I agree that things like the tension on the screws on the reference 5700XT are just a silly problem that should not exist. Some of the reference coolers are simply pushed out of their sweet spot(not difficult considering the cost-saving measures taken). No excuse. But most of the criticism of the driver team is unfounded IMO. Drivers work fine 99% of the time for my user base and many issues are also happening on the green team as well(mainly because its a problem with Windows and not AMD/Nvidia). The deciding difference for me is RTG actually listens partially to its user base. We asked for a new UI, we got that. We asked for features, we got that too. Then we got a new UI again we didn't ask for but hey at least they are trying. They release a feature for the 5000 series and the user base is able to "persuade" them to give it to Polaris and Vega users as well. Nvidia, on the other hand, is more like Apple, they try to tell the consumer what they need. I'm personally not a fan of that.
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Jon Peddie Research: NVIDIA reaches 80% discrete GPU market share
- Thread starter RavenXXX2
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I agree that things like the tension on the screws on the reference 5700XT are just a silly problem that should not exist. Some of the reference coolers are simply pushed out of their sweet spot(not difficult considering the cost-saving measures taken). No excuse. But most of the criticism of the driver team is unfounded IMO. Drivers work fine 99% of the time for my user base and many issues are also happening on the green team as well(mainly because its a problem with Windows and not AMD/Nvidia). The deciding difference for me is RTG actually listens partially to its user base. We asked for a new UI, we got that. We asked for features, we got that too. Then we got a new UI again we didn't ask for but hey at least they are trying. They release a feature for the 5000 series and the user base is able to "persuade" them to give it to Polaris and Vega users as well. Nvidia, on the other hand, is more like Apple, they try to tell the consumer what they need. I'm personally not a fan of that.
Associate
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Of course they care, Nvidia's stock coolers are so much better and look way better in the bin once they've ripped it off to fit their waterblocks
Soldato
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Try telling someone who is already heavily in debt to spend more money in the hope to make it back in the future. Like I said it's not like they were buying a small amount of these coolers and the costs would ramp up for a large company.
It's something they definitely can improve on for sure, but I can't blame a company that's making a loss quarter-on-quarter to try to find places to cut costs.
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The comparison you are using is ridiculous as the "vast majority" of GPU buyers don't consider buying these cards, let alone actually buy them. Only a small percentage of these cards are actually sold compared to total GPUs sold.
When the new ranges are released there will be a card that will offer similar performance to the consoles. The Nvidia card could be the 3060.
The comparable card will certainly not be the 3090, 3080 or the top RDNA2 card.
Soldato
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By the way, 4K8K has made a comeback, you should revert to your previous sig
Don't tempt me
So a company valued at $100 Billion can't aquire money?
Caporegime
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I prefer to support AMD too and would agree to wait a bit after reviews, however it's clear for a lot of non-enthusiasts these problems leave a bad view of AMD GPU products,which make them not sell.ATI clearly did better so AMD really need to go back and try work on their problems. Also I believe the crap AMD CPUs tainted the AMD brand in the past,but Ryzen has revitalised the AMD brand,so they really need to capitalise on this to give some good PR to RTG.I can see where you are coming from and I wouldn't necessarily say that you are wrong either. You have some solid points. To me though, it all depends on what kind of glasses you are wearing when looking at either brand. To me, AMD has been more enthusiast-friendly, less locked down, and with more tinkering possible. All sorts of cool and odd community contributions has been made. Whereas Nvidia is just a black box. Some don't mind this about Nvidia and it certainly helps with the uninitiated who have a harder time messing up their system to a degree.
Let's take the black sheep in the family, Vega. So many people hate it, citing a power draw of 400 watts and it's true, out of the box experience back when it launched wasn't very good. Today, however, is a different beast. Vega is still putting out some solid numbers and with tweaking, it's even better. My power draw with a monitor and a complete system is 350-400 watts and that's with an overclocked Vega.
To me, AMD has some solid products once they are viewed in the right light, and while they all have their flaws, it's usually flaws that can be fixed yourself. Now you can argue that you shouldn't have to and as a regular consumer I would agree, but I'm not one of those, I'm an enthusiast.
I think it's rather simple, don't buy the first week of release. Wait and let other's be the guinea pig. This goes for both red and green. Once a week has gone by you should have a rough and crude idea of where the potential is(what kind of issues are there, are these fixable, or is it just bad hardware) and what not to touch. Dodged the 295x2 this way
I prefer AMD more than Nvidia i. The reason is, I prefer open software, I don't like the anti-consumer tendencies of Nvidia(Jensen and Co., and no, AMD isn't a saint in this regard but the lesser of two evils) and I like AMD's hardware solutions. That said, If Nvidia releases something with the price/performance and efficiency and it fits what I need then I'm certainly considering them. I prefer New Castle Brown Ale over Heineken but if Heineken is all that is there then I'm certainly not gonna say no
The problem is most of the money is spent on the design and manufacture of the GPU. AMD designs decent reference PCBs too,so it seems rather weird they have rubbish coolers which make poor first impressions. I would rather they had overbuilt the PCBs less and used far better coolers! In the end getting more sales would help claw back at short term money issues they would have, if, they need to spend more on production costs.
Because all the launch reviews for prosterity will use them and most gamers will read those first reviews,even when looking for a new GPU a year after it. Most people won't keep up-to-date after that. So why if AMD has problems it's stays with them. The R9 290X was a magnificent GPU,but the cooler ended up making it so tainted they ended up going for less than £200 at one point.
First impressions count. It also affects Nvidia too,ie,why RTX is still a meme. In fact I see more noise about DLSS,but then Nvidia is just pushing it a ton in the news media.
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An issue is the performance of the release drivers. "Fine Wining" seems to be part of their DNA now. Improving performance a year later (5700XT) when the card was released later than the competition doesn't make business sense.
