AMD is not a charity, they have to make healthy profit to reinvest in R&D, start paying off their $2bn loans, and start making their investors happy. Now trading some profits for market share may help in the future its no guarantee of future revenue, e.g. if nvidia make a more compelling product then AMD will still loose sales. Besides which, market share will come naturally if there is a good top-to-bottom lineup of competitive products on time, with good release drivers and closer developer relations.
what they are doing now is the charity, happy investors ? well how happy are they for the last 5 years with the current policy ? the break they had with their stock came from Ryzen, not Radeon.
and seriously what's the point of selling 2 or 3 times less product than your competitor ? when market share is paramount to your strategy that introduces new features and techs that need Developer backup ? and no the market share doesn't come naturally, that might be the case for a new company coming to market, not a company, that accumulated a bad enough mindshare, that ppl laugh at you when you suggest their products, this problem cannot be fixed with marketing, because ppl are not unaware of your brand, but in their mind your brand = bad, that's the key here.
again AMDs driver have been good for more than 2 years, even better than Nvidia, how did that work out ?
AMD have been working with Devs, they even intriduced free library with GPUopen, how did that work out ?
Not having an answer to pascal for a year is costing market share and mind share. Having similar products to Nvidia at similar prices would have netted them plenty of sales and profits. Trying to undercut Nvidia pricing is very risky, nothing stops nvidia lowering prices if NVidia feel that they are loosing sales. the fact that Nvidia frequently don't hit AMD's price levels is a sure fact that Nvidia know they wont gain more sales so ultimately it is just costing AMD profits. Which is exactly why AMD have said they need to escape form being known as this budget brand, it doesn't ultimately gain them much.
you just made my case here, even when they had a slightly cheaper product within range performance 780Ti vs 290X they still lost market share, when they had a product priced similarly to Nvidia 980Ti vs FuryX, they still lost market share.
AMD has never been that far behind in performance it always was 10-20% which is ok, so the problem didn't just appear when AMD stoped their line up at polaris with no high end, talking about polaris , Nvdia sold 2 or 3 times more 1060 than 480s, and AMD was going to sell a lot less, they are lucky that pre-launch the card got trending because of the 199$ announcement, which was a bit spoiled by a slightly slower card than expected, then the release of 1060 that came 20-50$ more and with less than 10% performance advantage in DX11...sold twice more...
and again even you cannot argue with the fact that even if Vega is faster than 1080Ti, the latter will outsell the former, now how scary is that for investors and for AMD ? knowing that no matter how good your product is, the competitor will outsell you, that's insane.
you practically suggest for AMD to keep doing what they are doing, and to me it's clearly not working.
last point in a price war AMD is far more sustainable than Nvidia, AMD have diversified markets not just desktop and pro, but CPU and consoles, so even if all they do is break even they will manage profit by other means, but Nvidia cannot, if they break even on their product what are they left with ?shield revenue ?...
AMD cannot guarantee to have crowned flagship for 2 or 3 generations, which is what they need to turn this around, but if they do well then, they can keep the pricing they want.
but if they cannot guarantee that, which is more likely, disrupting the performance per dollar for the competitor's crowned flagship, is the most safer way to turn this around, will hit hard their bottom line, but at the rate at which they are selling it's practically change compared to what they stand to gain in futur products.
. I would have gone 1070 a long time ago if they had supported FreeSync, otherwise I'm locked to 60fps unfortunately.
