Competition - Nvidia vs. AMD

I don't think its that AMD refuses to compete. They just do not have the money to keep up with Nvidia.

AMD has been making a loss for the past few years and their revenues are 1/5th of Nvidia's. They simply do not have the capital needed to do RnD to the extent that Nvidia can. Which sucks because without that competition Nvidia can really do whatever they want and people have the choice of either putting up with their crap or choosing a less capable card.

It's kindoff like a chicken and the egg story. In order for AMD to make more money they have to catch up to Nvidia in terms of performance. In order to catch up to Nvidia they need to spend more on RnD. In order to spend more on RnD they need to make more money...and we're back to the beginning again.

Nvidia can outspend them, outresearch them, outmarket them any day of the week.

 

I've discussed this at length before. AMD made bad decisions. They stuck with GCN until now, they're being slow and padding benches with Zen CPUs, they willingly gutted by design their new entry-level gaming card to keep up appearances. They're in a bad position, but they're not saints, and they're not worth all the allowances people are giving them. I'm not saying that I won't give them a mile (far less an inch), but they're not getting the 10 miles they seem to want.

There's a lot AMD could've did differently, even since back in 2012 when they were working on Hawaii and Tonga and realized GCN's limits. I need to start blaming them for most of their shortcomings, both on the hardware side and on their driver side. They're cleaning up much of the issues like frame pacing etc with their drivers, but the underlying problem which is their performance and tunability is still in a rather bad position, and they're making absolutely no visible effort to fix this. And don't get me started on the awful position of their Crossfire technology (far less their stupid presentation showing badly-scaling crossfire to compete with a 1080).

 

Oh no I agree that AMD have made some pretty bad decisions over the years, they went from being a dominant competitor to being relegated to the middle / bottom tiers. But those very decisions have put them in the spot they are in today and that's not the point of my post. They lost a huge amount of marketshare over the years and now they're in a position that in order to compete with Nvidia would bankrupt them in an instant. They no longer have the money left to do so.

They've made a loss for the past few quarters and their revenue is 20% of Nvidias. Any amount of money they put into RnD will be outspent by Nvidia and unless AMD gets some super genius scientist working for them or some billionaire graciously donates billions to them, they will most likely never be able to catch up.

The only thing Nvidia and even Intel have to do keep being just "good enough". As long as their chips are better than AMDs, they can shove whatever **** they want down people's throats and they will have no choice but to stick with them.

I mean AMD used to have some god awful drivers but over the years they have made improvements. Nvidia used to be great and then around Vista / 7 their drivers turned to absolute trash. I have never had more BSODs in my life than I had with Nvidia's garbage ass drivers. They just simply stopped giving a **** and then people complained and their driver quality improved and then they started getting rid of options...knowing full well that people aren't going to put their money where their mouth is.

Even if AMD wants to compete they no longer have the money to do so. That's the real issue at hand and that's why you're seeing Intel and Nvidia getting away with w/e they want to get away with.

 

AMD has the money to compete. What AMD is doing is funneling that money into tech that won't be used for a long time.

They're pushing for DX12/Vulkan because it kills the CPU overhead issue on their drivers, granting their GPUs the near-proper performance they SHOULD have in DX11/OGL titles. nVidia LOSES performance in DX12 because they removed as much DX11 overhead as possible years ago, and since all DX12/Vulkan games on the market use driver-side optimizations because it costs too much time/money/effort for devs to bake in optimizations like they would into a console game, immature DX12/Vulkan drivers vs mature DX11 drivers without CPU overhead means.... *drum roll* better DX11 performance! Yay! AMD's cards on the other hand, with immature DX12/Vulkan drivers, get upwards of 30% boosts (that they should have when in DX11 and OGL in the first place). If they put R&D into this facet of their drivers, all of their cards would be creaming their counterparts in pretty much all non-heavily-tessellated titles. If current AMD cards trade blows with a competing nVidia card and they one day ran 30% faster... you know what would happen.

Next, they stuck with GCN. They were working on Hawaii and Tonga and knew what GCN would end up as. They continued work on Fiji, which I don't blame them for, but then they pushed GCN all the way to polaris, which they were most certainly at least planning around Hawaii's time... they should have been planning to discard GCN. And since they didn't, it's costing them victories because they basically did what nVidia did with Pascal... shrink it down on a new node, slightly tweak it, run with the efficiency boost gained from nm process shrinkage. They didn't make it overly hot like Pascal is, sure, but it's the same deal mostly.

