You are free to ignore it, Maybe I should have chosen another title though...
Well not entirely. Sure Nvidia has the most powerful GPU (Titan X), although I wouldn't say "if you don't have much money...buy AMD", because there is a difference between not having much money and not wanting to spend 1300$ on a GPU. If you were talking about the 1070 and 1080 series it should be mentioned that AMD's Fury is in DX12 benchmarks only 10% slower, so it really comes down to personal preference which card you would like to pick. (Afaik the 10x0 is more expenise, while better temperature/power consumption wise, and the Fury line is cheaper, but gets hotter and consumes more power).
Well yeah, AMD's marketing is atrocious that's true :-D I think they simply lack the money for it.
Best way to choose is when you accidentally cut your self check your blood color. If red buy AMD If green buy Nvidea and leave our planet:)
Seriously todays stuff is so cheap that you can build 2 full 1080 gaming machines for under a grand. One of each. I do like Nvidia for Linux ease of install.
Yeah that's true, the reason I pointed it out though, is that DX12 and Vulkan are the future (so to speak) and DX11 is the past. But generally speaking you are right, the overall performance (and personal preferences like: Bioware fan -> frostbite; do you want filters? ...) is most important.
@anon85933304 call me crazy, but I don't like cutting myself :-( Seriously though, todays stuff is cheap again (rx480/1060) and longer viable then the GPUs 10y ago.
Kat, you're right that all of these products were in some way 'bad' and that's a valid criticism. However with the exception of the Shield and Tegra, all the other products were (afaik) very successful for nvidia. Somebody already mentioned that the 970 was/is nvidia's most sold GPU. The class action lawsuit/bad PR costs might have been high but they probably weren't even high enough to significantly touch the profits the 970 must have made them. G-Sync might not have taken over the monitor world but it's holding out a nice little niche and forcing G-Sync monitor owners to buy more GTX cards. Gameworks is a horrible artifact of the GPU wars but boy does it work. General consumers are simply not aware/responsible enough and keep pre-ordering/buying 'subprime' games like AC:Unity. That's bad for people who like working games but it doesn't really hurt nvidia. Gameworks allows them to ensure that their own GPUs have inherent advantages in many titles, gives them closer ties to developers and allows them to plaster their logo onto the games.
Nvidia might not be a 'nice' company but they sure seem to know how to make profit.
wasn't there a time when bit mining really took off and basically all videocards were flying off the shelf and prices were super inflated especially for amd cards because their architecture lended itself towards bit mining better? doesn't he completely ignore that time, which was after the period he started.
amd profit is affected mainly because of how many people they hire, and for their wages. AMD cards are mainly used for computing, rendering in opencl etc. Rather than gaming on steam.
Generally I go with whoever is trying the hardest NOT to be a douche-bag. Atm that is AMD as they are trying to open-source stuff and actually make progress with their drivers under Linux even thought there still behind NVIDIA (with Linux driver usability 'on average').
I run two 980Ti atm but the SLI feature doesn't blow me away to be honest and simply doesn't work for me under Linux (neither did crossfire), the other issue is NVIDIA hasn't been trying to improve drivers that hard, they just release a fix here and there but many long term bugs remain and are ignored. Plus NVIDIA is doing some ANNOYING things with their telemetry services and software they are shoving in their drivers!
Do we need every bit of hardware in our system installing telemetry services that ultimately hog bandwidth and cpu cycles for their own purposes? NO THANKS
Anyway my intel X99 mobo is on the fritz (crashes for 1st bootup of day) which means I gotta RMA it very soon or loose it, so what I will do is get a Zen system and RMA this intel mobo and sell the CPU off (and mobo after 2 months in RMA).
AMD hires 8.5k people, most of them are seniors and get paid over 150+k/year. (too many people, they had around ~20k) They did reduce it recently by significant amount by sharing workforce with Fujitsu, Samsung, and few others that i cannot recall at this moment.
They are also expanded to so many little businesses that its hard to follow them (they expanded too fast after acquisition of ATi.) - and they do not announce when acquisition/alliance happens like some seniors from AMD become "owners" of other companies. They also have shadow deals with Koreans, Intel and IBM.
Mining, there's still plenty of people doing GPU mining, as they are used to x86 computer gpu mining. Others have moved to dedicated mining hardware - which is not like our x86 architecture.
I mean all of us remember how it was with 290x gpu's... for almost its whole time in retail; they were being bought on massive scale - and costed around $800 for first 4-5months. Because some miners orders were in thousands. Normal customer was hurt because of it - but it got better with coming of 300 series and fury where amd forced retailers to sell at specific price ranges. (very similar thing happened just after release of rx480's amd sold its whole stock in world in first day, 2nd batch in couple days)
AMD is loosing a lot of money and question is where it goes; and for what reason... amd sells far more hardware than intel or nvidia alone. (consoles, apple, professional usage, embedded systems, mining markets etc) The only real possibility is that they are hiding actual profits to pay no taxes.
Sorry I don't think this is the case mate, AMD isn't going to butcher its own shares and go near bankruptcy to hide offshore money somewhere and dodge tax. You don't do that when the former is happening!
AMD has probably been spending allot more than you think getting Zen/Vega/HBM2 happening! Keep in mind they have been selling chips and bits to other companies practically AT COST prices just to remain competitive and obtain those partnerships!
'at cost prices' i don't think you know what they are... but 1 cpu/gpu to make (already at manufacturing process - when they make thousands of them) cost them around 15-20$ with 14nm; they are certainly not selling them at those prices.
Well then you should research a bit about the whole XBOX360 AMD and PS4 (I think) price problems with AMD. They were making a profit but definitely were not milking it.
I did research, question is where did amd spilled all the milk they've gained from xbox360, xbone, ps4, all Hawaii chips sold for around $800 by miners (those were being bought in hundreds), all those big screens on buildings in big cities..., not to mentioning licensing fees they've gotten from companies like qualcom, intel, and samsung.
Just by calculating amount of cash they should have after paying for production costs they should be still around $50 plus from every xbone, ps4 apu they sold. (they sold their apu for ~$120/unit for ps4 -- they did mark it out somewhere in past) their income simply didn't reflect it... Their income reports reflected marginal clean profit of 80mil (or something around that) when ps4 and xbone came out. Just by counting amount of sold consoles the numbers didn't add up then and now.
I also doubt that AMD is hiding money, there are easier and more legal methods do to just that. Although I have to admint that I've never directly calculated CPU/GPU sales and compared them with their quarterly reports. That being said, if it were that obvious, AMD would already be in trouble.
You would also need to look at the depreciation of the cards as well when ever they have a new line the old line usually sells cheaper yet they still put in developer time to improve the older drivers.
