New AMD Navi RX 3080 "XT"- "Pro" / 3070 Info

That was great for gamers, but the question most fail to ask is: "was it good for AMD?"

Did AMD gain a lot of market share?

Looks like no:

If all that happens if AMD makes a drastic pricing move, is that NVidia cuts it's prices to maintain the status quo, exactly how does that benefit AMD? They get the same market share, but just get less money for each card sold.

R9 290 was a great product for the money and definitely beat the 780 which had already been on the market for several months. The problem is, Nvidia knew AMD was launching the R9 290 soon and the 780 was a cut-down GK110. GTX 780 Ti launched only 2 weeks after R9 290 with a fully-enabled GK110 chip. That was enough for NV to reclaim the performance crown. Couple that with a price cut to the 780, and NV's vastly superior drivers (I know, I owned 2x 780s in SLI and 5x 290s during this timeframe - the 780s had way fewer problems) was able to maintain their marketshare until Maxwell launched the next year. AMD has been playing catch-up ever since.
 
I don't think AMD really reaped the benefit of gouged pricing as they are selling at a predefined cost to their partners. The only thing they did was sell more chips. They control the cost to their partners and what their partners charge retailers or what retailers charge end users isn't directly determined by AMD.

Again, does that matter to AMD either? They didn’t have to eat any discount to sell cards. They may not have got the additional margin, but that just goes to the fact that they themselves also undervalued their own product
 
I don't see a problem with this pricing structure if it holds true.
 
Again, does that matter to AMD either? They didn’t have to eat any discount to sell cards. They may not have got the additional margin, but that just goes to the fact that they themselves also undervalued their own product
not from a purely monitary point of view. but gamers look at different things than miners. they see nvidia as top dog and thats what everyone buys. even though amd may have stuff thats fine at the mid and lower end of the stack.
they need a little more to bring people back.
 
Because recent pricing is the exception to the rule. Historically, RTG products have been priced lower than the competition. Also, Vega 56 and 64 were supposed to offer more performance for less money than equivalent Nvidia parts, so I'm not sure they benefit your narrative.

Plus it is questionable how well recent pricing has been working. nVidia has been having trouble moving inventory. Part of that is the crypto bubble crash, of course, but I think part of it is gamers, like me, that are sitting this out because it is too expensive. I had the money ready to go for a 2080 Ti but when I saw the price, I decided my 1080 Ti was just fine.

Finally they'd be wise to undercut nVidia's price to convince people to buy their shit. In the GPU market they are in kinda the same boat as the CPU market as being the "other guy" not the default. That means you need things to draw people in, either higher performance, lower price, etc. If it is just "Hey this is an nVidia but in red!" people will likely say "Nah I'll stay with nVidia."
 
I would agree with that. I would consider a 2080Ti for $750-800. At $1000+ not a chance. If AMD can provide me something comparable eventually and come in at less money, I'll look at it, and probably buy it.
 
Not really if you have a gpu on 300 mm2 and your competition has something on 700 mm2 the one that has the bigger die size is going to be crying for a long while.

Well, since this is supposedly about a card that competes against RTX 2070,then that die size comparison isn't really valid. The 2070 die is 445 mm2, not 700, and while it is bigger, it's on a cheaper process so it isn't nearly the advantage you make it out to be. Also NVidia has had a fair bit of time to sell at $500 price point, reaping good margins to help recoup up front costs.

If AMD were to release at much lower price, it would be depriving themselves of the strong margins NVidia already received. It would be a terrible idea.

OTOH, if NVidia wanted to be really nasty it would be the perfect time to drop the price and crush AMDs margins before they even started selling.

Though I don't expect either side the start any kind of price war because in the end, they hurt themselves as well as their competitor.
 
Well, since this is supposedly about a card that competes against RTX 2070,then that die size comparison isn't really valid. The 2070 die is 445 mm2, not 700, and while it is bigger, it's on a cheaper process so it isn't nearly the advantage you make it out to be. Also NVidia has had a fair bit of time to sell at $500 price point, reaping good margins to help recoup up front costs.

If AMD were to release at much lower price, it would be depriving themselves of the strong margins NVidia already received. It would be a terrible idea.

OTOH, if NVidia wanted to be really nasty it would be the perfect time to drop the price and crush AMDs margins before they even started selling.

Though I don't expect either side the start any kind of price war because in the end, they hurt themselves as well as their competitor.

Sales of their Turing cards have been far lower then their Pascal cards. Yes higher margins but far less product is leaving the shelves, the price has simply been far too high for most. Neither company wants a price war but AMD has one ace Nvidia will never have, they can rely on the cpu division for profits. But price means little when you dont know what the performance will actually be.
 
