The Radeon division was in a much stronger spot 15 years ago compared to the CPU division. It was Nvidia's Maxwell that really started turning the screws on them, and then Pascal pretty much wiped them out from mid/high-end relevance. Nvidia's product was just better. Significantly more power efficient, more stable drivers, and priced reasonably well. And just for the sake of mentioning it, back at that point I was still a pretty hardcore team red fanboy, arguing with people about why the R9-290 was a no-brainer compared to the GTX 970.
One thing that often doesn't get brought up in these kinds of discussions though it's how specifically relevant all of those factors are for major OEMs looking to sign supply agreements for dGPUs. If you're a Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc, lower power consumption means cost savings on power supplies and cooling, more stable drivers means lower tech support costs. If you're looking at cards like the 3050 and wondering how it has such a massive install-base lead over something like the 6600, a lot of that is going to be down to OEM choices, because that's where the bulk of those cards are going.
They were, but Nvidia, even 15+ years ago had much stronger marketing and better business model. AMD wasn't doing much, even when they where at 40% market share. Their HD 4000 series was great and their HD 5000 series had an advantage over Fermi. But Nvidia was doing a much better job in promoting it's hardware. They convinced tech press and gamers that PhysX was an important feature and more importantly developers to not just use PhysX, but also make the visual experience much worst without it. They had managed to convince developers to develop and optimize their games on Nvidia hardware, probably because AMD didn't wanted to spent extra money to promote it's GPUs, something to be expected from a company that was still considering themselves a CPU company and probably they still do today, with the exception of Instinct line of cards. On the contrary Nvidia was spending money on developers and also helping them to not just integrate it's proprietary techs, but make them the core of their programming code, by using stuff like Gameworks Libraries. Nvidia was prioritizing software over hardware and that was a huge advantage for them, even back then. AMD on the other hand had almost always better hardware, but was waiting from others to take advantage of it. By working with developers and promoting proprietary techs, by locking PhysX and CUDA , even punishing their own customers who dared to use an AMD card as primary and set the Nvidia card as secondary, by probably buying a more favorable coverage from tech press while AMD was having all those financial problems and still remaining focused on the CPU market, they managed to not only gain market share, but also make AMD cards look inferior and also create all that drama about "AMD bad drivers". R9 290/X cards where mostly refreshes, a result of AMD's financial problems. It wasn't the big jump that someone should expect after the excellent HD 7970. And Nvidia had the clear upper hand even from that period, that's why you couldn't convince others that the R9 290 was better, that's why Nvidia's GTX 970 being a 3.5GB+0.5GB card didn't affected Nvidia's reputation or success in the market. Then another failed refresh in the form of R9 390, then the Fury that was a rushed product trying to take advantage of HBM, the Vega, Polaris. AMD didn't had money for marketing, they definitely didn't had money to pay the press and developers to be more friendly to them, fortunately they had won consoles that helped them with games being optimized on AMD hardware and having much less bugs when released and running on AMD hardware. Pascal was just a huge step for Nvidia, Nvidia was accelerating, AMD couldn't follow, was still focusing on CPUs and with Zen released they had even more reasons to be focusing on CPUs.
As for OEMs, they go with the strong brand that can warranty supply and sales. Intel had the fabs and the name, so AMD was winning in the CPU DIY market, but not the OEMs, Nvidia had the advantage of being the company with the strongest, more premium name in the market, proprietary stuff that tech press was promoting and eventually, with Pascal, clearly the faster hardware. Not always, not in every category, but still they where the premium name that was sitting on the top of the charts. OEMs want premium stickers on their boxes. That's why they are trying so much with Qualcomm. Qualcomm is a premium brand.
But my post you quoted was targeting the audience that for 20+ years plays the same tune. "Please AMD, create good enough and cheap enough hardware so I can spent less when buying hardware from your competitors". And people where always finding excuses to not chose AMD hardware. You see, AMD hardware was considered always for "the poor". We have Threadrippers out there and many still see AMD as the budget option. It is engraved in their minds.
Your argument is basically boiling down to "everyone else seems to be an idiot and I'm the only one seeing clearly here". You treat yourself as thinking rationally about the situation, but judge everyone who comes to a different conclusion as being irrational. Once you re-frame it to see everyone as trying to act in their own rational self interest to the best of their abilities, you might be surprised at how much better all the pieces suddenly seem to fit in.
You are the one who makes that mistake here, painting an image of me like I am an fanatic idiot who thinks he is the only sentient being on the planet. That's how you describe me here. The fact that you were a red fan 10 years ago and then you "seen the light", doesn't make you objective and me blind. You seen the light 10 years ago, congrats. And because you seen the light and I haven't, in your mind, you are doing here exactly what you are accusing me.
You are just missing my point here, because you are biased and you don't care understanding what I wrote in the post you quoted. 10 years ago you might understood. Today, you have seen the light and the others who still haven't, and insist on "coming to a different conclusion are (obviously) being irrational".
