 3DFX and took their crown and ATi became known as the company that was chasing Nvidia up the mountain (the AMD to Intel, the SEGA to Nintendo, etc). Ever since then even when ATi/AMD have been firmly beating Nvidia they have been waaaaay behind on sales simply because of the perception of them being second best (this is the same issue they have with Intel too).
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D.P. said:
It is also completely false. ATI existed long before Nvidia did, and was the dominant graphics manufacturer. Nvidia was a very new startup, much less funding, no market, no brand. Their first GPU wasn't even that great, but they invested heavily in R&D which ultimately led to teh first Geforce with hardware TnL which killed off 3DFX.

One of the reasons nvidia did so well is they Supported both OpenGL and DX D3D, and had extremely dependable drivers that worked great in both APIs. At the tiem you had cards that only supported OpenGL, or supported DX but OGL was dire, worse still You had 3DFX trying to fore developers to use their own low-level close to the metal API (GLIDE), and funnily enough S3 were trying to push Metal. Developers hated the concept then just as they do now.
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Let's not forget that Intel bribed AMD out of the CPU market for a long, long time, depriving them of revenue etc. then getting off with a fine that was laughable considering the money Intel was making at the time.

I'm not saying that AMD would have been in a better place financially had Intel played fair but it seems likely.

It was hard enough for AMD to compete in the marketplace without all the underhandedness and it left them with difficult choices and limited R&D funding for over a decade.

All things considered, it's a miracle they are still with us and even more miraculous that they have bounced back in the CPU sector.

Hopefully, providing their current leadership aren't buffoons, they will continue to strengthen their position and increase R&D to enable them to produce ever better products.
 
KillBoY_UK said:
It was clear they massively overpaid for ATI at the time
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A big part of the problem was that they didn't issue new shares but paid cash I think so the borrowings were crippling when the bad times came.
So it was a doubly dubious deal but if they'd been able to buy at a similar price paying in shares things might have been different.
But then again that was just one of many poor management calls.
 
The past is past. Try running GeForce 2 or even the newest RTX on a CRT monitor, and you will understand that nvidia provides crappy products, and are the opposite of visuals experts..

Intel without 10nm and nvidia without 7nm will eat AMD's dust.
 
We don't want them to fail though do we, we want them to come back fighting as they have done in the CPU sector which means better value, choice for us consumers.

Competition is good, I'm sure their time will come again
 
HangTime said:
I was going to post that the Radeon wasn't even that good and that the Geforce coming out first didn't make that much of a difference, but actually checking back on old reviews it seems it was better than I remembered it. Seems like it was better than the previous gen i.e. TNT2u / Voodoo3. So maybe there is some truth in the suggestion that people looked down on ATI at one stage (to be fair their drivers were pretty shoddy back in the day).

That said, when the 9700pro came out I don't think many people were under any illusions as to who was top dog. I had historically only owned 3dfx/NV cards but switched to ATI with the 9800AIW (softmod to Pro). Went back to NV for several years before my most recent two cards (7950/RX480).
On the CPU front, again when Athlon came out that was very competitive and lots of people got them for gaming/overclocking, likewise Athlon64 (my first AMD cpu). As above, then back to Intel for years due to the performance of Core 2 / i5 architecture before last year going with Ryzen.

So I guess in spite of me favouring Intel/NV overall I currently have an exclusively AMD setup. If I was building a new system from scratch today I'd almost certainly go AMD cpu (1800x at under £200 looks appealing) and as for GPU, probably 1060 6GB now that prices have came back down to reasonable levels.
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If you look back again, you'll realise that the drivers never were actually shoddy. History shows that nVidia have had significantly more and worse driver issues than AMD or ATI ever did, but people still claimed AMD and ATI had bad drivers. It was simply never true.
 
ubersonic said:
The real reason AMD are always thought of as the losers is simple, Intel beat them to becoming the dominant IBM-PC CPU manufacturer and Geforce launched before Radeon. Once those things happened it established Intel and Nvidia as #1 and everyone else as #2 or lower, hence why even during the occasions when AMD's products have been dominating Intel's/Nvidia's they still have never been able to compete on sales because people just see them as second tier.
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I had a ATI Rage 11 2MB 2D/3D card before my first GeForce card …:D
 
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