Sales of their Turing cards have been far lower then their Pascal cards. Yes higher margins but far less product is leaving the shelves, the price has simply been far too high for most. Neither company wants a price war but AMD has one ace Nvidia will never have, they can rely on the cpu division for profits. But price means little when you dont know what the performance will actually be.

That's a facetious argument. NVidia sales are not monolithic and AMD doesn't even really compete in all sectors against them. AMD really couldn't decimate all of NVidias income.

OTOH AMD is already trending toward the red. Their most recent quarter only netted 16 million dollars, vs 394 Million for NVidia. AMD would bleed red long before NVidia.

While it would be ill advised for NVidia to start a price war, it would be downright suicidal for AMD to do so.
 
That's a facetious argument. NVidia sales are not monolithic and AMD doesn't even really compete in all sectors against them. AMD really couldn't decimate all of NVidias income.

OTOH AMD is already trending toward the red. Their most recent quarter only netted 16 million dollars, vs 394 Million for NVidia. AMD would bleed red long before NVidia.

While it would be ill advised for NVidia to start a price war, it would be downright suicidal for AMD to do so.

Not really there is only one company that boasts to their stockholders about margins and as soon as that goes in the bin what else is there to please those heavy margin loving people with Nvidia stocks ....
 
I just really hope this isn't everything for them. AMD needs to offer either a 10% lower value for matching performance or a 10% higher performance for a matching price to really get this off the ground. A dollar for dollar performance to price match isn't going to get people to switch preferred vendors. If they can keep margins within a happy place and undercut nvidia by a chunk, they can do what they've been trying (and in some cases succeeding) to do to Intel with Ryzen and win market share by performance per dollar.
They've also yet to have anything to compete with the top end nvidia in a long time within any reasonable timeframe of nvidias top end card release, and that also takes a chunk of the board away for them. Sure, it isn't a high profit portion of the market, but if you don't appeal to those gamers and professionals that do buy top end, it's hard for them to recommend your stuff on the mid to low end. I know that it's hard for me to tell people to buy a 580/590 or Vega 56/64 when Nvidia has the better performance for not a hugely higher price.
And Mobile, they really need to get their shit together. My work laptop is an nvidia 1060, my better half has a 1060 or 1070 in it, my next laptop probably will have an nvidia, and that's only because the current crop of amd mobile stuff sucks for power consumption. It's also the reason that the 100 or so deployed VR packs my company uses are all on Intel/Nvidia for a combo. They just can't compete so far.

Admittedly, I'm an AMD fanboy in what I want to own but they just haven't offered the performance I want for the dollar, at least outside of the used market when it comes to GPUs. Ryzen is going into my next build, it's going into the build I'm going to do for my nephews for Christmas, it'll be my daughter next PC and my SOs next PC, and it's even going to be in my next server (or Threadripper if they're planning a next release). But unless the value is there for their GPUs, I'm going to stick another Nvidia card in a case since it'll last a bit longer per dollar, or it'll be a used AMD since I'd rather not be getting into a huge dollar value that Nvidia has decided is the new norm and the used market reflects that as well. I realllllly hope they don't drop the ball here, but I guess we'll see.
 
I don't think AMD has a choice but to price war.
What else can you do in a market with extremely dominant players?
They gained on the custom console war only becuase of pricing, not because nvidia could not do it ( they could plus intel cpu like the first xbox)
Its about margins in the end.
I guess you could invest heavily in promotion, while prices remain nVidia like... That is possible I suppose. Still think they will just price war, and probably will price war in AI and professional too.
As mentioned, I agree no one will switch for same price /performance ratio... Unless like massive PR campaign that is like super effective... Can you have one of those in this market?
 
AMD have a choice to price similarly to Nvidia, and sell a handful of cards with high margin, and maintain the status quo of loosing market share year after year, or they could price aggressively, sell many more cards at a lower margin and increase their market share.


5,000 cards with $150 profit each makes much less sense than 20,000 cards at $50 profit, but 50,000 cards at $15 profit makes even less sense. That's the intricacies of finding the perfect profit curve. Add in the fact that the boom to market share would please investors, it's a no-brainier. Forcing Nvidia to price match and reduce their margins is only a bonus: yes, price-dropped Nvidia cards would boost Nvidia's sales, but Nvidia's cards are already at the 'optumum' profit curve, any change to their current pricing will result in less profit.
 
AMD have a choice to price similarly to Nvidia, and sell a handful of cards with high margin, and maintain the status quo of loosing market share year after year, or they could price aggressively, sell many more cards at a lower margin and increase their market share.


5,000 cards with $150 profit each makes much less sense than 20,000 cards at $50 profit, but 50,000 cards at $15 profit makes even less sense. That's the intricacies of finding the perfect profit curve. Add in the fact that the boom to market share would please investors, it's a no-brainier. Forcing Nvidia to price match and reduce their margins is only a bonus: yes, price-dropped Nvidia cards would boost Nvidia's sales, but Nvidia's cards are already at the 'optumum' profit curve, any change to their current pricing will result in less profit.
Things got convoluted after they released the HBM based cards that was good technology wise but did not do AMD any favours margin wise..
 
