I have seen AMD do a lot of stuff that has ultimately turned out to be a waste of time like Mantle and very poor CPUs to name but two.
What AMD need are brand new cutting edge products and all we have seen is the Fiji based cards which are almost as rare as a GTX 980 Ti in AMDMatt's PC.
All the other cards in the 3XX range are based on older SKUs.
Producing pretty software is nice but it is not going to earn AMD any money.
As to all those coders mentioned above, get them working on the drivers rather than what colour the interface is.
In your opinion.
You would be surprised, having a good looking, fast and user friendly UI is a very long way from a waste of time.
To a lot of people a GPU is not just a device for a purpose, its a toy.
A lot of people take a lot of pride in owning one, a nice usable control interface matters to how they feel about that product.
People buy expensive phones not because they need them to be expensive but because as a gadget its how they feel about the quality of materials used, about how it looks...
2 ways in which you can appreciate a GPU, the physical item its self and the way in which you interact with it, its the latter of that which AMD have polished up. This matters because if the user feels good about his UI interaction with it he's more likely to stick with the brand and recommend it to their friends, it may even be a part of the concentration when choosing a brand.
Its not just the hardware, its the whole bit, its not a choice of the hardware or the software as you seem to think it is. just because they have polished the software does not mean they are ignoring the hardware. Black and white thinking ridiculous.
Its no good just doing the things that
you think are important, you have to do what everyone thinks is important, the look and feel of how they interact with it is important to people, it may not be to you but it is to others.
PS: in your opinion Mantle was a waste of time, by that i'm guessing you think Mantle did absolutely nothing for anything or anyone, DX12, Vulkan and Metal would be the same thing if Mantle had never existed despite the fact that Vulkan is Mantle. I'm guessing you would dispute Mantle having anything to do with Vulkan?
So many times do i read on forums like this that "AMD do nothing for the industry and nothing for their own user base" and yet when they do AMD get crucified for it in one way or another, with that there is never a shortage of criticisms of what AMD are doing, its thick and constant.... for me that says it all. Maybe less really is more but in this case i very much doubt that will be satisfactory. Nothing ever will be.
