Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options and will also focus on budget and midrange cards. AMD has also promised better raytracing performance (compared to their older cards) so I don’t think it will be the new norm if AMD also prices their cards competitively to Intel. The high end cards will be overpriced as it seems like the target audience doesn’t care that they’re paying shitton of money. But budget and midrange options might slip away from Nvidia and get cheaper, especially if the upscaler crutch breaks and devs have to start doing actual optimizations for their games.
moody@lemmings.world 3 days ago
Which means there’s no more competition in the high-end range. AMD was lagging behind Nvidia in terms of pure performance, but the price/performance ratio was better. Now they’ve given up a segment of the market, and consumers lose out in the process.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 3 days ago
the high end crowd showed there’s no price competition, there’s only performance competition and they’re willing to pay whatever to get the latest and greatest. Nvidia isn’t putting a 2k pricetag on the top of the line card because it’s worth that much, they’re putting that pricetag because they know the high end crowd will buy it anyway. The high end crowd has caused this situation.
You call that a loss for the consumers, I’d say it’s a positive. The high end cards make up like 15% (and I’m probably being generous here) of the market. AMD dropping the high and focusing on mid-range and budget cards which is much more beneficial for most users. Budget and mid-range cards make up the majority of the PC users. If the mid-range and budget cards are affordable that’s much more worthwhile to most people than having high end cards “affordable”.
moody@lemmings.world 3 days ago
But they’ve been selling mid-range and budget GPUs all this time. They’re not adding to the existing competition there, because they already have a share of that market. What they’re doing is pulling out of a segment where there was (a bit of) competition, leaving a monopoly behind. If they do that, we can only hope that Intel puts out high-end GPUs to compete in that market, otherwise it’s Nvidia or nothing.
Nvidia already had the biggest share of the high-end market, but now they’re the only player.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 3 days ago
It’s already Nvidia or nothing. There’s no point fighting with Nvidia in the high end corner because unless you can beat Nvidia in performance there’s no winning with the high end cards. People who buy high end cards don’t care about a slightly worse and slightly cheaper card because they’ve already chosen to pay premium price for premium product. They want the best performance, not the best bang for the buck. The people who want the most bang for the buck at the high end are a minority of a minority.
But on the other hand, by dropping high end cards AMD can focus more on making their budget and mid-range cards better instead of diverting some of their focus on the high end cards that won’t sell anyway. It increases competition in the budget and mid-range section and mid-range absolutely needs stronger competition from AMD because Nvidia is slowly killing mid-range cards as well.