Sunday, August 6th 2023
AMD Retreating from Enthusiast Graphics Segment with RDNA4?
AMD is rumored to be withdrawing from the enthusiast graphics segment with its next RDNA4 graphics architecture. This means there won't be a successor to its "Navi 31" silicon that competes at the high-end with NVIDIA; but rather one that competes in the performance segment and below. It's possible AMD isn't able to justify the cost of developing high-end GPUs to push enough volumes over the product lifecycle. The company's "Navi 21" GPU benefited from the crypto-currency mining swell, but just like with NVIDIA, the company isn't able to push enough GPUs at the high-end.
With RDNA4, the company will focus on specific segments of the market that sell the most, which would be the x700-series and below. This generation will be essentially similar to the RX 5000 series powered by RDNA1, which did enough to stir things up in NVIDIA's lineup, and trigger the introduction of the RTX 20 SUPER series. The next generation could see RDNA4 square off against NVIDIA's next-generation, and hopefully, Intel's Arc "Battlemage" family.
Source:
VideoCardz
With RDNA4, the company will focus on specific segments of the market that sell the most, which would be the x700-series and below. This generation will be essentially similar to the RX 5000 series powered by RDNA1, which did enough to stir things up in NVIDIA's lineup, and trigger the introduction of the RTX 20 SUPER series. The next generation could see RDNA4 square off against NVIDIA's next-generation, and hopefully, Intel's Arc "Battlemage" family.
363 Comments on AMD Retreating from Enthusiast Graphics Segment with RDNA4?
BTW, everybody seems to forget the emerging market of handheld which AMD pretty much created and now dominates and I can only imagine it'll grow in the future.That's what 90% of consumers were doing already.....in a way, we brought this on, and I hope we enjoy the Nvidia monopoly we helped to create (not me though, I've never purchased a single Nvidia product in my life and I never will....it's a moral decision. BTW, just because I hate Nvidia doesn't not automatically mean I'm an AMD fan)
Apple things they can release a iPhone 1000+ USD and include almost not anything but the phone itself then people keep buying it so Samsung and others do the same, it takes one company to start something and force their user base to actually pay it and when this happens others follow.
Wish we could go back in time with better prices for everything not like now where things cost more than it should just because they exist.
I am still waiting on a APU that can deliver 120+ fps on 1440p high that uses max 120watt that would be awesome to see when we as consumers keep getting told to lower your energy comsumption every day than force the bigger companies to make something that uses less power it would be a greater win for the world and enviroment than having graphics cards that on their own uses 400-800watts a card depending on how insane AMD or Nvidia want to go to be the best of the best in performance....
Turn the table around and see what they can do to deliever the best performance for a capped wattage.
This is the direct result of two decades of so many people only pushing for AMD to release competitive cards so that they can buy a geforce for less money, even when AMD/ATi offered better performance for the price.
Those people deserve to pay every extra cent of the hundreds/thousands for their next high-end nvidia card. This is their doing, and joke's on them if they can't afford it.
For Nvidia this didn't go as bad because after crypto, people turned to geforces to do stable diffusion and LLMs. For AMD this meant their sharpest decline ever in GPU sales, and now they're not moving enough GPU stock to justify being in the market. AMD's choice to undercut Nvidia by 10% on similar performance levels while failing in a comparable featureset was abhorrent.
Also, what about QDR? We had DDR for decades now...
If you study the research into consumer psychology you'll quickly learn thet the vast majority of consumers do NOT make rational choices based on comparable empirical data (PC enthusiasts wrongfully think they do because that's what enthusiasts do). They make completely irrational choices based on perception (no matter how divorced from reality that may be), how a product makes them "feel", on word of mouth even when the source of the recommendation cannot be verified to be correct, and in social pressure.
The social pressure and peer pressure is a big one. Consider the following hypothetical situation: someone new to PC gaming and new to the community will be immediately exposed to the opinions of others, now if they happen on cite like WCCFTech, they'll be exposed to pretty much nothing but rabid Nvidia fans who are constantly spamming things like "AMDumbs" or "AMDead", spamming the old, though long disproven, claims that Radeon runs hot and other artifacts leftover from the the 290x. Being that Nvidia has 90% marketshare, they're going to be exposed to these pressures pretty much anywhere they go. Depending on their own psychological makeup and personality, their desire to belong to the "in crowd" may have them simply buy Nvidoa without comparing a single benchmark. And don't underestimate the power of these parasocial relationships and the desire to be seen with the "winning side", because they have a profound impact on consumer decisions.
This is why even when AMD releases a GPU that is undeniably a better value, Nvidia still outsells them 10 to 1. Because to many, performance is not as important as the desire to be seen as "cool" or "a part of the crowd" to others.
*I'm not trying to denigrate anybody or demean anybody, I'm just relaying the fact that research into consumer psychology shows that the overwhelming majority of consumers make irrational choices based on intangible factors.Nvidia steers the market, AMD just follows and usually just out of sheer desperation to survive. I would argue that the snti-consumer trends that emerge in the dGPU market are usually inspired by Nvidia. AMD shareholders see what Nvidia is charging and don't understand why AMD doesn't do the same and that's because they're investors NOT PC ENTHUSIASTS. TThis is why AMD can't simply sell GPUs at cost or very cheaply to play the long game of marketshare, because investors expect nothing but short term profit every quarter. I think this is what people miss, because it's constantly repeated that "AMD shouldnjust sell GPUs cheaply to get marketshare". How do you explain that to investors? How do you explain that "we're not going to turn a profit for 4 years/2 generations in hopes that we'll gain marketshare"....see how well that goes over with the price of AMD stock. Corporations are designed to make return for investors, investors don't care how that's accomplished and they don't care about videocard buyers.
I'm not an nvidia fanboy but AMD support is trash, their forums are dead, nobody from AMD reads them, my 6400 sucks no 10 bit or VRR on my smart tv so now I will be moving to a 4060, paying way more but also getting rid of trash AMD drivers.
How a company is so quickly able to forget the strategy that returned it to relevance, boggles the mind. How a company that has never been an absolute performance leader, believed it somehow could become one in a single generation and across both product lines, is similarly confusing. It seems that AMD leadership has been infected with hubris, or maybe just greed... regardless, I think they need to eat some humble pie and soon, or the company could be eating bankruptcy pie later.
AMD, you had a winning strategy. How about, IDK, going back to it? What's so difficult about admitting you were wrong?
PS @enb141 see it from a humorous perspective
These days the default game dev behaviour appears to be "use an existing engine poorly by ignoring all of the optimisations the engine offers, forget to pre-compile shader cache so that it stutters to all hell, and then launch it half-baked, incomplete, and needing a year of patches and a DLC to complete the main plot/story/campaign that us gamers used to get at launch"
There's a reason why only one of them is such a massive hit for consoles!
CPUs are on debate, you either go Intel or AMD or if you are nuts and have Windows you get a Mac for about 3 times more expensive, but GPUs nvidia pretty much has no competition.Most users doesn't care about power, if you don't believe me, then look at Mac users, they are paying exorbitant prices for a computer that could cost 1/3 if they weren't worshiping mac os.
MS, Sony won't be going to either unless they can match AMD's perf/$ or better it!
Can you explain me that?