AMD, even when it was controlling nearly 50% of the market with evergreen,
You mean when in CPUs they where trying to sell Bulldozer and where going straight on the bankrupt cliff?
Yeah, it makes you wonder why they didn't throw a gazillion of money back then to improve their GPUs.
AMD was competitive until first GCN cards, like the HD 7970. Of course everyone was parroting that their drivers where bad, from back then. The fact that all developers where building their games on Intel and Nvidia systems(first demo XBOX machines from Microsoft that where put in a public place, where PCs running Intel and Nvidia hardware), leaving optimization and compatibility on Radeon GPUs as something to be fixed after release with a patch, wasn't an excuse. Because it was AMD and we never offer the benefit of an excuse to AMD. Now that all console games have FSR integrated because there is no point integrating DLSS in a console game, it's again AMD's fault that they have a head start.
So, Nvidia enjoys a head start. AMD's fault. AMD enjoys a head start. AMD's fault. Funny isn't it.
After HD 7970, AMD had to play with very strict financials. They where with one foot in bankruptcy. So they kept improving GCN as much as they could with the limited financials they had. Played some bets that didn't worked out at that time (HBM) and just tried to remain relevant in the market. Having improving their financials thanks to Ryzen and EPYC they managed to split the architecture to CDNA and RDNA so they can focus in both professional and gaming. Their RDNA1 was showing signs of a good start, their RDNA2 was great and only in RT behind Nvidia, their RDNA3, unfortunately just didn't worked. They probably where expecting huge performance increase in raster, never happened. At the same time they didn't focused on RT and they are paying it now, because Nvidia is moving the narrative of the market at will and everyone is looking at RT performance today, even those going to buy an RTX 4060 that will offer them sub 30 fps in some cases with RT enabled.
Everyone seems to forget or excuse when Nvidia and Intel where having issues or pushing anticompetitive practices, but perfectly remembers every single case that something gone wrong with AMD's hardware and/or drivers, while also elevating it in the category of apocalyptic events.
Nvidia's "mindshare" is a direct result of AMD being a 2nd tier brand with 3rd tier support,
In the resent election in Greece (15 days ago) it was the first time in 50 years that the opposition not only didn't managed to gain percentage points against the government, but it was completely obliterated in the elections and it's leader resigned after 15 years. While they did made some big mistakes in their election campaign, it's also common knowledge to everyone that the government controls in a degree the media here. So it's always the government's narrative what is pushed as the truth to the public. We see on almost every show of every channel the host(s) asking a question to a government representative and letting him/her finish while nodding in agreement and then asking the same question the opposition representative, only to keep cutting him/her while trying to reply to the question.
Nvidia enjoys this kind of support from the press and the public. That's "mindshare" and marketing of course. Even if AMD was coming out with a killer RDNA 3 product, it would take them years to get significant market share. The same happened with Intel and Ryzen. Ryzen was offering more than Intel in many cases with much better efficiency. And what happened? In 202x all are looking single threaded performance, because that's where Intel keeps having an advantage (while consuming 300W of course, but we don't talk about efficiency this period, we might if Intel managed to fix it's manufacturing and starts winning there).
It's an uphill battle for AMD, even when having the best products.
