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EricHiggin said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Well the problem with being in AMD's position and competing against Nvidia is that Nvidia will try to match almost every price point. AMD releases 5600 XT, Nvidia responds with 2060 KO. AMD releases 5700, Nvidia responds with 2060 Super price cut. AMD releases 5700 XT, Nvidia sandwiches it by re-releasing 2070 and releasing 2070 Super. AMD releases anything lower than a 5600 XT and Nvidia has a billion iterations of 1650/1660/1660Ti.

The thing with beefing up existing features is that it only really works if the competition sacrificed existing features for those new features therefore having less performance in return. Nvidia stayed relatively the same sure but AMD only caught up. So you have a situation where Nvidia is giving you good-excellent rasterization performance + giving you a taste of the future while having the full feature set ready for next generation vs AMD is giving you good-very good rasterization for the similar price with worse driver support...

There is certainly a market for AMD cards no doubt and the once in a few years crypto boom that seems to happen also helps with AMD's sales. But it's a position of uncertainty as Nvidia is playing in the same space.

I like this analogy but I don't think it's quite works in this comparison. Waiting for AMD drivers doesn't get you a better driver than what Nvidia gives you in day one. Waiting on AMD driver allows you to play the games like the Nvidia people have been playing all this time.

And yea that's true but it is a risky business being in second place as your competitor gets to dedicate how much profit you can have which I would say isn't very good for business.

So if AMD can't beat Nvidia on price point since they will match it or come close, what's AMD's incentive to undercut Nvidia or themselves? Why bother with dedicated (consumer) GPU's at all if you're surrounded?

Could Nvidia have done more with existing (hardware) features if they left out things like RT on the 2000 series? Did they really do the right thing that was best for the consumer? Based on the 3000 series leaks, it seems like the consumers agreed, prices be damned. AMD likes money too just by chance.

I don't just mean drivers. What about waiting for prices to get to a point where they are at the very least, reasonable, top to bottom? If fewer people bought in so early, the prices would flat line and remain there since they won't drop much without serious competition along with a price war. Some people won't wait though, so why offer better pricing? In fact, why not keep increasing?

Second place has it's benefits as well though. You aren't expected to always have the newest features. You aren't expected to have the best tech. You're seen as the underdog, which helps a lot if you ever decide to take a shot at the title. The fall is a lot further from the top.

Cause if they have similar price but worse drivers and less features. What incentive is there to buy AMD?

Nvidia could have certainly had better performance sure but by having these features baked into Turing, they now have experience as to what works and what doesn't. Take DLSS for example, 1.0 was terrible. 2.0, incredible. Now going into 3000 series, they will probably have even more of an improved version. Then you have ray tracing. RDNA 2 will be AMD's first attempt and it might be good but this will be Nvidia's second generation which should mean greater gains. Now one could argue that consumer are the ones getting screwed but since the alternative is not having any of these at all while having lower or similar performance... I think most people would rather have the first generation features + the similar performance even if the first gen features are not fully ready for prime time. Since the prices are similar that is.

Well if AMD wants to price like Nvidia, it won't be reasonable... Personally I don't consider the 5000 prices very reasonable myself as they lack Ray Tracing, Tensor cores and DX12 Ultimate.

That's true.