PC Graphics Market on Track for Post-pandemic Correction

[SOAREVERSOR]

It will depend on the extent of this economic downturn and whether or not AMD will go for such a gamble.

We'll know either way when the prices of RDNA 3 are officially announced: if prices are similar to nVidia's, AMD will have opted to NOT MAKE such a gamble.

Because that gamble won't work. It's a losing bet.

 

[kapone32]

Let's make a gentlemens bet. nVidia won't lower prices and will still outsell AMD regardless of how good AMD is this generation.


What I'm saying is that yet again, none of this will matter. AMD will have better price to performance and not a silly product and people will say "now nVidia has to lower prices" and they won't, and people will still go out and buy nVidia.

This is not 2015. AMD gets plenty of hype on Youtube among other channels. If the 7900XT is within 10% of FPS of the 4090 with traditional frames and sells for half of what the 4090 is it will sell well.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

This is not 2015. AMD gets plenty of hype on Youtube among other channels. If the 7900XT is within 10% of FPS of the 4090 with traditional frames and sells for half of what the 4090 is it will sell well.

And nVidia will still not lower prices and will still outsell it. I'm not arguing AMD can't sell GPUs, of course they can. I'm stating that AMD isn't going to impact the price of nVidia GPUs as it's the budget brand. So all the "will force nVidia to lower prices" is lunacy. Those who can buy nVidia, even if they get less for more. Those who can't buy AMD. It doesn't really affect pricing.

Also those youtubers don't actuall use AMD. You see any of the big names and they hype the hell out of AMD and then you see their rigs and it's all nVidia. There's similar behavior on the corporate side as well. People will tout AMD products but when it's your job on the line you pay the nVidia tax.

I want AMD to make a good product for the people who will buy it. But I'm not so deranged as to think it's going to affect nVidias pricing and am fully aware the majority of the people wanting better don't actually just want cheaper nVidia which won't happen and they'll just still buy the nVidia.

The market is going to stay nVidia 80% and AMD 20% unless nVidia starts burning houses down, pricing won't change this. And if nVidia drops their prices they are fucking morons, the high prices justify their 80% share. That's what people do not get about this. Markets are not actually competitive in the sense you think. Something is worth more because it costs more, period. Companies know this, most consumers are too stupid to get this. My 10,000 dollar watch is worth more and a better item than my 1000 dollar watch. And the only reason it's worth more despite having more issues, performing the same is because it costs more. That's why Rolex is the biggest watch brand in the world. Always raise prices when you are the go to brand, the moment you lower them you are not the go to brand and you are trash as well. You implode.

Once you grasp that's the reality about pricing, it's all the brand it's never the product, things make a lot more sense. I can charge more as long as I charge more, and I am worth more as long as I raise prices. If you lower prices and I raise them I win. The product doesn't matter, you're just a more worthless budge product and I'm just that much more of a better product. It's the nature of the game. The war is NEVER to have the better product. It's to have the most desired product, and inflated prices drive desire. So inflating your prices to all hell is the name of the game the moment you can. Having done consulting in the past I've raised sales on crappier products just by raising them. Amazing how that works! Never ever lower your prices, and do not compete with people on pricing because that admits you take them seriously. If AMD releases a great GPU nVidia should raise their prices. Get back to your premium brand. If you lower them you should go bankrupt and live on the street.

No doubting AMD won't release a good one, but if nVidia lowers prices as a result they are fools and they are not fools.

 

[kapone32]

And nVidia will still not lower prices and will still outsell it. I'm not arguing AMD can't sell GPUs, of course they can. I'm stating that AMD isn't going to impact the price of nVidia GPUs as it's the budget brand. So all the "will force nVidia to lower prices" is lunacy. Those who can buy nVidia, even if they get less for more. Those who can't buy AMD. It doesn't really affect pricing.

Also those youtubers don't actuall use AMD. You see any of the big names and they hype the hell out of AMD and then you see their rigs and it's all nVidia. There's similar behavior on the corporate side as well. People will tout AMD products but when it's your job on the line you pay the nVidia tax.

I want AMD to make a good product for the people who will buy it. But I'm not so deranged as to think it's going to affect nVidias pricing and am fully aware the majority of the people wanting better don't actually just want cheaper nVidia which won't happen and they'll just still buy the nVidia.

The market is going to stay nVidia 80% and AMD 20% unless nVidia starts burning houses down, pricing won't change this. And if nVidia drops their prices they are fucking morons, the high prices justify their 80% share. That's what people do not get about this. Markets are not actually competitive in the sense you think. Something is worth more because it costs more, period. Companies know this, most consumers are too stupid to get this. My 10,000 dollar watch is worth more and a better item than my 1000 dollar watch. And the only reason it's worth more despite having more issues, performing the same is because it costs more. That's why Rolex is the biggest watch brand in the world. Always raise prices when you are the go to brand, the moment you lower them you are not the go to brand and you are trash as well. You implode.

