It's true, but no one seen EVGA's end coming. Interesting how he picked another Nvidia exclusive vendor to work with.
Unfortunately AMD is making their own brand irrelevant at the high end and believes maybe gamers will be desperate enough to take them back with rdna 5. Will their strategy backfire when they are the primary reason for Blackwell likely price swelling across the board?
While I am critical of them I am also hopeful they can be competetive at the high end once more for a market price correction sooner than later. If Battlemage's rt performance will be superior than rdna 4 their plan will backfire like wildfire! Imo.
I've had EVGA cards and it was really my only reason for sticking with nvidia cards, every other nvidia aib brand has a lackluster warranty, either not allowing gpu disassembly or a non-transferable warranty. IMO RDNA3 could've been better, but i think it's still impressive for their first attempt at a chiplet consumer gpu.
I'm not too surprised he went with PNY, they are one of the closest brands to nvidia and the oem making quadro cards. I hope Kingpin is successful in bringing PNY into a competitive level with Asus and MSI high end cards. Although high end OC cards are becoming a very limited niche as nvidia keeps restriciting what overclocking can be done even with physical mods to the card.
AMD was already mostly irrelevant in the high end at least to those who are always going to buy the x90 level of card anyway. AMD hasn't competed with Nvidia in the high end in years and it makes no sense for them to waste billions on trying to bring a high end card to the market, when Nvidia can just cut a chunk from their massive compute dies and beat AMD without even really trying. And then you have all the tech press finding something to bash AMD on, like not having proprietary features like DLSS or frame gen, or power consumption even though no one seemed to care when the RTX 30 series consumed more power.
If Blackwell has a significant price increase, the fault is on nvidia for that one, its well known Jensen decides what the price is on launch day. Nvidia doesn't care what AMD does as they have over 80% of the market now, and IMO its on consumers who paid inflated prices during the crypto boom and keep paying Nvidia even though they shifted the whole stack down a tier yet prices up a whole tier.
And Intel Battlemage would a be a massive if, even if Battlemage can catch up in RT performance, their drivers are still very hit or miss and Intel has a long way to go if they want to catch up to AMD and Nvidia.