Nvidia lately have had the shitty habit of crippling previous generation cards, while AMD has been increasing performance of last gen cards, including the now ~7 year old 7xxx series, witch with the lates drivers (16.12.2) get a massive 25-40% boost (depending on model), especially in current games. Have you tried playing fallout 4 on a GTX 760? It's a slideshow. Now try playing it on a HD 7950. At launch, the GTX 760 was 10% faster and more expensive, but it's aged badly due to lazy nvidia driver support and crap like gameworks.
Now what I always wonder is - why do you give a shit if nvidia has the fastest card on the market? Are you going to buy a 1080 or 1080ti? 99% of gamers won't. They are too expensive and make for a bad investment. What people do buy in mass is stuff like the GTX 1050, RX 460, and to some extent the 1060 / RX 470 / RX 480. That's where the money is. Sure, there are huge margins on top end GPUs, but sales are so poor, money is made in the mid-end. And for the mid-end, the most recent driver updates have brought the RX 480 on par with the 1060 6GB in DX11, and gave it a 20-25% edge in DX12 / vulcan. In fact a 4GB 480 I recently tested impressed me by catching up to my GTX 1070 in Doom (using vulkan - ultra settings, 1080p, FSAA8X). That's a huge performance improvement since launch.
Right. Looking at the two company's history, in 2002 nvidia took an ass whopping from ATi's Radeon 9700. What did nvidia have back then? The Geforce 4 ti 4600, witch the 9700 PRO nuked. A few months later, nvidia rushed the FX series witch bombed. Bad. The FX 5800 was hot, loud and slow. They released the FX 5950XT a few months later, but ATi countered with the 9800 PRO witch dominated until the release of the Geforce 6 series. ATi then released the X800 and X850 witch took the performance crown away from the 6800. Then it was the X19xx vs the 79xx where they were tied (the 7950GT were great cards - had one back in the day - my first high end video card). ATi lost it with the 2xxx series, but they weren't far behind. The 2900XT while using more power, was cooler, cheaper and placed between the 8800GTS and the 8800GTX (both great cards but suffered from manufacturing challenges of the time - crappy ROHS solder). Later still, nvidia launched the GTX 280 - hot as hell, louder then a vacuum cleaner, expensive, but very, very fast. AMD countered with the HD 4xxx series witch were amazing. Cheap, cool, efficient, reliable, and the 4870 DDR4 offered 85% percent of the 280's performance. It was the best buy by far. Nvidia cocked up again later with the GTX 480 witch like the 280 was really hot, but lost the performance crown to the more expensive 5870.
What I'm trying to get at is nvidia and ati (now AMD) will always be in a sort of balance. What people missed at the VEGA demo was that AMD showed off "little vega" the 8GB cut down version. This fits their style since they seem to have a habbit of releasing slower cards first, with the fastest ones coming later. It's very possible that the bigger vega chip is not ready to showcase, and will probably launch in Q3 or Q4 2017.
tl;dr - nvidia tend to be dicks, and their products don't last as long as the competition (right now) because of lack of performance optimizations for previous generation cards in new drivers as well as crap like gameworks. They don't care about you, the consumer - they care about your money, and how they can get more of it as soon as possible. AMD doesn't care about you either, but if they have to fight each other with good products, we the consumers win.
Those results represent overall earnings, not earnings from GPU sales. In fact nvidia made so much money lately by getting into IoT, AI, self driving cars and the server market - good decisions all. GPU's don't really bring in that much revenue anymore.
584 SP GP102.