Hire / headhunt driver engineers. Show the cards full or near full potential at launch. The costs involved are tiny in the great scheme of developing a new GPU.
Net income is profit, Annual Revenue this year will be around $8,000 Million, that's how much money they actually have before doing anything with it, out of that comes running costs and R&D, whatever the difference they get in return for that spend amounts to net loss or net income.
Edit: CAT did a much better job of explaining this than me....
Why're you explaining this :? I picked Net because I thought it was more illustrative of the point, if you wish I can use revenue figures to make the same point?
It would have been better, Net Revenue is not what they have to spend, AMD's revenues have been going up over the last 4 years, especially in the last year, they are spending most of it which suggests they are spending more on R&D.
Zen 2 is a very good CPU by any measure, in most measures much better than Intel, the 5700XT is quite a good GPU, much much better than AMD's past GPU's, its probably AMD's best GPU architecture so far.
Zen 3 looks like its going make Intel look third rate, RDNA2 is shaping up to be verty good too if the new consoles are anything to go by, AMD need to work on their drivers, Drivers Drivers Drivers.
AMD's products are getting much better, they are getting very good, there is still work to do but the work that has been done, which we can see the results of suggests they are putting money into improving themselves. They have money to spend and they are spending it, things just don't happen overnight, Zen was in development for 4 years.
Caporegime
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Nah, AMD are dumb sometimes but even they're not that dumb. They just have ****-poor cooling engineers with a 'good enough' attitude. Lot of them need firing imo and start over.
Soldato
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Aren'
Talking about people interested in features like Ray Tracing, 4K gaming, VR and paying latest triple A games at decent settings. Features a 2020 gamer might be looking at. The vast majority of gamers will find these things desirable.
On PC you would have to spend a considerable larger amount of money on a capable PC and Graphics card VS the upcoming next gen consoles.
New gen consoles and high end GPU's are what 'gamers' think about imho. The pricing gap has grown so large that far more people will consider console VS PC than in the past.
This is just my opinion, your free to yours as well
Talking about people interested in features like Ray Tracing, 4K gaming, VR and paying latest triple A games at decent settings. Features a 2020 gamer might be looking at. The vast majority of gamers will find these things desirable.
On PC you would have to spend a considerable larger amount of money on a capable PC and Graphics card VS the upcoming next gen consoles.
New gen consoles and high end GPU's are what 'gamers' think about imho. The pricing gap has grown so large that far more people will consider console VS PC than in the past.
This is just my opinion, your free to yours as well
Caporegime
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I don't disagree on any point except using Annual Revenue would have been better.. But for added clarity (and demonstration of why I didn't use these);
AMD Annual Revenue
(Millions of US $)
2020 $7.646
2019 $6,731
2018 $6,475
2017 $5,253
2016 $4,319
2015 $3,991
NVIDIA Annual Revenue
(Millions of US $)
2020 $10,918
2019 $11,716
2018 $9,714
2017 $6,910
2016 $5,010
2015 $4,682
At first glance, these numbers look reasonably comparable and don't adequately demonstrate the gap. It looks like nVidia is +50% or so on average - which would probably be a reasonable position for AMD to be in to be able to stay fairly competitive.... if all of that were available to the GPU division as it is on nVidia's side. AMD has that income coming from both their CPU and GPU sides (which shows how poorly their sales were doing) but also it means they have to distribute their spending over 2 divisions as well. So not only do they have a smaller pie to begin with, but their pie has to be cut in two - whereas nVidia just have one big pie. Mmmmmmmmmmm Pie.
^^ And that little explanation of the numbers is why I chose Net values.. The net values are less .... accurate? but it's much more illustrative of the difference and doesn't require any explanation.
So, the initial quote I took issue with was along the lines of "AMD has money now, they've no excuse" is not only wrong - as shown by the figures multiple times now, but even if the figures for 2019/2020 showed AMD having greater revenue would show a distinct lack of understanding of the timeline required for development. I don't think it's unfair to say that even if AMD started pumping massive amounts into R&D in 2018 when their revenue picked up that we'd only start seeing results from that in 2021 -- and I think a 3 year turnaround may even be overly optimistic.
Soldato
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If the AMD penny pinching finance department give them a really small budget there's only so much they can do. Most of the time it's not up to the engineers for that and they just have to do what the finance department tells them.
I work in IT for my company and we can beg and plead all we want for new equipment or software, if the budget holders say no it's tough luck.
Well, when you got the fastest consumer graphics card on the market you got that as leverage for any with remarks about it
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Then the CEO and board needs to step in. Its no point spending 100s of millions of USD on R and D,test production,etc for all that effort to be wasted because the cooler is a POS. Its literally throwing away sales over the 12~24 month product lifespan.
The fact is if those stock coolers were better and cost more,AMD could charge more for the reference GPUs. This is why they eventually have to crater prices on reference models,as most people avoid them like the plague - this is why reference RX5700 GPUs,were the same price as AIB RX5600XT GPUs even late last year and before all the current problems. It wouldn't surprise me if AMD has to financially support AIBs and shops,so the stock of reference models can be discounted,to reduce inventory. Its happened before - its not saving AMD money,but costing them! Costing them in sales,and in having to write off inventory which is unsold.
What is even worse,is Ryzen ended up getting great stock coolers,which probably cost more than normal to make(probably more than Intel also). So if they can do that for the CPU division and get Coolermaster to make a better set of stock coolers,then I cannot fathom how some of their best GPUs get hobbled with rubbish reference designs.AMD commissioned 4 different CPU stock coolers,in both RGB and non-RGB variants.
If anything it probably would be better if they just delayed the launches and let AIB partners use their own custom coolers,and have no reference coolers.
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