AdoredTV Goes Over the GPU War

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Scottish Youtuber Jim Parker of AdoredTV posted another history lesson, this time on the "GPU War" that AMD and Nvidia have been fighting for years. In in he outlines AMD's rise to dominance over Nvidia with the 4000 and 5000 series cards, and how Nvidia clawed marketshare back over the next few years. Jim seems to think Nvidia has "won" the GPU war, and that AMD has a long way to go before achieving parity, even if their next generation cards are faster than their Nvidia counterparts.

Whether you agree or not, the video is worth a look here.

The history behind Nvidia's graphics victory
 
It certainly feels like AMD has nothing up their sleeves to even touch Nvidia's midrange, but.... what if AMD decides to wait it out and not participate in any ray tracing stuff, and simply make a mega GPU for traditional rasterization, etc.?

It would kinda catch Nvidia with their pants down to have GPU that plays today's games at 4K, etc. better than the 2080ti. Either way, I hope AMD does something significant quickly, because although I was able to afford the 2080 Ti, I personally don't think it's worth that much. LMAO. That monopoly pricing has to stop sometime. XD
 
For me it has always been as a simple as every AMD/ATI card I've owned has had an asterisk beside it. They been good* but there is always some kind of caveat. It might be drivers, compatibility issues, odd performance quirks, etc. but there's always something. The only exception was the 9800 Pro, which might have been the best video card I've ever owned. With Nvidia cards I've definitely spent more money, but I rarely have some giant caveat making me have buyers remorse.
 
I've bounced around depending on what works better in the things i'm playing at the time, loved the 8500 , 6800 GT and 8800gt were goodies too , 6970's worked great for me, as did the 290x's, 1080 TI is the first time I've really had some bugs, usually with video stuff while running multiple games and trying to watch videos (same setup as the 290x) but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the windows 10 fast ring outpacing driver releases.

Overall, I can't really think of any card I've had troubles with driver wise besides maybe some mishaps with kyro2 back in the day and HSR removing non hidden surfaces, usually tends to be a Windows problem.
 
So AMD are a business company just caring for the money ? what do that make Nvidia ?? Gaming philanthropists. :)

The 8800GT was indeed a sweet card, many here even SLI those at the time, personally i dident get in on those though i cant remember what i had / build with at the time.
I am writhing this on a 570GTX so no wonder i am in the process of building a new machine.
Just one problem, what GFX card to get ? Buy a cheap 1080p card ( RX 580 ) To tie me over until Navi come out, or just screw it and the fact i am on a freesync monitor and get a 2070 or something.
I really wanted to build with Vega 64 as it will be plenty fine for my need and are playing ball with my monitor, but at the current price of those i am sure i would feel stupid, and have enough of that feeling in regard to other people.
 
I still remember how mindblowing the 4770 was at its price point when it came out.
 
AMD has a 3rd of the Market is that a win? If you don't want monopoly lawsuits they had better stay somewhere near there. I am happy with my twin Vega Frontiers on Water. :)
 
It certainly feels like AMD has nothing up their sleeves to even touch Nvidia's midrange, but.... what if AMD decides to wait it out and not participate in any ray tracing stuff, and simply make a mega GPU for traditional rasterization, etc.?

It would kinda catch Nvidia with their pants down to have GPU that plays today's games at 4K, etc. better than the 2080ti. Either way, I hope AMD does something significant quickly, because although I was able to afford the 2080 Ti, I personally don't think it's worth that much. LMAO. That monopoly pricing has to stop sometime. XD

I'd like to see a GTX 2080ti without all the mostly useless RTX features at a reasonable price.
 
I hope AMD does something significant quickly, because although I was able to afford the 2080 Ti, I personally don't think it's worth that much. LMAO. That monopoly pricing has to stop sometime. XD
This makes no sense. Why did you A) buy it if it's not worth that much, B) why should Nvidia reduce their price if you and enough others are buying it for that much? Serious question.

This phenomenon reminds me of the people that criticize Elon Musk all day and complain their Model S or Model 3 shouldnt have cost as much as they paid, but my god they HAD TO HAVE IT.
 
This makes no sense. Why did you A) buy it if it's not worth that much, B) why should Nvidia reduce their price if you and enough others are buying it for that much? Serious question.

This phenomenon reminds me of the people that criticize Elon Musk all day and complain their Model S or Model 3 shouldnt have cost as much as they paid, but my god they HAD TO HAVE IT.

I'd like to see a GTX 2080ti without all the mostly useless RTX features at a reasonable price.

Precisely.. If Nvidia produced a separate GPU, say a "Final Rasterization Edition" (LMAO), with like 8000 cuda cores and the correct proportionate amount of the other bits without the RTX stuff, people would have bought it. AMD sort of has an opportunity here if they did such a thing. They could develop some new kind of cores while developers start thinking about DX12 raytracing and release that later when it's more popular.

DPI, you're right about nvidia charging whatever people will pay for, but I bought the 2080ti because I could and wanted it, but it's not a great value and I still don't think its worth that much lol. My opinion is not unique, and you can see almost every article/review written about the RTX 2080 Ti mentions that the price is nuts.
 
