This is the effect of bumpgate finally leading OEMs to choose AMD GPUs (see Apple, no Nvidia in sight because of what they did). Nvidia's 5xx series is fully competitive with AMD's 6xxx series now, unlike the 200 - 400 series where AMD had large pricing freedom and Nvidia lost money on high end parts.

disolitude is right too, Nvidia's focus on features has been a waste of money up to now. A faster GPU at every price is what gets sales, especially to OEMs where the bulk of the market is.

It will be interesting to see who gets to 28nm first. Despite using the same foundry AMD had profitable 40nm parts a year and a half before Nvidia (4770 v 480, and I wouldn't even call the 480 profitable).

@ssj12

AMD SLI won't make up more than 0.5% of the market given its rarity and AMD's own share. Anyone who really wants AMD SLI already hacked it to work or just bought Crossfire (since it scales better anyway).

scaling is always back and forth just like performance, one moment the new Nvidia cards are better with certain cards and certain drivers, the next AMD just comes out with new cards and drivers that scale like 1% better, they are generally close these days, I choose AMD simple because it has better image quality when playing back DxVA content.

It wont be rare at all. All bulldozer chipsets will support crossfire and SLi..... And SLi hasn't been available for multiple chipsets from AMD. I know of many people who want an AMD CPU and 3x SLi Nvidia. Hell, half of Bit-tech.net will enjoy it.

AMD Q1 '11 CPU shipments. Phenom II X6 made up 3.1% of AMD's desktop processor sales (anyone buying a sub-$200 CPU will not buy two GPUs). Let's say that represents the AMD enthusiast market. Now, what percentage of those enthusiasts would buy a dual-GPU setup? Then subtract those that would choose Crossfire. I don't think 0.5% is unreasonable.

That same minority are extremely vocal on tech sites. You just don't see the computer purchasing decisions of 95% of the market. I agree there is demand for AMD SLI, it just won't affect, specifically, the marketshare figures.

And you're not correct. Only BD motherboards whose ODMs pay a license fee to Nvidia will be able to use SLI without hacks. Some companies won't bother; some will only license their top motherboards. The installed base of SLI-capable motherboards will be fairly small.

What mobos do most enthusiasts buy? Top-end. And I'm sure most AMD enthusiasts would use Nvidia as most bitch and complain that AMD's GPUs suck for folding@home. And F@H that is important for a lot of gamers.

Edit: Then again, I don't see why anyone cares about AMD anymore. They are being heavily beaten by Intel, and Nvidia has entered the CPU market with their CPUs benching faster than a Core 2 Duo.

And then there is this: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/05/04/intel-announce-3d-tri-gate-transistors/1

AMD is behind in technology and performance. All AMD does is beat Nvidia in price, which if Nvidia cuts prices AMD is screwed.

I think your perspective is skewed. Sure, SLI matters to a lot of people. So does 3D Vision, F@h and PhysX. But that number is dwarfed by the number of people who don't care what they buy and buy the cheapest Dell box. And in a marketshare survey, they vastly outnumber the enthusiasts. In revenue, or maybe market importance, the enthusiasts are much more influential. I think we'll have to agree to differ on this point.

But:

- Nvidia's CPU is fail. How many actual products is it being used in? It's a generic ARM core that other vendors are doing better, delivering on promises of 1080p playback that Nvidia missed. Also the benchmark Nvidia used for that figure was rigged, they used an outdated version of gcc with optimisations disabled to run the C2D bench. Legitimate testing involves using the same test setup for both products at least. If we're talking about the future, then x86 fusion that Intel and AMD have will squeeze Nvidia's low-end market significantly.

- They are being beaten by Intel right now, yes. But even in their worst time ever, right before BD arrives, they are making a decent profit. They could live in this situation for a long time before being screwed. Neither of us know where BD will end up, and I happen to be optimistic.

- OK, Intel wins on process tech. They will have 22nm three years before AMD last I saw. However the initial Ivy Bridges are only 4 core, and it'll be 2H 2012 before Intel has 22nm products fighting BD. So AMD will have some time to shine if BD is good enough. By the way AMD (GF/IBM) also have that transistor tech, only they call it FinFET.

- Isn't AMD ahead in graphics at the moment? 6990 > GTX 590 and using a lot less silicon area? It is AMD who have pricing power as they have greater margins on their products. If AMD cut prices Nvidia would be pushed into the red on the GF110 die. 28nm is doubtful for this year so we are stuck in this AMD-favoured market for a while.

I'm not saying AMD has a lead in anything. But they are hardly screwed.

In the super long term Nvidia either needs x86 compatibility or bet on ARM domination (which I find unlikely).

uh, you guys are kinda off on a few things, AMD is not behind Nvidia SSJ, they use different methods to get performance is more like it, I still think Nvidia has better software support, but I think AMD hardware has a lot of strength over Nvidia stuff if you don't simply look for gaming but AMD software is not as proficient in many cases.

Nvidia CPU is not fail, it's able to do 1080p encoding and decoding just fine, the problem atm is software support, Tegra 2 basically took the place of the Neon set in their CPU since that'd cut costs and you wouldn't need the Neon instruction set if Tegra 2 is there and will eventually have good software support before the end of this year, not to mention they already have something that has 5x the performance with same or lower power drain. It will be interesting once AMD enters that same market in 2012 or later though.

Fuck Intel graphics, and nothing more on that particular topic, just fuck them. I love their i7 line though, ridiculous performance once overclocked, if you don't have money issues, always go Intel over AMD on CPU with current gen tech I say, otherwise AMD is awesome at budget CPUs. I've seen those sexy 12 thread xeons in action, ridiculous is all I can say.

considering this is the only one directed at me.

The GTX560 - 590 are stronger than AMD's HD6xxx line. And drivers are entirely apart of the GPU market so if AMD can't make decent drivers its not Nvidia's issue.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-590-sli-review/3

And Tri-SLi 580 is stronger than crossfire HD6990.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20629/12
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20573/10

Charts demonstrating AMD is ahead on price and performance in all market segments.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/04/28/nvidia_geforce_3way_sli_radeon_trifire_review/3

Tri-fire 6990 6970 is stronger than 3 GTX 590s. In both of our reviews though, the third and fourth cards did hardly anything. Even if I agree that 4 Nvidia GPUs are faster than 4 AMD GPUs, that is a vanishingly small percentage of the market. My whole argument is that the amount who will have SLI on AMD is so small it won't move those figures hardly at all. I'm not trying to claim no one would buy SLI.

That's the thing, you are soely talking about gaming performance, and that's always back and forth, as far as techs go, AMD builds better hardware outside of their shittier memory bandwidth architecture that is made up with massive core count, and Nvidia has better memory architecture and software engineering to utilize the hardware better for what they do, that's what you get when using 3rd party contractors to write your drivers on AMD's part lol. The main difference is really that AMD is better at multimedia at a hardware level, and a lot of people look for that. I would never build a HTPC with Nvidia cards over AMD, and their performance is so close that the only reason you'd really want Nvidia is for games that support PhysX since AMD does 3D as well now. I mean, if Nvidia builds a really nice card that can trimph over AMD in multi monitor support and multimedia support while using less power and have on par performance at a good price, I'd gladly use them again, but Eyefinity and AMD DxVA kick the shit out of Nvidia and I can't give that up.