They refuse to make Crossfire work well. I understand much of the issue is with developers not using AFR-friendly rendering techniques for literally no reason whatsoever, but Crossfire still doesn't work in windowed modes and there is no way to edit the bits or force profiles like you can with nVidia Profile Inspector. They don't throw out profiles fast enough or for enough games. When Advanced Warfare launched I simply forced AFR1 and it was good to go. When BO3 launched I forced AFR2 and it was good to go for the most part. When Overwatch was in the release candidate stage before launch I forced AFR2 and I was good to go. I cannot do that with AMD. I used the Daylight SLI profile for Lawbreakers and encountered no real issues beyond the fact that the game is really unoptimized. I can't even do that with NCP, I need Profile Inspector. It's what makes SLI tolerable today. Multi-GPU on AMD is dead as Dumbledore and they aren't doing anything about it, but have the gall to push it as an actual alternative to a single card offering from nVidia.

The ENTIRE RX 480 fiasco with burning out peoples' mobos I rate almost as bad as the 970 fiasco (note: I tell everybody that is willing to listen to avoid those cards like the plague). In my eyes, AMD is no better than nVidia for the bullcrap they tried to pull here. I'm glad they lost PCI/e-sig qualification on that card so they learn a bloody lesson. At least in this case I can recommend 8-pin connector versions of the card to people, but even then it's a long shot from telling people to grab a 1060 if they find a good one for $260 or so, and you can see the reasons above.

They're pushing VCE on their cards higher and higher with each new card gen... but only for H.265 encoding. You know, the format not supported by anything yet? H.264 still is horrible, doesn't even match Kepler in performance, and is an absolute pain in the shoulder to set up, especially with 3rd party programs like OBS that can use it as an encoder.

Raptr.

As a friend of mine put it, AMD is basically running the lifeline card right now. And as I put it earlier, they're targeting segments of the desktop market that nVidia is NOT targeting. And nothing else. I.E. they're not bothering to compete.

What they could do is stop pushing and R&D-ing tech that will only be relevant when their current cards are obsolete. It's nice to have older hardware that uhh "gets benefits" or "works" with newer technologies, but honestly your card stops being relevant beyond after about 4 years from its creation (not when you buy it). So none of what they're doing right now is going to benefit the majority of people who will, after 3-4 years, actually get an upgrade (even if it's to a new midranged/entry-level card). I say it for games and I'll say it for AMD. They need to stop trying to add new features before fixing old bugs. If your game (drivers/cards) doesn't work properly, then adding new features doesn't fix it. Fix it then work on new things. I'm not telling them not to produce/R&D new cards, but their drivers and technologies that work with current tech are sorely lacking.

So, essentially, YES. They have enough money to compete. What they're doing is throwing it in places it makes no sense to be thrown, and then they're trying to make money by non-competition. And we have the sorry state of their company right now.

 

Where exactly do you get the idea that AMD has the money to compete with Nvidia lol? Have you seen their financial statements?

1. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs (and then APUs for things like consoles). Nvidia makes only GPUs with the occasional OpenCL computing platform which is largely based on their GPU tech.
2. AMDs revenue in 2015 was just over $4 billion. Compared to Nvidia's $5 billion. AMD made, and has been making a loss, last year. Nvidia has been making a profit year after year.

Now lets look specifically at RnD.

In 2015 AMD spent $947 million on RnD of which $185 million went to GlobalFoundries for wafer development. That means the total amount AMD spent on chip RnD was $762 million split between their CPU/APU and GPU divisions (plus any other technologies like VCE but I suspect this is a tiny fraction of the total RnD budget). Nvidia spent $1.4 billion on RnD the vast majority of which went to it's only division...GPUs.

Next lets look at cash on hand / short term investments. Basically how much money a company has in liquid assets they can quickly pull from if they needed.

AMD as of June 2016: $957 million
Nvidia as of April 2016: $4.8 billion

Nvidia can outspend them in any category they want to and they will always win out.

If AMD dedicated all their resources to the high end market, which is what they'd need to do to compete with Nvidia's pascal architecture, they would be bankrupt in a year. It's simply not a market they can compete in without having the cash needed to do so.