Once you grasp that's the reality about pricing, it's all the brand it's never the product, things make a lot more sense. I can charge more as long as I charge more, and I am worth more as long as I raise prices. If you lower prices and I raise them I win. The product doesn't matter, you're just a more worthless budge product and I'm just that much more of a better product. It's the nature of the game. The war is NEVER to have the better product. It's to have the most desired product, and inflated prices drive desire. So inflating your prices to all hell is the name of the game the moment you can. Having done consulting in the past I've raised sales on crappier products just by raising them. Amazing how that works! Never ever lower your prices, and do not compete with people on pricing because that admits you take them seriously. If AMD releases a great GPU nVidia should raise their prices. Get back to your premium brand. If you lower them you should go bankrupt and live on the street.

No doubting AMD won't release a good one, but if nVidia lowers prices as a result they are fools and they are not fools.

I seriously think you are underestimating the effect that EVGA will have on the GPU market going forward and there is plenty of negative sentiment around the 4090 and though they do use Nvidia (how many of them are paid) but I am not talking about Hardware Unboxed or Jays I am talking about channels like MSI Gaming where they do live streams of hardware testing. What about the unnaming of the 4080 12GB? Are we really all sheep and slaves to the propaganda cycle that we no longer possess common sense? When there was a poll on TPU last week that had a hard no in terms of getting a 4090? I guess we are not sheep but it makes sense on an enthusiast platform.

As much as you may think that gentrification is justified it really doesn't mean shit and neither does having something be that much more in a performance based environment. Marketing Formula/James Bond does more to allow Rolex to command the price but we should be afraid if a GPU maker is doing the same thing, as those are not real luxury items in the way of what you mean. I don't want to have to go to Beverly Hills to buy a GPU. The only reason we are paying through the nose for a 4090 is to stroke Jensen's ego and there is no reason to support his thought of how the world should work. If Cyypto is doing nothing how can they justify the price of the card? There is a price point that becomes too much for most people. Initially there will be people that are going to have issues and unless there has been a change in policy people in North America are going to really lament MSI, ASUS, GIGABYTE and AS ROCK. That is going to blow up on REDDIT and other chat groups. Nvidia are part of the community but have not been playing fair for years. Even if they are better right now.

We have no idea what the future will bring but I promise you that the world has changed. You see there was a time when there was a card called the 2080TI was released and compared to any card in that generation it was a unicorn. Then AMD worked on and released a line of cards that were all faster than the 2080TI. There were so many charts that showed how much faster the 2080TI was than anything else with a rumour of something coming from AMD that when they actually delivered the narrative changed. Crypto mining decided to sky rocket and AMD did not juice their price but the distributors and retailers were more than happy to play musical chairs with how high can we go. Then we had a pandemic and the world went into juxtaposition in terms of PC Gaming and to a lesser degree content creation. Now we have the 4090 and you are missing something else, the card is 4 slots wide while having the same power draw as a card that was 3 slots wide. That might not seem like an issue but no one has had one of these sitting in case long enough to know. To talk about the sheep you mention there will be no longer Super Bowl commercials for EVGA Nvidia GPUs.

 

[R0H1T]

And nVidia will still not lower prices and will still outsell it. I'm not arguing AMD can't sell GPUs, of course they can. I'm stating that AMD isn't going to impact the price of nVidia GPUs as it's the budget brand. So all the "will force nVidia to lower prices" is lunacy. Those who can buy nVidia, even if they get less for more. Those who can't buy AMD. It doesn't really affect pricing.

They probably won't but they will not outsell Ampere, the big Crypto short shock will be felt across many (future) quarters! As for AMD being a viable competitor, there's also Intel btw for however long they persist with ARC, the thing is there's a lot of goodwill Nvidia has lost over the years & probably a lot more post EVGA debacle. Remember Intel, the 10x bigger whale (last decade) in PC market you remember what happened post zen launch? It wasn't just the performance but Intel's shenanigans also pushed a lot of users away from them, this will happen to Nvidia as well but maybe to a lesser extent. Intel didn't lower their CPU process for over a decade, then they had to in 2018(19?) even though they technically lead the ST charts IIRC.

The biggest issue Nvidia will face is in the mobile space, people forget just how dominant they are with laptops but now AMD & Intel can offer much cheaper bundles with their own CPU's ~ JHH is in a world of pain if he thinks their "we don't compete on price" BS will forever work in this industry! We've seen much bigger players go bankrupt in the consumer space, NVidia isn't close to some of their dominance

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

They probably won't but they will not outsell Ampere, the big Crypto short shock will be felt across many (future) quarters! As for AMD being a viable competitor, there's also Intel btw for however long they persist with ARC, the thing is there's a lot of goodwill Nvidia has lost over the years & probably a lot more post EVGA debacle. Remember Intel, the 10x bigger whale (last decade) in PC market you remember what happened post zen launch? It wasn't just the performance but Intel's shenanigans also pushed a lot of users away from them, this will happen to Nvidia as well but maybe to a lesser extent. Intel didn't lower their CPU process for over a decade, then they had to in 2018(19?) even though they technically lead the ST charts IIRC.

