Officially 10 Years since the ATI AMD merger. Was it a good idea?

[Griffildur]

In dx12 fury not that far behind 1070 and people are saying Vega will have trouble beating a 1070 come off it, Nvidia are on the back foot here with dx12 it is only because Amd has not got any high end cards out yet.

I would hardly call it back foot. This said, I cannot wait to see Vega released so we can finally see what's what. It'd better be as good as some people think, otherwise the future will be bleak for AMD.

 

[maonayze]

They can't.

How long ago did AMD show the diagramatic view of their roadmap?

In that roadmap it had Vega bordering on end of 2016 to the start of 2017. So basically we all know whereabouts on that roadmap Vega will surface. Nothing has changed and AMD have said nothing to the contrary.

So we ALL know when it is coming, so instead of spitting out absolute rubbish as you have done for the last 3-5 months, try adding something interesting to the thread that can be discussed or debated.

You really are getting tiresome, so why don't you just go out and buy yourself a nice EVGA 1080 FTW and have lots of thermal fun with the VRMs.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Vega isn't going to do anything for them.

 

[maonayze]

Vega isn't going to do anything for them.

Congratulations Troll, you are the first on my ignore list.

Bye Bye

 

[queamin]

I would hardly call it back foot. This said, I cannot wait to see Vega released so we can finally see what's what. It'd better be as good as some people think, otherwise the future will be bleak for AMD.

Yes they need to perform or why not just shrink down a fury and remove a few bottle necks and add 8 gig if Vega is that bad.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Congratulations Troll, you are the first on my ignore list.

Bye Bye

They need a card that beats Nvidias to be able to do anything, but Vega isn't going to do it, imo, so its going to be pointless.

 

[TheRealDeal]

They need a card that beats Nvidias to be able to do anything, but Vega isn't going to do it, imo, so its going to be pointless.

Why can't Vega do it. Vega could be the second coming or down right disappointing but at this stage nobody has a clue what it's capable of.

 

[hornetstinger]

Why can't Vega do it. Vega could be the second coming or down right disappointing but at this stage nobody has a clue what it's capable of.

Because he's an Nvidia fanboy.

Couldn't care less, I'll buy ATI or Nvidia certainly wouldn't stick to one like a fan boy.

In current lines, it seems 50/50 split- G-sync/freesync- freesync wins. Memory- ATI here. Power usage/temps- Nvidia. DX12/Vulkan- ATI. Not a clear winner in the two.

 

[humbug]

You read nothing about what I stated earlier. They need to make a high end card that is not expensive to make.

Why in the world are you comparing the Fury X to the GTX 1070/1080 they are completely different generation on a totally new node. That is silly.

Fury X should be compared to the 980 Ti and it was poorly executed and yes it was expensive to make but there were other factors that didn't make it as competitive like it came late to market and had closed loop cooler (adding to the costs) and it didn't perform as well. 980 Ti had a larger die than the Fury X by the way.

So, I would pin the Fury X not selling as much to the reasons mentioned above mainly the performance.

I did and actually i am comparing it to the 980TI, all of which completely detracts from my point.

It was in every sense a thing that damaged AMD and unless they can do exactly the opposite to that in the future they should not bother at all.

Certainly not for the sake of making products cheaper for Nvidia consumers, like it or not.

 

[melmac]

They have competed on the high end as well as mid end before. The 9700 Pro/9800 Pro line ups, X800 line ups, and with the 7970 line ups. Even with the HD 200 series line up I would say they had a descent line up in the mid-end.

The last time AMD/ATI made an effort for the ultimate high end, that wasn't a dual card, was with the 2900xt. Everything since then from AMD has been at slightly lower than highest tier and at a good price, like the model they used for the 4xxx cards. Great performers at a great price, but not top end. The 290x and the 7970 were the same. The 290x was released to go against the 780, but the 780ti was the top card. I think the 7970 is the only AMD card that was faster than Nvidia's top card. And that was because Nvidia didn't release a GK100 chip. If Nvidia had released cards based on the GK100, then the 7970 would have found itself where all the top AMD cards find themselves, slightly above the second tier NVidia cards, but behind their top card.