From a financial point of view it makes far more sense for AMD to focus on the low/mid end of the PC market as well as the console market where they essentially have an entire monopoly. Their only real hope of capturing the high end market now is if Nvidia ****s up big time and releases an absolutely garbage chip.

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Also I thought the 480 power fiasco was because of people using low/mid end motherboards that didn't meet the specifications required by the card? Which in a way is quite ironic because AMD is mainly used in budget builds...in which the user will most likely have a low end motherboard and not a high end one......

 

I swear. I'm about to be done with everybody even beginning to defend AMD. All of you have some serious sense of ignorance toward when they do stupid things.

AMD has been making a loss for quite some time. Sure. Bleeding cash like a stuck pig. When did I state they should have known to work on a new architecture? As far back as 2013. It's now 2016. You're talking about R&D and profits since LAST YEAR. I'm saying they built straight up to this crap. I'm saying they should have put more R&D into drivers when they realized Mantle was dead and pushed it into Vulkan. I'm saying they should fix their OpenGL drivers. I'm saying they should improve their h.264 encoding before adding and improving h.265 encoding to the cards. I'm saying they should have improved their crossfire tech. I'm saying they should give us a tool that accesses driver profiles for games like NVPI. I'm saying they should be doing things that they're not doing right now, and stop trying to make appearances and pander to the gimmicks. Which is what they're doing.

Nothing, NOTHING, of what you have just said, means they could not have put their R&D into what I said they should have been doing. What you're saying right now is that they don't have as much to shove into GPUs as nVidia does, and I completely agree... but it doesn't mean they can neglect things, or make screw-ups like the RX 480, or even wait so blasted long before launching cards. Look how long it took for Polaris to hit the market. Over an entire YEAR ago they had Polaris demoing on the low end. They launched Polaris *AFTER* nVidia RUSHED out Pascal. Why? And then the drivers were STILL broken on launch, and crossfire scaling on Polaris was broken too, unlike their previous cards which are known for up to 101% scaling in multi-GPU.

AMD has been on a long road to get where they are right now. And now that all their bad decisions are screwing them over, they're playing the lifeline card. "Well we just have to survive, so we won't compete... we'll aim where they're not aiming and turn a profit". And they did make a profit a short while ago, according to someone who had stocks in them that I spoke with. But that doesn't mean their products are any better to choose.

I recommended AMD in Maxwell's time, because nVidia was ridiculous. The GTX 960 was the same price as a R9 380, and a lot weaker even with the broken DX11 performance of the AMD card (remember, add 30% to most any GCN card for what it SHOULD be doing in DX11... just take any benchmark. Any one. Add 30% fps. There you go). The GTX 970 was a broken anti-consumer farce so I recommended the R9 390 instead. But mark my words, if that card was sold as a 224-bit, 3.5GB vRAM card, I would never tell people to buy a R9 390 for any reason other than "if you want lots of vRAM". The 980 was $550, and priced well beyond the R9 390X, while being give or take similarly strong, so it got no recommendations unless it could be found cheap. And the R9 Fury was the same price as the 980, so why wouldn't people buy that? The 980Ti and the Fury X being the same price invited superclocked 980Tis to take the recommendation instead. The 750Ti being cool, quiet, power-sipping and having generally better drivers than the competing card (I think it was a 370X?) is what got my recommendation despite the competition being a little stronger out of the box. Every other Maxwell card simply had no place, either because of pricing issues or being unbalanced/broken like the 960/970.

Now? What do we have. nVidia brought Pascal. AMD has no counter. Is focusing on cards lower end than the lowest end Pascal. Is not even going to have anything until, according to their projections, 1st half 2017. That means by the time nVidia is getting ready to dust off Pascal and cram Volta down our throats, they'll JUST be preparing to counter Pascal's midranged section. If they're using GCN for Vega (which I am almost certain they are), they won't even hit close to the Titan X Pascal performance either. I'm tired of waiting for them to make some good decisions. They started hot and heavy with their Crimson drivers, and then fell off the face of the earth about it.

 

I'm not arguing with anything you said, but want to point out the problems started long before that. Specifically, the CEO testing on his laurels with phenom, not doing **** to compete sense, then, after reduced revenues, purchasing Radeon and stretching their budget even thinner. Even at this point, they needed to get the R&D going in the right direction, and did for long long term production, but...