I don't think AMD has a choice but to price war.
What else can you do in a market with extremely dominant players?
They gained on the custom console war only becuase of pricing, not because nvidia could not do it ( they could plus intel cpu like the first xbox)
Its about margins in the end.
I guess you could invest heavily in promotion, while prices remain nVidia like... That is possible I suppose. Still think they will just price war, and probably will price war in AI and professional too.
As mentioned, I agree no one will switch for same price /performance ratio... Unless like massive PR campaign that is like super effective... Can you have one of those in this market?

A lot of factors for an effective PR campaign for this market. The gamers who build their own know what they want and look at that performance per dollar. The ones who build their own and aren't knowledgeable look to those who are, hopefully ending up in the first group down the line. The ones who did build in the past but want to buy pre built will look at the performance per dollar versus other similarly priced systems, mainly because they know the value of their dollar having done a build before. And finally, those who do none of those 3 will buy whatever seems to have the highest "numbers" (580 vs 590 vs 2080 vs 3070) for their dollar. They might even ask the sales rep, which means changing the views of thousands of people who sell systems on a daily basis, and some of those might get a kick back on their check for selling a higher dollar system.

If you take the first 3 groups and figure they probably house the first 60% or so of PC gamers, those would make a PR versus a numbers campaign pointless. And the last group wouldn't really care about a PR campaign, but they would care what people selling to them have to say if they sound even half way sincere.

AMD have a choice to price similarly to Nvidia, and sell a handful of cards with high margin, and maintain the status quo of loosing market share year after year, or they could price aggressively, sell many more cards at a lower margin and increase their market share.


5,000 cards with $150 profit each makes much less sense than 20,000 cards at $50 profit, but 50,000 cards at $15 profit makes even less sense. That's the intricacies of finding the perfect profit curve. Add in the fact that the boom to market share would please investors, it's a no-brainier. Forcing Nvidia to price match and reduce their margins is only a bonus: yes, price-dropped Nvidia cards would boost Nvidia's sales, but Nvidia's cards are already at the 'optumum' profit curve, any change to their current pricing will result in less profit.

You're spot on. The console war Uvaman2 mentions is similar to the 50k number you point out. It isn't a high dollar margin, but in this case it's a margin of known quantity numbers produced and therefore a known value coming in. When you deal in PC components, it's less a known quantity number of how many need to be produced and more of a guess as to how successful you can be. Closer to that the better. Too high or too low and you've caused a problem for your stock in both the stock market and the stock on hand. Hopefully they get as close to that 20k number you mention and get the happy investors and the happy gamers to both buy in. It'd be great to see them compete on both price and performance compared to Nvidia and start forcing the cost of cards to come back to a reasonable value that the average person can game.

Also, hopefully more PC gamers come around, or more PC gamers encourage other PC gamers. The mobile market and the console market are taking a ton of the market share every year. My nephews play on Xbox and mobile because it's "cost effective" for their family situation. The $500+ GPUs and $500 Mobo/CPU/RAM combos are not a good selling point to those who want to game but can't drop $1k. They can't justify a PC for gaming when their phones, their console and their cheap laptop can do all the things they need for social, gaming and work/school. They don't see FPS per dollar as a metric to weigh just yet. Once I build their PC for christmas, even though it's going to out me a chunk of change, hopefully they'll see that FPS per dollar value, that quality per dollar they miss on xbox. Maybe it'll draw them to "something of their own" instead of "something of the masses." Maybe it'll convert 4 more into PC gamers, or they'll see the $1k I spent as wasteful when they can buy a new console for $600 and make due without noticing like most console gamers do now. Plus with the rise of ultralight yet powerful laptops, it's a harder sell. Most people don't want that 27" or 32" 144hz monitor and a gaming PC when they can get a smart TV and a laptop with 12+hr of battery life for the same $. Shit, that's a reminder that I can't just build them a gaming PC, I need to pick up a damned good monitor to make it worthwhile, and a good keyboard, mouse and headset. Another $400 in the bucket.
 
Not really there is only one company that boasts to their stockholders about margins and as soon as that goes in the bin what else is there to please those heavy margin loving people with Nvidia stocks ....

Nonsense, all companies "boast" about good results, and margins were the first thing mentioned by the CEO:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-reports-first-quarter-2019-202000154.html

“We delivered solid first quarter results with significant gross margin expansion as Ryzen and EPYC processor and datacenter GPU revenue more than doubled year-over-year,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We look forward to the upcoming launches of our next-generation 7nm PC, gaming and datacenter products which we expect to drive further market share gains and financial growth.”

A price war would quickly drive AMD into red ink. It would be suicide.
 
