Monday, September 9th 2024
AMD Confirms Retreat from the Enthusiast GPU Segment, to Focus on Gaining Market-Share
AMD in an interview with Tom's Hardware, confirmed that its next generation of gaming GPUs based on the RDNA 4 graphics architecture will not target the enthusiast graphics segment. Speaking with Paul Alcorn, AMD's Computing and Graphics Business Group head Jack Huynh, said that with its next generation, AMD will focus on gaining market share in the PC gaming graphics market, which means winning price-performance battles against NVIDIA in key mainstream- and performance segments, similar to what it did with the Radeon RX 5000 series based on the original RDNA graphics architecture, and not get into the enthusiast segment that's low-margin with the kind of die-sizes at play, and move low volumes. AMD currently only holds 12% of the gaming discrete GPU market, something it sorely needs to turn around, given that its graphics IP is contemporary.
On a pointed question on whether AMD will continue to address the enthusiast GPU market, given that allocation for cutting-edge wafers are better spent on data-center GPUs, Huynh replied: "I am looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that's hurting us? It's $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I'm looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us. So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users. Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill]—it hasn't really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been...the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we'll have leadership."
Alcorn pressed: "Price point-wise, you have leadership, but you won't go after the flagship market?," to which Huynh replied: "One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can't get the developers. If I tell developers, 'I'm just going for 10 percent of the market share,' they just say, 'Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.' So, I have to show them a plan that says, 'Hey, we can get to 40% market share with this strategy.' Then they say, 'I'm with you now, Jack. Now I'll optimize on AMD.' Once we get that, then we can go after the top."
The exchange seems to confirm that AMD's decision to withdraw from the enthusiast segment is driven mainly by the low volumes it is seeing for the kind of engineering effort and large wafer costs spent building enthusiast-segment GPUs. The company saw great success with its Radeon RX 6800 series and RX 6900 series mainly because the RDNA 2 generation benefited from the GPU-accelerated cryptomining craze, where high-end GPUs were in demand. This demand disappeared by the time AMD rolled out its next-generation Radeon RX 7900 series powered by RDNA 3, and the lack of performance leadership compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 with ray tracing enabled, hurt the company's prospects. News of AMD focusing on the performance segment (and below), aligns with the rumors that with RDNA 4, AMD is making a concerted effort to improving its ray tracing performance, to reduce the performance impact of enabling ray tracing. This, raster performance, and efficiency, could be the company's play in gaining market share.
The grand assumption AMD is making here, is that it has a product problem, and not a distribution problem, and that with a product that strikes the right performance/Watt and performance/price equations, it will gain market-share.
Catch the full interview in the source link below.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
On a pointed question on whether AMD will continue to address the enthusiast GPU market, given that allocation for cutting-edge wafers are better spent on data-center GPUs, Huynh replied: "I am looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that's hurting us? It's $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I'm looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us. So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users. Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill]—it hasn't really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been...the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we'll have leadership."
The exchange seems to confirm that AMD's decision to withdraw from the enthusiast segment is driven mainly by the low volumes it is seeing for the kind of engineering effort and large wafer costs spent building enthusiast-segment GPUs. The company saw great success with its Radeon RX 6800 series and RX 6900 series mainly because the RDNA 2 generation benefited from the GPU-accelerated cryptomining craze, where high-end GPUs were in demand. This demand disappeared by the time AMD rolled out its next-generation Radeon RX 7900 series powered by RDNA 3, and the lack of performance leadership compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 with ray tracing enabled, hurt the company's prospects. News of AMD focusing on the performance segment (and below), aligns with the rumors that with RDNA 4, AMD is making a concerted effort to improving its ray tracing performance, to reduce the performance impact of enabling ray tracing. This, raster performance, and efficiency, could be the company's play in gaining market share.
The grand assumption AMD is making here, is that it has a product problem, and not a distribution problem, and that with a product that strikes the right performance/Watt and performance/price equations, it will gain market-share.
Catch the full interview in the source link below.
137 Comments on AMD Confirms Retreat from the Enthusiast GPU Segment, to Focus on Gaining Market-Share
Didn't know buying a $1200 gpu was the equivalent of buying a $120k car (911 carrera base model) o_O; i'll gladly trade my 4080 for a used 911 if anyone is out there! :D
Where is AMD's current mid-range cards on that list? It's still dominated by Nvidia.