So, Su is trying to pull shelved tech off the shelves and get it to market, specifically focusing solely on having enough cash to pay the debt obligations coming due in 2018, because otherwise the company is bankrupt. This means taking certain low competition segments, expanding the high margin special design ICs such as APUs for consoles, and to recapture part of the server segment, excluding the mission critical and a couple other areas. Now we may not like that, but the real question is if they tried to compete, would they win enough to pay this debt? Safe and survive for future fights usually is better than going down swinging...

Once again, this is not disagreeing with anything you said, but taking a different look and adding more info...

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

 

Please show me where I'm defending AMD. I have never owned a single AMD chip in my entire life.

You just can't seem to understand simple financials even though I've given you proof of it several times. If AMD focused all their RnD budget on competing with Nvidias high end cards they would be bankrupt and non existent right now. They simply do not have the money to do so.

Their RnD budget for ALL their divisions is half that of Nvidia's single division. HALF. That's what they have to work with.

Everyone agrees, me included, that AMD have made stupid decisions and led to where they are today. I literally even said that in my previous post:

You just seem to think AMD should pull money out their ass and spend it all on beating Nvidia, which is never going to happen in the high end. They made their choices and now they're too far into a whole to dig themselves out of without serious capital injection.

AMDs only hope for survival nowadays is the low / mid end sector and consoles. That's it and focusing towards the future. They cannot compete with Nvidia (or Intel for that matter) today.

Financials are what determine what a company is going to do in the future, not fairy tales and wishful thinking. They simply do not have the money to compete with Nvidia and that is a god damn fact. That's my entire post, so stop arguing about how they should be spending their money researching X instead of Y when they don't have the money to research anything compared.

Intels RnD budget is $13 billion. Granted a lot of that money is spent on semiconductor research since they fab their own chips.
Nvidias RnD budget is $1.4 billion.
AMDs RnD budget is $700 million.

Well maybe your friend needs to go learn how to read a financial statement then.

2011: Profit of $495 million
2012: Loss of $1.18 billion
2013: Loss of $83 million
2014: Loss of $403 million
2015: Loss of $660 million

The last time they made a profit was 5 years ago not "a short while ago".

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So once again, it doesn't matter what AMD did in the past to put them in the situation they are in today. AS OF TODAY they do not have the money or the budget to do anything but compete on the low/mid end sectors. THAT'S IT.

It's like you seem to think that this is me defending AMD. It's not, its just what the facts are. If they spent all the money right now on competing with Pascal they will not exist this time next year. They have a lot of debt they need to pay back, they have a lot of obligations to GF that they have to pay for yearly, and they have to find some way to keep paying their staff during that time.

They made mistakes in the past, a lot of them, and they blew through whatever money they had left. Now their options are forget about the high end market and stick to budget builds and hope to have some new/different tech that interests people, or die out in a year. That's all they have left.

Well that and the console market. I'm willing to bet a huge amount of their RnD budget goes to their APUs specifically for that reason. They need to hold on to their monopoly in that sector, without it they have nothing left.

 

I have to chuckle a little about how the conversation is going here in the last few pages.

AMD should have done something over a decade ago, let alone 2011, last year or 'Zen' for 2017.

At their peak (when Intel was the performance underdog (for a very long time), at least for gamers) AMD wasn't an option for my workloads (their processors simply couldn't run the software I relied on then - so much for 'x86 compatible'). Since then? I don't recommend them to school age kids to run a word processor on.

Why? Not because I want them to disappear from the tech/cpu industry altogether. A far simpler reason: they didn't (and still don't) deserve my money, nor my clients either.

Rewarding a company that is failing is a great way to fail yourself, imo.

A point about financial statements are in order too. Profits/Losses in a single year or even the majority of a decade do not dictate what a company should do with their assets or how they 'should' have set their goals.

When Intel pulled the rug out from their cpu division in 2006 with Core and then Core Duo chips and NVidia eventually did the same to their gpu acquisitions - that was the time to act.

Zen should/better be something great for AMD, but they still have a long way to catch up to anyone, let alone be king of the hill again.

In the tech sector AMD is in, if their goals don't mirror their competitors (and that 'demands' huge RnD investments...), they soon won't be one themselves to anyone else.