AMD can't compete with nVidia just on the mid end forever because people will associate with AMD as the cheaper brand, then it already is. This is what Lisa Su alluded to as AMD can't be considered just the cheaper brand. That's why they need to continue to produce 7970's, R9 290X's because that has an effect on their mid-tier, lower tier image wise. ATI wouldn't have been able to get over 50% market share in the mid-2000's if they had just focused on the mid-end. They continued to pump out high end cards like the 9700 Pro/9800 Pro/9800XT the X800 XT PE/X850 XT which finally enabled them to take more market share from nVidia for the first time because people started to associate ATI with making high end cards.

I would argue that the only reason the AMD 7970 and 290/x cards sold in any numbers was because of the mining craze. It was at it's peak back then and because Nvidia stripped out a lot of it's compute stuff for Kepler, the AMD cards were king for miners.

And I don't think having the top card really does make that much impact on sales, certainly not as much as you and others make it out to have and it certainly didn't for ATI. If having the top card really makes all that much difference than you would imagine that during the time of the 9700pro and 9800 pro that they would have increased their market share. I mean they completely dominated everything at the high end for those years.

No they didn't, they actually lost market share. In fact around the time of the 9700pro to the 9800pro Nvidia gained huge market share. In fact they gained market share for 6 straight quarters.

And please stop comparing the graphic card market to the car market. Those comparisons don't work.

 

[FuryXGuy]

I did and actually i am comparing it to the 980TI, all of which completely detracts from my point.

It was in every sense a thing that damaged AMD and unless they can do exactly the opposite to that in the future they should not bother at all.

Certainly not for the sake of making products cheaper for Nvidia consumers, like it or not.

Well obviously they will have to put out something more competitive than the Fury X when they put out a comparative part going against a high end nVidia.

Something like the 290X at the very least. But I was commenting on your earlier claim that they should only focus on the mid to low end and basically surrender the top end. Which I find completely ridiculous.

 

[humbug]

Well obviously they will have to put out something more competitive than the Fury X when they put out a comparative part going against a high end nVidia.

Something like the 290X at the very least. But I was commenting on your earlier claim that they should only focus on the mid to low end and basically surrender the top end. Which I find completely ridiculous.

Thats not what i said, its what you read into but its not what i said.

 

[triss]

Because he's an Nvidia fanboy.

Couldn't care less, I'll buy ATI or Nvidia certainly wouldn't stick to one like a fan boy.

In current lines, it seems 50/50 split- G-sync/freesync- freesync wins. Memory- ATI here. Power usage/temps- Nvidia. DX12/Vulkan- ATI. Not a clear winner in the two.

LoadsaMoney runs a pair of fury gpu iirc, not what most would call a typical Nvidia fanboy.

The merger was a good idea and i hope vega does well but atm i dont see them competing with the 1080's etc let alone Nvidia's next gen. AMD seem to be focusing on midrange atm

 

[humbug]

LoadsaMoney runs a pair of fury gpu iirc, not what most would call a typical Nvidia fanboy.

Its astonishing someone who apparently does, has been for all this time, still does and yet has nothing but hate for them and the company who made them.

Seriously he has never had a good thing to say about his Fury's or AMD, nothing but rants and hate and yet seemingly insists on keeping them.

 

[nashathedog]

I am not arguing against the RX 480. But they still don't have a card to compete with the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. If they did their profit margins would be higher and they would be in lock step with nVidia in terms of technology.

That is my argument. You can't just focus on the mid end. You should try to capture the mid end AND the high end.

At the moment they haven't got a choice, They can't just release a high end card because they ought to, The cold hard truth is they haven't got one to release, It's as simple as that they're not focusing on the Mid range no matter what they say, It's all PR, They simply had nothing available or else it would have been out already. The sales team and PR team are focusing on the Polaris cards because that's what they have in there hands, Meanwhile the gpu development team are likely to be more focused on getting Vega ready than anything else.

AMD have had a few lean years due to low sales, the recession, debts and what funds they had available being spread out between Zen, HBM and everything else that's on the table or on the cards, That's limited how much could be done at the same time, Hopefully that's going top change over the next couple of years, But to do that both Zen and Vega need to deliver solid products.

You can see how they've struggled by how many refreshes we've had, Look at Pitcairn for example that went 7850, 265 and then the 370, How many time have they revamped the 8 core cpu's? Giving us cpu's like the 9590 and the 'e' etc.

