Monday, September 9th 2024
AMD Confirms Retreat from the Enthusiast GPU Segment, to Focus on Gaining Market-Share
AMD in an interview with Tom's Hardware, confirmed that its next generation of gaming GPUs based on the RDNA 4 graphics architecture will not target the enthusiast graphics segment. Speaking with Paul Alcorn, AMD's Computing and Graphics Business Group head Jack Huynh, said that with its next generation, AMD will focus on gaining market share in the PC gaming graphics market, which means winning price-performance battles against NVIDIA in key mainstream- and performance segments, similar to what it did with the Radeon RX 5000 series based on the original RDNA graphics architecture, and not get into the enthusiast segment that's low-margin with the kind of die-sizes at play, and move low volumes. AMD currently only holds 12% of the gaming discrete GPU market, something it sorely needs to turn around, given that its graphics IP is contemporary.
On a pointed question on whether AMD will continue to address the enthusiast GPU market, given that allocation for cutting-edge wafers are better spent on data-center GPUs, Huynh replied: "I am looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that's hurting us? It's $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I'm looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us. So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users. Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill]—it hasn't really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been...the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we'll have leadership."Alcorn pressed: "Price point-wise, you have leadership, but you won't go after the flagship market?," to which Huynh replied: "One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can't get the developers. If I tell developers, 'I'm just going for 10 percent of the market share,' they just say, 'Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.' So, I have to show them a plan that says, 'Hey, we can get to 40% market share with this strategy.' Then they say, 'I'm with you now, Jack. Now I'll optimize on AMD.' Once we get that, then we can go after the top."
The exchange seems to confirm that AMD's decision to withdraw from the enthusiast segment is driven mainly by the low volumes it is seeing for the kind of engineering effort and large wafer costs spent building enthusiast-segment GPUs. The company saw great success with its Radeon RX 6800 series and RX 6900 series mainly because the RDNA 2 generation benefited from the GPU-accelerated cryptomining craze, where high-end GPUs were in demand. This demand disappeared by the time AMD rolled out its next-generation Radeon RX 7900 series powered by RDNA 3, and the lack of performance leadership compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 with ray tracing enabled, hurt the company's prospects. News of AMD focusing on the performance segment (and below), aligns with the rumors that with RDNA 4, AMD is making a concerted effort to improving its ray tracing performance, to reduce the performance impact of enabling ray tracing. This, raster performance, and efficiency, could be the company's play in gaining market share.
The grand assumption AMD is making here, is that it has a product problem, and not a distribution problem, and that with a product that strikes the right performance/Watt and performance/price equations, it will gain market-share.
Catch the full interview in the source link below.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
On a pointed question on whether AMD will continue to address the enthusiast GPU market, given that allocation for cutting-edge wafers are better spent on data-center GPUs, Huynh replied: "I am looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that's hurting us? It's $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I'm looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us. So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users. Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill]—it hasn't really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been...the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we'll have leadership."Alcorn pressed: "Price point-wise, you have leadership, but you won't go after the flagship market?," to which Huynh replied: "One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can't get the developers. If I tell developers, 'I'm just going for 10 percent of the market share,' they just say, 'Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.' So, I have to show them a plan that says, 'Hey, we can get to 40% market share with this strategy.' Then they say, 'I'm with you now, Jack. Now I'll optimize on AMD.' Once we get that, then we can go after the top."
The exchange seems to confirm that AMD's decision to withdraw from the enthusiast segment is driven mainly by the low volumes it is seeing for the kind of engineering effort and large wafer costs spent building enthusiast-segment GPUs. The company saw great success with its Radeon RX 6800 series and RX 6900 series mainly because the RDNA 2 generation benefited from the GPU-accelerated cryptomining craze, where high-end GPUs were in demand. This demand disappeared by the time AMD rolled out its next-generation Radeon RX 7900 series powered by RDNA 3, and the lack of performance leadership compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 with ray tracing enabled, hurt the company's prospects. News of AMD focusing on the performance segment (and below), aligns with the rumors that with RDNA 4, AMD is making a concerted effort to improving its ray tracing performance, to reduce the performance impact of enabling ray tracing. This, raster performance, and efficiency, could be the company's play in gaining market share.
The grand assumption AMD is making here, is that it has a product problem, and not a distribution problem, and that with a product that strikes the right performance/Watt and performance/price equations, it will gain market-share.
Catch the full interview in the source link below.
271 Comments on AMD Confirms Retreat from the Enthusiast GPU Segment, to Focus on Gaining Market-Share
I'm glad AMD don't bother with the BS 4090 market, focus on real world and let Nvidiots hype something they will never own anyway.
By not having the crown AMD is losing mind share which is costing them market share. AMD is giving free advertisements to Nvidia's 4090 when showing off their 7800X3D benchmarks. rinse repeat Blackwell 5090/9800x3d.
Currently AMD has the vram advantage in most tiers. AMD can get developers to take advantage of this by filling it with higher quality textures. This would be an easy short term win for them that can move the needle. Gamers will will with no performance cost. Tech media will praise AMD for having more vram than it's Nvidia counterparts. The conversation will move away from rt to higher quality textures with no performance penalty. All those 16 gig vram cards from rx6800 to upcoming 8800xt will benefit and will destroy all those 12 gig and 8 gig Nvidia cards. I wonder why most Nvidia titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Blackmyth Wukong have lower quality textures but heavily rely on rt features, maybe because they will get destroyed in the midrange.
In the end of the day AMD has only itself to blame not developers ,not gamers, not the competition especially with2 crypto mining booms benefits and now ai craze.
While the market leader has a diversified portfolio of hardware in case of ai market saturation ( ai bubble pop). AMD on the other hand wants to focus on the midrange. This could backfire with further market share loss to Intel if Battlemage has superior rt performance.