AMD being 'different' was great in the wild heady days of processor/gpu development. Today, if they keep beating that drum they will be the only ones whose heads it will be echoing in.

 

Pretty much. The hole they're in now is pretty difficult, if not straight up impossible, for them to climb out of. They need a miracle, if even that.

Well my point about financials was never about what they should do with the money just that because of their past decisions they've put themselves in a financial position that is unsustainable at best. They barely make enough money to cover their RnD budget, let alone everything else and their cash on hand is so low that if they keep making the losses they do they're going to be gone.

Should they have set their goals differently? Sure nobody is arguing that but at this point of time right now they simply cannot afford to set a goal to compete with high-end Nvidia chips. That ship has sailed a long time ago and most likely will never return to shore.

I mean here's a quote directly from their financial statements:

MAYBE if Nvidia does something monumentally stupid like Intel did with the Pentium 4 chips they may get a chance but whether or not they pounce on it is up to them.

And that's the sad bit. I do not want them to disappear because if they do Intel and Nvidia are only going to become much much worse once they're the only competitor with no one else in sight. But at the same time I haven't been able to justify buying any of their products for a long long time now. There's just nothing that makes them competitive...

Hell even with pure budget builds I'd rather spend a little bit more and just go with Intel / Nvidia over AMD...

 

Duh....Arguing and proving again , While the consumers are ultimate loosers against monopoly, Such a pity.

Not a single OEM is advertising AMD, Maybe crApple might get away with hot solder onto the iSheep deep wallets....

 

As a point: it's not a hole entirely of their own making. Remember the netbook craze? Of course you don't because it never happened. It didn't happen because iPad and imitators stomped Bobcat to the curb. What should have been a cash cow for AMD became a dud and then the entire PC market crashed.

I don't think AMD need a miracle to get out of the hole. What they need are solid products which build consumer confidence in AMD. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are good examples of doing exactly this. RX 480's launch... perhaps not so much although a driver update did address the power problem and in fact managed to improve performance a little bit. It's probably the best GPU in its price class ever and I expect to see it show up in a lot of budget BYO guides.

 

I really wish there's another NP6110 with 6820HK and 1060...

 

DPC latency, non-working DP, top-of-the-line VR GPU that can't VR... just to name a few that I haven't seen you comment on recently. There are probably more.

You know, someone has to push that envelope, nGREEDIA is obviously not the one to do so. Mantle was a pretty good solution. They had a problem - huge overhead, instead of throwing people and money on the problem (which they don't have at quantities as the competitors do), they just took a different approach and it's one that can benefit the competitors as well. I've said that, but you sound like a broken record, so can I. They can definitely improve DX11 performance right about now if they focus on it, but why throwing money on legacy support? Even saying this, AMDs DO GET better performance as the time goes, unlike the others. Also Mantle/Vulcan means (eventually) better support under Linux, so we can dual-boot that SteamOS hopefully soon enough and we can all ditch W10. So how investing into future technologies is a waste? Not to mention HBM, async compute... Yeah, bunch of useless stuff, right? Oh and the competition wont benefit from them in any way, right?

Let's chuckle together, shall we? At their peak, they got about equal market share with grIntel, so at no point in history grIntel was anywhere close to the situation AMD is into. Oh and should I mention the bribing settlement? I'm pretty certain that the amount was nowhere near enough to fix the damage done and probably even AMD doesn't know the exact losses. You tell me how that affects R&D. Forget about chuckling, that's outright laughable, right? There's also this little thing that if you happen to come across an AMD system nowadays it's most likely crippled - either cooling, or single RAM, where it's pretty well known that APUs greatly benefit from dual-channel RAM.

That last sentence is very "unbiased", I must admit. These same school kids not only could've run their spreadsheets, but also play a game, which can't be said about grIntel (if we are going to exaggerate, I'm right back at you).

No one gave you a hand in a hard time? I feel sorry for you. You must have had a terrible child/adulthood. And before you ask how this is related - I look at them as a friend with shared vision for the world/future. They have flaws as quite a few of you are happy to point out, but I can live with that. After all nobody's perfect and that's what I'm trying to say in most of my posts. If you happened to be (perfect), you wouldn't have bought anything at all, since everything's flawed. Really. So, what that tells about you?

