(inspired by rsilverblood)
I felt like I had to write this because in my opinion, AMD and Nividia are in a matter of war right now and they are the only ones that are in this war *, no extra forces to back themselves up. They have already finished setting the stages of and claimed their home land, and (was) going start the first major battle, UNTIL... you guessed it, litecoins.
I'll try to explain as much as possible, from the start. As far as my knowledge goes, Nvidia has been ahead of AMD in many ways, wether it be money, architecture, etc. But about a year ago, AMD was able to start their genius plan, mantle. It mostly likely started when AMD was able to get their apu into all 3 of the consoles. This allowed them to gain a large amount of "land" as previously mentioned. Then all of this was only building up to their developer summit, in which mantle was announced, a api that seemed too good to be true. Sadly after, it turned out it wasn't going to be nearly as exciting, since mantle was able to dig that deep into the consoles, it meant than ports aren't expected to be nearly that big of a proformance increase. I think AMD most likely had the biggest chance to literally crush Nvidia, and that was what it seemed like in the early days of the mantle announcement. I guess you could say that AND aroused their own fire without the help of Nvidia. But the thing is, I think never before were pc and console so close and similar, much less all controlled by a single manufacturer to decide. The console takes up a large amount of gaming "land", and at least half of gamers use consoles. But AMD messed up with mantle, which leads to Nvidia' s counterattack, SFF PC.
I, for one, never expected nvidia to try and win such a small piece of "land". I was sure that they were confident with just ruling the regular pc industry. But I guess with that big of an investment, they would be better off digging into new lands. They are really serious about this. This is most likely their main line of defense/attack. They teamed up with Steam so that steam os was created to go against consoles, and making drivers for Linux too. And even a small hint for everyone: the holiday bundles? They all have controller support. All 3 of them. That can't be a coincidence, right? They are really dead serious on their little small form factor pc, and they just won't settle with the pc gaming industry, they want ALL of the gaming industry.
litecoins are also an important role right now in the AMD industry, since many of you must have noticed that stores are all selling out of AMD cards since they do so well mining the coins and ACTUALLY breaking even and getting more money than the electric bill. This is causing the AMD cards to have their prices go flying up and thus, the entire graphics card industry is ripping people off for their money. Nvidia, whom just lowered their retail prices for all mid to high end cards, is most likely very delighted that they can still make so much money from AMD's success. It's a win win situation for AMD and Nvidia, but a lose lose situation for us consumers. How does it affect this comparison you might ask? Well, this is a matter of subject mainly because it I felt that for now, litecoins are causing crazy prices for all the graphics cards, therefore may price per proformance charts might go bonkers for some people, and therefore think that (x) company has a better value card than that of (y) company, which is as for now, not true.
* Intel was left out of this conversation because I feel that even though they did start to make better integrated graphics, it's going to take a while before they(and any integrated graphics, for that matter) can come close into the level even side by side to consoles. Sorry intel, maybe in ten years though!
And that concludes this post.