Also Nvidia started using ai for driver development years ago. AMD needs to do the same like yesterday! Imo.
On a personal note, I think the biggest problem with RDNA 3 is the video playback / low usage power consumption. Nobody wants 50 W gone on a 7800 XT with the fans turning on and off intermittently just for having VLC or YouTube open. I know it's a very unique gripe, but I only expect AMD to fix this for RDNA 4, although I fear that focus will be elsewhere. If they do fix it, and we get 7900 XT level performance with improved RT, I'll call it a massive win. Oof! I couldn't have said it better myself. :D The point is that those midrange Nvidia cards are an easier target to compete against for increasing market share. More gains if AMD succeeds (because it's a much bigger market than the high-end), and fewer losses if they don't (because less is spent on R&D and manufacturing). What do you mean? I've been using both AMD and Nvidia concurrently in the last 8-10 years, and with the exception of the 5700 XT, all AMD drivers have been fine.
I also remember pointing out that locking a game into a technology that everybody can use isn't as bad as locking it into a technology that only last-gen Nvidia card owners can use (which is what Nvidia had been doing before that without any backlash), but no one cared.
Anyway, this is quite off-topic, so let me leave it at that. :)
Way too much but that doesn't mean anything. The prices are way lower than used to be.
Despite that, I can play some less demanding titles @ 4k in a high refresh experience. Reality is unless the monitor dies it's not getting replaced for 3-5 gpu cycles and it's replacing a 1080p 144hz screen (so no merit for a 4090 there)
I've decided a compromise is 4k for esports/hdr streams and 1080p for high refresh gaming for demanding titles, so as per our earlier post, an RDNA4 card with 7900XT equivalence, with some good efficiency, power consumption and an uptick in RT performance is likely to be a sale for me.
Really annoying.
If they offer in this or that price point an awful product for an unreasonable amount of money, they are covering nothing.
A 12 gb card for 700 $/€ in 2024 does NOT mean that you are covering the 700 bucks price point.
The same is when they say "ehi, there are still 300$ card, exactly like in the past", No, there are not, because the 300 $ cards in the past were high level cards, the same cards that now cost 800-1.200 $ at least.
Personally, I like my monitors to last for a lifetime, but each to their own. I was happy with 1080p at 24", and I would have never upgraded if it wasn't for the ultrawide angle. Fair enough. I don't play that game, and I don't have any issue in any other, so I'm fine. Are you sure it's a driver problem, though?
If those people gave you that answer well that also sucks, and I'd say it sucks for anyone saying the same but saying AMD didn't do the thing, there is no proof, but there is evidence that they did, and I'm inclined to believe it.
If someone accused AMD of child slavery in a direct yes or no question I'd imagine, incompetent as they seem to be, they'd go on record super fast denying it. All I was looking for from AMD was a swift and concise denial of what they were accused of, yet we got (paraphrasing) "no comment" for months. Yes, that's evidence.
amd european shop
7900xtx "midrange is 1,091 euro
7900xt "midrange" is 818 euro out of stock. time for 8800xt release?
geizhlas.de
7900xt, an aib which is not Asus - 700 eur
7900xtx 910 euro
nvidia germany store
4070 ti super 810 eur
geizhals.de 820 eur
for 120 eur and no driver lottery every single sane european which is not fanboy will buy 4070ti.
now goodluck with amd 80% marketshare and report to amd real-life situation if you have contacts.
Except when sometimes LM studio needs to be reloaded, sometimes - but that not ending driver crash
Such strategy, to return to the "old days" and roots, is what everyone, including AMD themselves would favor heavilly. I mean, when the top solutions from previous generation becomes cheaper, not only on the second-hand market, but manifests as performance uplift for the new generation mid-end cards. This is the whole meaning, and definition of progress.
Though so far, sadly, this seems more like the wishful thinking, false hopes, and holow promises. I would rather believe, that by mainstream segments, AMD means 7900XT performance for 7900XT money, not the shifting it down the sane prices. They would rather adjust the price tags and SKU monikers of mid end, to the higher numbers, than lose the sweet profit margins. At least the last five or so years, have proven, that this predatory behaviour, to be a solid trend, and most likely is a presumable outcome, rather than not.
For example, the "what about GameWorks being gimped on AMD" comments... For one, it's an entirely different matter, so there's no "what about" here. Secondly, Nvidia developed GameWorks for Nvidia cards. They probably never even tested it on AMD. Why would they have? Let's be reasonable. :D
Limiting a lot of games to DLSS only in early days is kind of a similar thing, but for one, it's still a separate issue, and secondly, AMD was late with FSR, so there wasn't really another option anyway.
I just wish a lot more people had the ability (and willingness) to remain impartial in matters concerning for-profit companies that they're not financially invested in.
AMD mostly sell cards in the sub 500 dollar segment, nothing new really.
The most popular AMD cards of all time are like sub 250 dollar cards.
AMD is years behind on features and drivers are simply way more wonky. Especially when you leave the most popular titles that gets benchmarked alot (for reviews). AMD GPU is terrible in most early access games, lesser popular games and in emulators. With Nvidia you get good performance across the board, with drivers ready for new games before release date, and best features possible. Resell value is higher because demand is higher. Watt usage is lower.
You literally save nothing by going with an AMD GPU when you factor it all in. Hence why marketshare keeps dropping.
I have zero stability issues with my 6750XT and users like me may be in the minority but we do exist. I needed to upgrade my GTX970 because it was not cutting it anymore and didn't go with another Nvidia card because bang for buck pricing at the time AMD was miles ahead.
There was no preference for me between AMD and Nvidia, until the Eyefinity advantage gone.
Would not replace this card, but my next one will be an Nvidia... most likely a 6080 or a 7080 when we get there.