That rug pulling might have a lot more to do with the settlement I mentioned than anything else. As for nGREEDIA, last year there were pretty much no AMD options, I don't see how this year would be different to be honest. OEMs have a lot to do with that too.

Most likely Zen wont be clocked as high, but the IPC is really close, so for most users it would be perfect. Why the "long way" if they can deliver about the same IPC at cheaper price point? Also we don't know about power consumption. So I think that they are not that far-off at catching-up and the HillKing is not a matter that affects enough people to be worth the investment right now. Hopefully at later point, as the process matures, they'll release something about that segment as well. After all Zen is supposed to scale up and down.

Yeah, x64 happened out of thin air, right? Or multi-core? BTW how is IA64 doing?

It's just that not many people are aware what are the inner workings. For all they know it's "Sony" or "Microsoft". Just like if you ask an iPhone/iPad owner what CPU/GPU it has, (s)he would proudly say Apple's own A4/5/X/6/X/7/8/X/9/X etc, without knowing that it's ARM and ImaginationTechnologies PowerVR underneath.

 

And I'm STILL waiting for your reply about Deus Ex Mankind Divided being OpenGPU gimped garbage for optimization. Your last post in there was "researching". I want to see you rip into such a game just like you rip into all the gameworks titles and everything in that vein that nVidia does. Go on. I'm waiting. 980M SLI hitting under 40fps at 1080p, 980Ti cards performing like RX 480 cards without either vendor touching DX12.

 

I don't believe that's an entirely accurate assertion (Joe or Jane Average would say "what's a CPU-slash-GPU?"). Regardless, confidence and brand recognition are not necessarily correlated. Consumer confidence in PS4 means consumer confidence in Jaguar and AMD even if consumers at large don't know AMD from XJ.

 

It helps AMD in sales, but I don't see how it would help them as a brand recognition. For all I know there are still people that think that AMD CPUs would catch fire. Not that the FX9590 was far off at least they paired it with AIO and I think that it's the only off-the-shelve-5GHz-CPU. Then people go ahead and say that AMD doesn't compete, LOL. It takes some balls to put such thing on the market.

Is this how you respond? I'll quote yourself (not exact quote, but I can find it if you want): "This is a matter of a different topic". This game came out literary yesterday and the issues I pointed, especially the DPC latency are there for a while. As I said before - you nit-pick about every single AMD mishap, but miss quite a handful of the nGREEDIA ones. And since you wonder, I haven't read much - busy weekend (some of us had better things to do during the weekends than arguing over forums). Whatever, your responses speak volumes and you would get my take on the matter (DE: MD) and that most likely would be my last response to any of your posts. I could've wrote you a quick theory right then and there, but I wanted to read some more before drawing any conclusions. I tend to like to read some before jumping the gun. I see zero point in wasting my keyboard's keystrokes trying to reason with you.

 

No, it really isn't. This is a thread about MXM upgrades. It has pascal in the name but AMD has been a large part of the discussion with respect to MXM.

The other thread was a thread about MOBILE POLARIS, where you were mad that I "was bashing AMD and not nVidia" to which I said "because this is about AMD, and I bash them in other threads", which you seem to be completely unable to ever find, amazingly enough.

You said

but then

How'd you find all these "recent" things about nVidia yet not have time to check anything up about something you told me "researching" on early Friday morning? Surely, by your own words,

you clearly would have gone and read and done a lot of research before pointing out all those above problems, yes? But you... didn't do much this weekend? When did you do it? I didn't see anything last week during the week about any of this in the P870DM2/3 thread, or had anybody else who I regularly speak with that keeps up with these things tell me about it, so it has to be pretty new.

You, plainly to everybody on this whole forum with some sense, have such a hatred for nVidia that you're instantly willing to find more ways to call them out on crap and blame them for things, and getting you to say a single word edgewise about AMD is a feat I think even Chuck Norris would find difficult.

On the other hand, I've spent plenty of time calling out nVidia's pricing, vBIOS crap, Pascal's ridiculous heat, calling the GTX 1080 Founder's edition the "Scammer's edition" WITHOUT FAIL anywhere on the internet and in speech, putting the 1060 on blast for not surpassing a GTX 980 while claiming it does, bashing them for their Pascal launch livestream claiming a single 1080 beat 980 SLI (which it only does in VR), telling everybody with half an ear never to buy the GTX 970 because it is the most anti-consumer garbage excuse for a video card I have ever seen being sold, calling the 980 overpriced and telling people to buy a R9 Fury instead, and various other things. I've spent well over four times the amount of time and effort bashing nVidia than I have AMD, but you have a problem with me because I'm not delusional and I actually bash AMD, and say that I won't support a company that won't fight.

