Until someone from the tech community decides to step up and take Nvidia on in the serious consumer GPU segment, all of the energy people spend in posting comments is wasted.
It is not at all impossible. It will, though, take a lot of money.
"Oh, Apple won't be able to beat Intel. Intel has decades of expertise and even has its own leading fabs. Apple should stick to the Intel contract. The idea of using ARM designs for high performance is laughable and pitiable. What kind of expertise does Apple have in CPU design? Zero."
AMD could switch its role from enabling Nvidia to set prices to actually competing. That's the biggest barrier facing a would-be serious competitor... AMD's intentional sandbagging. However, even with that, AMD will still want to allocate as many of its wafers to enterprise as possible. There is space, right now, for a serious competitor which AMD has vacated and hasn't occupied for
many years. Claims that there isn't enough market aren't supported when discontinued GPUs sell out so quickly, regardless of whether or not something like a mining craze is happening. The cards sell. If there were no market, they wouldn't.
It strikes me as weak that people are so excited about the 9800X3D, even though it's mostly an overclocked (increased power budget) variant of the 7800X3D and what people really need are more affordable powerful GPUs. Oh boy... a faster CPU to use with massively overpriced GPUs. What value!
There are so many comments claiming that people buy Nvidia cards because of the branding. That's not true. The main reason people buy them is because the alternatives aren't as good on a technical level. If I were to be given a chunk of Elon's fortune to create the
Potato GPU corporation, releasing a card with Vicki Lawrence's Mama on the striped and polka dotted box, fake flowers and potpurri in the box with the GPU, influencer videos from me as the CEO mocking people for buying them — saying all their friends will make fun of them, and printing LAME! on the GPU shroud, they would sell out. Why? Because they'd offer better performance for less money than what Nvidia is offering, without the shortcomings. How?
1) More VRAM than Nvidia at each tier.
2) Competitive gaming performance per watt.
3) Better gaming performance per dollar.
4) Clearer naming strategy. No more Ti, Super, XT/XTX, products with the same name but different specs, products with a bigger number but worse performance, etc.
5) Each generation would be much better than the previous one in performance, not going down in performance per dollar especially.
6) Possibly moving the AI-oriented/RT-oriented hardware to a separate GPU, for a dual-GPU setup for those who care about those things. Possibly involving a new form factor to reduce latency.
7) Longer driver support than both Nvidia and AMD.
8) Better drivers out of the gate than Intel.
9) Top-end performance that's, at minimum, no lower than whatever Nvidia's top consumer card offers.
10) Serious committment to performance in AI workloads.
11) Excellent Linux support, not just Windows support.
12) Quiet cooling.
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One doesn't need smoke and mirrors to sell a superior product.
There are endless comments trying to justify AMD's refusal to compete which is AMD's method of letting Nvidia set prices. (Soft collusion that also benefits Sony and MS by keeping "consoles" relevant.) They claim that there aren't enough customers to justify the creation of products, even though the 4090 was sold out for a long time. The argument that "consoles" are so good now (as compared to the pathetic Jaguar generation) has some merit but the video game market continues to expand, not contract. I would like to see good data showing that the serious ("enthusiast") PC gaming market is too small for a company to be able to make a profit whilst undercutting Nvidia — and that the market wouldn't expand if people were to be able to purchase better-value PC gaming equipment at the enthusiast level. Instead, what I've seen are comments that could be written by AMD and Nvidia. "Oh... woe is us... there's nothing we can do... Here's my money..." fatalism.
Enthusiasts are the people who care about hardware specs. The claim that they're blinded by "team" this and that has been shown to be untrue. Enthusiasts are not Dell, chained to one vendor. When a truly superior product becomes available, they will abandon everything else unless they're being paid to use the competition's. Enthusiasts are debating the 7800X3D vs 9800X3D for gaming. They aren't blinded by Intel's history of better performance (particularly Sandy Bridge—Skylake.)
Pointing to historical situations in which Nvidia was able to sell inferior products at a higher rate than AMD/ATI seems to point to inadequate marketing. But even then, ATI and AMD cards had drawbacks, like inadequate coolers. The cooler AMD used for the 290X was embarassingly underpowered and I believe I recall that ASUS released a Strix version that was defectively designed. The current state of the Internet makes it very easy to get the word out about a superior product. A certain tech video review site, for instance, has millions of YT followers. Don't tell me people aren't going to learn about the superior product and will instead buy blindly. I don't buy it. I also don't think serious gamers care about what generic imagery is on the box, and that includes the brand logo and color scheme.
If it were my company, I would ditch the archaic ATX form factor so that GPUs, which are the highest-wattage components by far, would have the form factor be about cooling them efficiently as the #1 design priority. Let's have some actual innovation (serious and committed) for once, instead of endless iteration of copy-cat products.
Anyway... my 1 cent. That's how much I have to rub together to get Potato GPU corporation off the ground. I'm not friends with the guys who build
flaming moats.