I just really hope this isn't everything for them. AMD needs to offer either a 10% lower value for matching performance or a 10% higher performance for a matching price to really get this off the ground. A dollar for dollar performance to price match isn't going to get people to switch preferred vendors.

yes, similar priced navi would have okay if navi had come out last year... but, I'd say now, it would have to be closer to 20% more performance at the same price to get the attention of anyone (that already bought a 2070). since almost a year has passed when rtx was released, nv has had time to come up with a counter to navi https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/23/nvidia-super-teaser/ which makes me think just 10% more performance from navi vs rtx might not be enough.
 
The cards are fine and even the pricing is fine, where they are going to gain share is with game bundles and marketing and the sub $350. Low profile cards that can be powered through the PCIe slot still make up huge sales numbers like 70% of PC gamers according to Steams hardware survey are running some flavor of 1080p be it 30 or 144 Hz. This is the area they need to focus on as this is where the largest market share is, they just need to be competitive there and things will work out.

I mean yeah the RTX cards launched back in Sept of 2018, but the big sellers from nVidia the 1660 just launched and that will make up the bulk if their sales same with the 1650 and the 1650TI and those are under preforming at best so AMD needs to crush those at the same price or better.
 
I don't think AMD has a choice but to price war.
What else can you do in a market with extremely dominant players?
They gained on the custom console war only becuase of pricing, not because nvidia could not do it ( they could plus intel cpu like the first xbox)
Its about margins in the end.
I guess you could invest heavily in promotion, while prices remain nVidia like... That is possible I suppose. Still think they will just price war, and probably will price war in AI and professional too.
As mentioned, I agree no one will switch for same price /performance ratio... Unless like massive PR campaign that is like super effective... Can you have one of those in this market?

nVidia burnt their bridges when it comes to MS and Sony, also MS and Sony want x86/64 SoCs for the consoles which is something that nVidia can't provide.
 
nVidia burnt their bridges when it comes to MS and Sony, also MS and Sony want x86/64 SoCs for the consoles which is something that nVidia can't provide.

Not that there isn't bad blood, but hell, Apple still does business with Samsung and Qualcomm. Bridges can be rebuilt if there's profit involved; it's literally criminal not to, as it's a clear disservice to investors.

The bigger issue is that AMD is both the only company that can reasonably build the part that Sony and Microsoft want, and the only company that'd be willing to do so for any pricing that might approach reasonable.

They could buy Intel and Nvidia separately and get higher performance of course- but they'd pay for it, and more importantly, while AMD is willing to give MS and Sony some ownership of IP, neither Nvidia nor Intel are interested in such an arrangement.

And since neither Intel nor Nvidia can build an SoC on their own that would be competitive with AMD's IP (either Intel x86 CPU with Intel graphics, or Nvidia ARM CPU with Nvidia graphics), it's really a moot point for now. AMD was just in a position to not be too demanding of MS and Sony.
 
nVidia burnt their bridges when it comes to MS and Sony, also MS and Sony want x86/64 SoCs for the consoles which is something that nVidia can't provide.

Nah with companies, bridges never stay burnt. It is all about who can give them what they want for the best price at the time. As an example despite Apple and Samsung getting all angry at eachother, Apple is still looking at sourcing Samsung OLEDs for their laptops.

Also on the console front, an nVidia Tegra powers the Switch.
 
nVidia burnt their bridges when it comes to MS and Sony, also MS and Sony want x86/64 SoCs for the consoles which is something that nVidia can't provide.

Nvidia decided they were sick of wasting a bunch of resources selling millions of low to no margin parts, which they were pretty open about. I don't think they burned any bridges, but I also don't think they have any interest in that market. It makes even more sense when looking at their recent GPU price hikes. Nvidia has clearly opted for lower volume, higher margins, and AMD is going to do the same.

Miners really helped show both sides what customers were willing to pay for GPUs without AMD or Nvidia having to take any risks trying it out on their own.
 
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Nvidia decided they were sick of wasting a bunch or resources selling millions of low to no margin parts, which they were pretty open about. I don't think they burned any bridges, but I also don't think they have any interest in that market. It makes even more sense when looking at their recent GPU price hikes. Nvidia has clearly opted for lower volume, higher margins, and AMD is going to do the same.

Miners really helped show both sides what customers were willing to pay for GPUs without AMD or Nvidia having to take any risks trying it out on their own.
If you are in the US you now also have Tariffs to worry about somebody’s eating that 25%.
 
Most are Taiwanese brands, and the GPUs are made in Taiwan- and the whole product can be made in Taiwan again, or somewhere else. I don't see it as being that big of a deal.
Yeah it just takes time to move manufacturing at that scale, but in either event both AMD and nVidia making a big stink about it how it will kill their sales in the US to both shareholders and the Gov't.
 
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