Believe me, the only one

is me.

 

When I first read D2Ultima's post regarding the nature of the Overclocked node shrinked Maxwell I was waiting for results, Damn this Pascal runs super hot !! And nGreedia closing onto the upgrade scene with shooting for DT performance, & BGA guys thinking It's okay. Anyone with basic commonsense would pick up a slightly nerfed 1070 with 3.0b form factor for the 980M current price rather than paying huge sums of cash for 1070 for over $1700 (but the eDP / EC things are whole another level of sh!tstorm for upgrades..damn this nGreedia pos)

I think most with Maxwell are going to skip this Pascal generation, the P775DM2/3 has it's cooling gimped plus the Clevo copper lottery is too much of a hassle to fiddle with and same for 870DM-2/3 (Some users have a damn 90-100C while others have at 60-70C, that delta there I don't understand at all), but to mention the Win7 support is truly the real deal there. MSI on an another note downgraded the GT72VR (No NVMe, no RAID M.2, removed slots, no TB, no MUX, NOTHING but absolute downgrade and want to steer towards the Extraordinarily priced GT73VR) anyways they have this BGA crap while the Barebones do have the LGA, such misery..

I can only feel we are being cornered with every option running out from firmware to hardware, No wonder people are interested towards the HEDT and buy a BGA netbook rather to face the wrath of monopolistic b$, With this worst scene happening from Pascal , I don't expect the situation to be any better with Pascal 2.0 or Volta. No news on VEGA while nGreedia is raking the market with the Scammers edition bullcrap.

Tid-bits - ASUS has this super beast GX800VH with BGA shackles but that machine is truly remarkable feat, looks sick and packs some real design at 5 grand while the GT83VR is also priced at the same level, MSI tax ftw !! Hello Alienware, wake up , Acer Predator lineup is also to be revealed soon gotta see how they perform.

 

But it was made a Polaris one from the poll initiator ( @Prema ) and I thank him for that. What? You missed the memo? Jump back a few pages.

You haven't seen me in the Pascal thread? OK, I'll quote you again - "go search the web". (Very convenient isn't it?)

If you kept the track you not once missed to mention, you'll know that these things I mentioned are a thing for a while now (months), but you are fast to jump on everything AMD that barely made the head-lines. Also two of them were mentioned in the Polaris topic a month ago by me, but that's part of your distortion field, as it seems to be the case.

EDIT: Also unlike me, you tried to derail and attack me once again, while completely missing to answer my question. I at least said that I'll research things, and I'm doing so now.

Yeah, I actually didn't, look above, they are not from yesterday. Not the week before either. Unlike you, I don't feel the urge to argue and point at everything someone did wrong. I understand that things go wrong. You know I actually only cared about upgrades and modding, but seeing how this forum took the road of big AMD bashing machine, I decided to step-in and point just enough mistakes on the other side to make things equal. I still fail to do so, since people still bash AMD for whatever they do wrong (literary), while everyone bites on nGREEDIA only when the knife hits a bone.

Then stop.


If you want to keep topic on track, the whole derail was whether or not AMD deserves place in the upgrade scheme - IT DOES! OEMs got to great lengths to make that "desktop video in a laptop" a thing, so I fail to see why not AMD as well. Not to mention that it was confirmed coming, but this didn't stop you or others from voicing their disgust! How comes people?!! Leave the ones who care to decide whether or not the AMD option is for them. You'll get your part, so what's so wrong about it?! You know what, you DESERVE to pay $2000 for a 1060 ALONE, and some $1500 for the machine it would go into!

 

Choice isn't good for money making. If Nvidia had a competitor then doing the things they have been doing would have been too risky.

They however have rightly judged that there is no one in a position to challenge them and thus have made their move. Consumer choice is not good for profitability.

At this point I simply want there to be an alternative to Nvidia to balance things out. There is no balance in the GPU market anymore and it is harming technological progress, reducing choice and promoting poor quality.

