People really are voting with their wallets and not buying at these prices.
That is such a wildly myopic analysis. People aren't "voting with their wallets" - six months ago, hordes of people were throwing whatever money they had at any available GPU. Calling the current reversal "voting with their wallets" is in such blatant direct conflict with recent history that it just makes no sense. People are either already using a relatively new GPU, or they have been objecting to GPU pricing for years and abstaining from upgrading. (Or, like the vast majority most likely, they just don't care that much about computers, and just want to play games.) But that just goes to show how utterly useless the concept of "voting with your wallet is" - 'cause if that's the case, then this same group has likely been doing the same for the entire GPU shortage. And not a single person has noticed or cared, because every single GPU made, no matter the price, would sell. The only exception to this is people who previously had the means to buy a new GPU, couldn't due to the shortage, and have in the meantime lost the economic security enabling them to do so. Even with current economic insecurity, that is not a large group.
What we are seeing is a combination of oversupply, a saturated market, a well stocked used market, and economic insecurity. Reducing that to "people are voting with their wallets" is incredibly reductive.
I disagree. We have a duopoly and AMD didn't master anything at all. We see the same old performance from AMD and no improvement at all.
I mean look at the 5500 XT (2019) -> 6500 XT (2022) transition. 0% progress. None!
It even looks that AMD intentionally stagnates the market, so that no "average joe" to ever be able to upgrade from the ancient 1080p monitor.
The AMD market share is still low 20% and there is absolutely no signs that to be improving.
You always have some rather interesting responses and analyses, and this is definitely one of them. First off, did anyone say AMD had "mastered" anything? Second, the RX 6500 is well established to be a
very weirdly specced and wholly underwhelming GPU that makes zero sense. It definitely shows that someone at AMD has some rather bad ideas - but crucially, it is not whatsoever representative of the RDNA2 generation at all - not whatsoever. It is a clear and remarkable outlier. It does indeed show no scaling from the RX 5500 XT - but on the other hand,
the RX 6600 (non-XT) outperforms the RX 5700 at 1080p; the 6600 XT outperforms the 5700 XT at 1080p and the 5700 at 1440p; and the
RX 6700 XT delivers a very significant 25-32% (dependent on resolution) jump over the 5700 XT.
Also, you're very selectively only focusing on naming tiers rather than pricing - which is after all what matters more to most buyers. It doesn't matter if the GPU you can afford is in a 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 tier - if it's what you can afford, that's the fastest GPU you're getting. Of course, in a way, you're right - there has been massive stagnation this generation. However, singling out AMD for this
makes no sense. Nvidia has been identical to AMD in this regard, delivering like-for-like price and performance increases over previous generations. Blaming the current value stagnation in GPUs on AMD in that context is just nonsensical - both AMD and Nvidia are perfectly equal in this regard for this generation. And, IMO, Nvidia as a market leader has a lot more clout and a lot more of an impact with their decisions, and thus had far more of a say of where price/performance has shaken out in the end. Yes, AMD could absolutely have undercut them as they have preivously, and that is absolutely something one could argue that AMD
should have done. However, that doesn't absolve Nvidia from its responsibility in consistently driving GPU prices upwards and relative value (perf/$ gen-over-gen) downwards each generation.
AMD's market share and its failure to grow is an extremely complex topic, and one that is strongly affected by Nvidia's massive mindshare advantage and their status as a decades-long incumbent market leader. Trying to gain market share against that kind of opposition is
incredibly difficult, no matter your product quality, marketing, etc. It took AMD more than three years of consistently delivering better-value and in the end fundamentally superior products to Intel to erase Intel's mindshare advantage in CPUs, and that was
far less entrenched than Nvidia's mindshare in GPUs.
The GPU market is a duopoly in that there are only two significant actors, but that is also a gross misrepresentation of reality, as the term implies that they are comparable in market strength. In reality, the GPU market is a quasi-monopoly with a moderately strong runner-up that somewhat threatens the status of the incumbent, but is by no means in a position to beat them - not in finances, not in multi-year R&D funding, not in mindshare.
