Comment by blihp
22 days ago
The tweet thread makes it clear: AMD has consistently based future strategy on the past which is why they were so ill-prepared for every major non-PC trend this century in CPUs until Ryzen. (which was basically catching up + much better value than Intel) This also translates to their GPUs where they seem to have absolutely no consumer GPU vision beyond 'we want some of what nVidia's getting.' Their current strategy seems to be weaker hardware + weak compute drivers + a little cheaper than nVidia = success.
I wonder if the lack of a "consumer GPU vision" is sort of a forced conclusion.
With ~15% of the market, it's going to be very difficult to pull the market in a direction you want, so you're forced to say "I can offer you what nVidia does, but cheaper"
AMD pulls the market with near 100% of consoles.
PC vs console is weird. They are different markets but you'd think the x86 based PS5 would have more pull these days.
The PC gaming market doesn't seem to track that well with the console market, though. I was always surprised by this-- you'd think that all the optimization skills and tricks they learned to get the most out of console APUs would result in a lot of ports being optimized by default for Radeon cards.
I suspect the problem the PC gaming market is very halo-product steered: Intel's product credibility is still buttressed by whatever 700-watt-from-the-wall 16900WTFBBQ they can showcase for benchmarks, and Radeons winning at various price/performance tiers means nothing when they don't have a 4090 killer.
I was also surprised how effectively ray-tracing was sold to the market, considering plenty of games still don't use it, and those that do take a big performance hit for it. The RTX2xxx cards were sort of turkeys, but I suspect it now provides an excellent FOMO/FUD scenario for newer cards-- that 7900XT might not ray-trace as well as a 4080.
Ryzen wasn't "catching up". Ryzen was literally inventing the future. It was stubbornly insisting on shipping on chiplets on a fabric at a time where intel and nvidia were both insistent on monolithic as the right choice.
The GPUs aren't playing catch up either, They're the shared memory APU systems. widely celebrated as novel on the current Apple silicon and shipping in configuration since the playstation 4.