I don't see a single machine built with quality anymore....unless you fork out 5k and still have BGA crap.

 

It needs to be a decent alternative, performance wise AND cost wise (not price to performance, just both individually) - imagine if Apple decided to get into the GPU game (they won't, but just a for instance - they certainly have enough $$$). If Apple or a company like them decided to compete and put up an equally appealing option, I would expect prices to stay sky high.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

triturbo,

You have your points (and I'll concede to them). But you're missing my point.

Reward a failing company and sooner than later you'll fail yourself.

The benefits that the corporation 'AMD' brought to the compute world cannot be ignored, nor am I suggesting that they should be. But the many repeated misfires and mistakes are 'ignored' or glossed over at the individuals own risk.

I have been helped and guided along more than a few times, (for which I am still grateful for), by others far better than me. That is because I don't pretend to hold all knowledge in my head. I still learn. I can still be wrong. And I'm still capable of changing (for the better, when need be).

Sticking up for a friend is noble. However, a company is not a friend, nor will it ever be. Standing on the deck of a floundering ship is not something to be commended. Save yourself and as many others as you can instead.

My opinion will not always be 'right', indefinitely. I just need to be 'right', right now. With the current situation, facts, options and knowledge I have today. If/when any of those change, I am willing to change right along with them (for the right reasons, of course). Blindly giving your allegiance to a faceless entity has gone out of style for a few centuries now.

The situation with AMD isn't that they haven't been helped (again and again). It is that they not only keep chasing the 'wrong' goals, they have also quite a reputation about lying about what those goals (and achievements) are.

With Zen, it seems this will change (it certainly can't continue for them...) and if their products are ever comparable again in all aspects - price, performance, efficiency and compatibility - compared to the future products from Intel, I will be a fool to not test/try/compare them for use in mine and my customers workloads for any future purchases. And no, I am not a fool.

The 'bribing settlement' that keeps getting brought up against Intel is far from that. That is business with the big boys. Intel interpreted the rules one way, a judge didn't. Intel paid the settlement (case closed). Did it cause AMD damage? Yeah; it was meant to. Business isn't in it for the relationships; $$$$$$$$$$ for the investors is the goal (always).

You think I am biased/exaggerating when I (only) recommend (to anyone, even just a 'kid') to buy an Intel based system today? Okay...

The fact is that if I don't recommend the best platform available today, I would not have too many more future people to influence in the very near future. I'm not trying to make 'friends' with my recommendations. I'm not trying to help an underdog (anyone, at any time, can only help themselves... if they truly want to...) - especially not a 'company' that has been labeled as such. I'm giving advice based on facts to people that want the best tool (today and 18 months + from now...) for a task or tasks they need done.

Many think I am brand sensitive. They can't be more wrong.

I am performance sensitive. If a product doesn't perform and perform 'optimally', given the then current options, then I kind of hate it (well, strongly dislike, at least...). Period.

Tomorrow? Next week? Next year? I'll re-evaluate all the options again. And make the same decision (performance). Not 'support the underdog (at mine and my client's expense). Not have imaginary company/business/corporate 'friends'. Not think I am saving the world from a future monopoly at the expense of substandard compute 'experiences', today (hint; the monopoly is effectively already here...).

Once again I'll repeat that I do not want/desire for AMD to disappear. Nor do I forget the contributions they have made to tech, the world and even shared with Intel that we continue to benefit from.

But to continually keep buying the 'throw away' tools instead of investing in the platform that gives you the highest performance for the longest time is not my idea of sanity.

And in my mind? That is why AMD isn't a force to be reckoned with for so long now; they've been told they can still sing when they can't even hold a note any longer (on key or not...). Yeah; I feel that some tough love (i.e. huge sales drops...) would have gone a longer way towards a better AMD today than the 'anything but Intel' mantra that sank a few billion $$ into AMD from their fans pockets...

I truly hope Zen finally marks the end of that squandering of AMD's fans' $$$$, hopes and dreams.

 

Confidence is not recognition. Confidence means consumers are spending money. They're spending money on AMD products even if they don't know they are buying AMD products.

 

The posts in this thread were moved from here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/pascal-mxm-gpu-upgrades.795169/
Into this new thread, and it's being closed because the back-and-forth is a little too strong. Feel free to start a new thread on this topic if you wish.

Charles