The biggest issue Nvidia will face is in the mobile space, people forget just how dominant they are with laptops but now AMD & Intel can offer much cheaper bundles with their own CPU's ~ JHH is in a world of pain if he thinks their "we don't compete on price" BS will forever work in this industry! We've seen much bigger players go bankrupt in the consumer space, NVidia isn't close to some of their dominance

Here's the catch though. The moment nVidia competes on price is the moment they are non premium and then they go away. Cheap nVidia will be no nVidia. They realize this. They also realize the cloud is the future.

The argument is as silly as "Nintendo should release on Steam" no they should never do this and if someone at Nintendo said it they should be boiled alive in oil and then nuked from orbit to be sure. Because the moment that happens Nintendo is dead. This this odd attitude in the PC world that customers define markets and the market players cater to them. That's not reality at all, and it never has really been. The market players state the rules, the customer deals with the rules as they are and gets no vote. That's what makes capitalism and markets work. If there is not eternal growth, rising profits, and price extraction from the customer constantly rising that market will implode or just catter to not the bottom of the barrel but the roaches under it.

If games won't pay 4k for a gpu in a few years than fuck gamers. Sell to the cloud and move it quicker than was planned, charged them 100 a month for low tier and 400 for a good tier and lease them games per month. That's how markets work. You always milk the goose that lays the golden egg till you kill the goose and then you move on. If you don't do that you will fail. If 4k for a GPU lasts the market will demand double that shortly, if people won't pay that's when you do cloud.

The only way we MIGHT get cheaper products. All of us quit buying for five years and implode the market forcing all these companies into bankruptcy and then hope it restarts. If that does not happen prices will keep rising because that is the only sane way a market works.

 

[R0H1T]

The GPU space isn't the Nintendo ecosystem though, you can use the same argument in favor (or against) Apple's walled garden. Outside of CUDA they aren't offering really anything distinguishing in the consumer space. Eventually it is all about performance & if/when AMD takes the performance crown back Nvidia will have to lower its prices, as they did a decade back, that's just a fact given the market is also shrinking. If they don't then their results will take an even bigger hit than what we saw earlier in the year. But the point about mindshare could still apply ~ someone will need to beat them at the top end, even if just for traditional PC (non RT) games.

 

[cvaldes]

The GPU space isn't the Nintendo ecosystem though, you can use the same argument in favor (or against) Apple's walled garden. Outside of CUDA they aren't offering really anything distinguishing in the consumer space. Eventually it is all about performance & if/when AMD takes the performance crown back Nvidia will have to lower its prices, as they did a decade back, that's just a fact given the market is also shrinking. If they don't then their results will take an even bigger hit than what we saw earlier in the year. But the point about mindshare could still apply ~ someone will need to beat them at the top end, even if just for traditional PC (non RT) games.

The problem is that the old graphics performance measurements are steadily losing their ability to capture a graphics card's full functionality.

We're seeing that in longer and longer graphics card reviews that now have to confront ray tracing performance as well as image upscaling technology performance (FSR, DLSS 2, DLSS 3+Frame Injection, XeSS). More and more gaming titles are including RT and upscaling technologies.

You can measure cards by pure rasterization performance but if a title has RT and DLSS support, it's more likely that the user is going to turn on those features. I'd be stupid to play Control on my Ampere cards without RT and DLSS turned on. Even if Shadow of the Tomb Raider's ray tracing implementation is barebones, the DLSS certainly gives an uplift.

If AMD is to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA, they will also have to do it with RT and ML cores. That specialized silicon is being used more frequently with each passing week.

Look at the iPhone and iPad. Apple has gone heavy on ML cores (they call it Neural Engine) and they are doing all sorts of things with machine learning that Geekbench don't measure. It's like Samsung claiming to be the performance champion because their Geekbench score is higher than the iPhone 14.

Joe Consumer doesn't run benchmarks. He uses the device in a variety of situations and more frequently some of those usage cases include taking advantage of differentiated and specialized silicon whether it be using hardware video codecs, image reconstruction, text recognition, etc.

The graphics card industry really needs to come up with newer metrics and measuring tools to capture these newer technology developments. The days of using 3D raster results as the yardstick for GPU performance are waning.

Mindshare is important. NVIDIA has established itself as the brand with superior performance.

For AMD to topple NVIDIA off of their perch, AMD would likely have to beat NVIDIA by a substantial margin (like 25%) across the board for a couple of GPU generations before the public perception changes on a wide scale.