Hopefully they've now been through the worst of times and survived, learning a lot as a business so let's hope things start picking up. They deserve it and we need it.

 

[nashathedog]

The last time AMD/ATI made an effort for the ultimate high end, that wasn't a dual card, was with the 2900xt. Everything since then from AMD has been at slightly lower than highest tier and at a good price, like the model they used for the 4xxx cards. Great performers at a great price, but not top end. The 290x and the 7970 were the same. The 290x was released to go against the 780, but the 780ti was the top card.

The 290x just about took the top spot from the Titan, The 780ti and Titan Black were not released until after Hawaii in response to it. It was obvious they had it though due to the original Titan being a cut-back chip just like the Pascal Titan is today.

The 980ti released just before the Fury X did but the Fury X wasn't going to take the top spot anyway, Presumably the were either playing it safe or snatching at sales at that price point while using up chips that never made the grade for the Maxwell Titan.

 

[Freddie1980]

Well obviously they will have to put out something more competitive than the Fury X when they put out a comparative part going against a high end nVidia.

Something like the 290X at the very least. But I was commenting on your earlier claim that they should only focus on the mid to low end and basically surrender the top end. Which I find completely ridiculous.

If AMD could build a monster GPU that was competitive against Nvidia’s offerings and could be manufactured cheaply enough they would have done it by now. One thing that must be stopping them is power draw, the power usage on cards like the 390Pro and 390X were ridiculous, watt for watt those cards should have been keeping pace with the 980Ti’s and Titans instead the 390 was competing against the 970 and the 390X against the 980 (non ti) in the majority of DX11 titles.

AMD’s GPU’s have fallen into the same trap of AMD CPU’s where management have made decisions based on future technologies that don’t work out and suffered from the same judgement issues that have plagued it’s CPU’s (such as when Bulldozer would herald an era when Software/games would be largely compatible with multi-threaded CPU’s). One of the biggest failings is CPU overhead, AMD can’t/won’t write drivers which allow their hardware to take advantage of multithreaded CPU’s, the command engine in the 290/390/Fury is capable but game programmers need to write for it specifically (given most games are written for consoles it’s wonder why AMD cards don’t perform better on PC). Nvidia cards can call upon multiple CPU threads via it’s drivers given them a huge advantage. AMD choose to incorporate a ACE engine long before it would become relevant in DX12 games, sure it’s meant the 390’s are still relevant today but so what? It doesn’t make AMD any more money.

I suppose when you look at it from a far AMD are designing products for 5 years in the future rather then what’s needed for the current day and it’s cost them dear, there gambling the market will go a certain way and if it doesn’t it costs them dear. With Zen it looks like they have their house in order again (let hope so) but the jury is still out on it’s GPU’s, Polaris is disappointing, it failed to address the problems of prior cards. Polaris smacks of a lack of vision, lack of leadership or a lack of funds, probably a combination of all three but I do agree they need to some cards into the enthusiast end of the market as it’s the only part of the PC market that’s growing (or didn’t AMD read the memo?).

 

[Ian Evey]

Thats not what i said, its what you read into but its not what i said.

That is how it read to me too, maybe its the way you type stuff out and not people reading into things.

 

[melmac]

The 290x just about took the top spot from the Titan, The 780ti and Titan Black were not released until after Hawaii in response to it. It was obvious they had it though due to the original Titan being a cut-back chip just like the Pascal Titan is today..

The 290x launched at the end of October, the 780ti launched at the beginning of November. There was less than 2 weeks between launch dates. So the 780ti was the top card, it doesn't change what I said.

 

[Rroff]

In current lines, it seems 50/50 split- G-sync/freesync- freesync wins.

Can't agree there - in some ways there isn't a clear winner as the propitiatory/closed system nature of G-Sync tends to be a significant negative over some of its potential advantages but at the same time G-Sync has some not insignificant technical merits (proper handling of games and programs that don't use exclusive fullscreen, etc.) that FreeSync lacks especially now if you have FastSync + G-Sync working properly together. Having used both even without any bias one way or the other there is no way I'd choose FreeSync over G-Sync if I had to pick one for every day use.