I'd say it's still going to be difficult for AMD to break into that mid-range tier when Nvidia will still have an opposing product next gen.
I am wishing Radeons well. We need it!
And still viable and in support, ergo still around.
"Incomplete DirectX API support"
Ah yes, lack of support for feature level 12_2, which includes... things it doesn't have in its design drafted in 2018. When DX12 Ultimate came out in 2020. Be real.
"No matrix multiplication/tensor/RT support"
When the competition barely had all of that in the card's heyday? When the people that have/are interested in a 5700XT probably won't be considering workloads like that?
"Buggy drivers"
This I'll concede, but that applies more to the card's earlier years than it does now.
"Deficient encoding hardware"
I will also concede VCN kind of sucking but that fact has not changed in comparison to NVENC/QSV at any point in the last decade or so. Didn't kneecap its sales nor sales of RX 6000 and RX 7000.
"Reliability issues requiring several revisions"
Much of what I could even dig up is solved by now or had existing workarounds at the time, cards that are still around can be/are fixed.
"Limited VRAM size."
Lemme grip you by the ear and rattle off some models you might be familiar with. 2070. 2070 SUPER. 2080. 2080 SUPER. 3060Ti. 3070. 3070Ti. 4060. 4060Ti 8G. A580. A750. A770 8G. Released around the same time or newer, or far newer, all hampered by the same 'lack of VRAM' you rest the blame on AMD for as if they were supposed to have some moment of divine providence to realize that The Last of Us Part 1 Remastered: Extra Shitty Port Edition (2023) will need more than 8GB. When the cards that roughly match it in performance have the same memory sizes and are still being used TODAY.
I highlighted how long the 5700XT has lasted as a card that you can slap into a PC and still use within its means, specifically in the segment that consumer Radeon targets: value-conscious gaming. Even its geriatric Polaris predecessor the RX 480/580 is still seeing use. Much of what you cite as it being a 'bad example' are issues that were either relevant only in its youth or a result of the card, shocker, being old. Get a grip.
That's why AMD is limiting their investment in the PC gaming market. Why invest in a market where the consumers will go with any logical or illogical excuse and buy the competitor's product? Why invest in a hostile market?
what they need to adjust is price - fix to $500
otherwise whole interview is whishful thinking
People also complained that AMD was forcing it's sponsored games to use a large amount of VRAM, again with zero proof.
Meanwhile when Nvidia has a bug or an issue like the terrible 12VHPWR adapter, 3000 series transient spikes and noise feedback in the 12v sense pin, New World bricking cards, or the discord bug that lowered clocks, people blamed everyone but Nvidia.Yep, AMD needs a Ryzen moment for their GPUs. They need to provide enough of a value advantage to make customer take notice, because most aren't even considering AMD.
That said I'm not sure they could have a Ryzen moment because Nvidia has been very aggressive in the past with it's pricing to prevent AMD from gaining marketshare. Nvidia could lower mid to low end GPU prices temporarily just to crash AMD and then things would return to normal the gen after. As we've seen with their AIBs and the AI market, they aren't afraid of coercion and other illegal tactics either.
My last Geforce was the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320 in 2007,
I loved it, but kept buying ATi then AMD because it supported 3 displays (Eyefinity), sometimes it was better and sometimes it was cheaper.
Now I starting to hate it since AMD doing nothing to make the cool stuff accessible with their GPU-s (mostly AI which sometimes I use) and the incredibly s*#t drivers.
They just not deserving my money anymore...I don't have recent experience with Nvidia drivers... but I can tell AMD is not doing well on that department.
I believe this is what they call misinformation. If you need to be this deluded to found your beliefs that the whole community hates AMD, maybe, just maybe, you have a bit of a victim complex.Ndidia did not force AMD to overprice the 7700, the 7900xt, or the 6400/6500xt. That was all AMD's doing. AMD themselves have stated they no long want to produce value options, they want to be a "premium brand". AMD is not your friend. They want money, always have, always will.
Nothing wrong with that, but as rumors have it RDNA 4 will top at RX7900XT to RX7900XTX performance with rt performance of 4070 to super and price of 500-600$, at best it will be OK performance/dollar improvement from last gen with stronger RT performance. All nvidia has to do is price their card within 10-15% more from AMD equivalent and people will pay the extra.