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AMD has been losing since the 5000 series. The 980ti is where things got really bad. And now AMD is going to release a 590 that’s 10% faster than a 580 to combat Turing? LOL. Even Navi won’t be more than 4096 cores at maybe 2.0 ghz.
 
Would be nice to see AMD come out of the gates with a design/Technology win. Right now they are winning mind share from Intel with their Ryzen and EPYC line of CPU's. They really need to kick NVIDIA in the pants on GPU's and not worry about AI and such. AMD already has another market segment. They need to grow that to be able to weather intel's CPU rebuttals.

It's interesting to me that essentially one company is second fiddle to two competitors at the same time in associated but different markets.

If we can see AMD truly pull a rabbit out of the hat with their next GPU it will be nice. Especially if it puts pressure on the crazy prices Nvidia is charging. I don't want to discount them because really from a market perspective.. who saw the Ryzen line coming? It dropped on us and it was something that is a real viable alternative to Intel. Get the IPC better and it will be the shining star.
 
I do enjoy and appreciate this guy's work but he seems to be banging a drum lately. Another 20 minutes about Nvidia's dirty tactics isn't really necessary, particularly since he is undoubtedly preaching to the choir.
 
Nvidia lost my business with the 7800GTX; they never released x64 Capture drivers for it, after promising it heavily.

I've bought a dozen cards since then, and everything they have done as a company has only confirmed that now long-ago decision.

They won a maybe few frames faster, but I've never noticed.
 
It certainly feels like AMD has nothing up their sleeves to even touch Nvidia's midrange, but.... what if AMD decides to wait it out and not participate in any ray tracing stuff, and simply make a mega GPU for traditional rasterization, etc.?

It would kinda catch Nvidia with their pants down to have GPU that plays today's games at 4K, etc. better than the 2080ti. Either way, I hope AMD does something significant quickly, because although I was able to afford the 2080 Ti, I personally don't think it's worth that much. LMAO. That monopoly pricing has to stop sometime. XD

Nvidia have no issues to come up with something faster than 2080ti even right now. But there will be problems if they do so. And AMD will also going to face similar issue. Nvidia already aware about this a few years back. So instead of pushing more rasterization performance they choose to push demanding feature such as RT.
 
AMD has been losing since the 5000 series. The 980ti is where things got really bad. And now AMD is going to release a 590 that’s 10% faster than a 580 to combat Turing? LOL. Even Navi won’t be more than 4096 cores at maybe 2.0 ghz.

The 5k series is fine. But nvidia as a company are more "versatile" than AMD. for example they can take financial hit better than AMD at the time. Nvidia initiate price war with GTX460. that is something rare from the green team. Amd decided to hit back by releasing 6800 series ahead of 6900 series but the final nail comes down when nvidia ninja'd AMD with 580 and 570. With every quarter in the red it is not a battle that Amd can sustain for a very long period of time. I think AMD have a very good chance to gain more market share if they did nof play the "premium" game with 7970. Though i also understand AMD desire to get better profit margin and want to capitalize for being ahead of competitor at that time. But the image they created for themselves as "cheaper and yet better alternative" really work against them.
 
Would be nice to see AMD come out of the gates with a design/Technology win. Right now they are winning mind share from Intel with their Ryzen and EPYC line of CPU's. They really need to kick NVIDIA in the pants on GPU's and not worry about AI and such. AMD already has another market segment. They need to grow that to be able to weather intel's CPU rebuttals.

It's interesting to me that essentially one company is second fiddle to two competitors at the same time in associated but different markets.

If we can see AMD truly pull a rabbit out of the hat with their next GPU it will be nice. Especially if it puts pressure on the crazy prices Nvidia is charging. I don't want to discount them because really from a market perspective.. who saw the Ryzen line coming? It dropped on us and it was something that is a real viable alternative to Intel. Get the IPC better and it will be the shining star.

Except Eyzen happen after several generation of slowing down from intel. Right now nvidia still coming out with at least 30% performance improvement every year. Only that this time that performance increase also come with massive price increase. On AMD side generally you need two years to get that 30% increase. Vega can be very fast but it strictly need to be build for it vs 1080ti that pretty much simple brute force. One thing about nvidia though. They never underestimate what AMD can do.
 
Indeed. I build a system for my nephew with one of those, he got a kick ass gaming computer,,,,, which he sold shortly after and replaced with a gaming laptop, that was a big disappointment for him.
The kid now play on console.

Poor kid just keeps descending... Soon he'll be on mobile games. XD
 
Marketing wins, it seems.

AMD has to score so many wins and take so many risks, yet when it comes to money it doesn't translate linearly. They were not outselling nvidia even when they were winning hardcore!

There's a reason why they play second best now.
 
This guy has a history of being anti-nvidia and pro-amd. He's a bit biased.

His other video where he bashes nvidia, for, among other things, buying 3DFx. Which was incredibly smart to do, for all the patents 3DFx had, plus the engineers. But here in this video, he talks about how great ATI's RV300 was (9700 Pro), putting ATI on the map, he still hasn't mentioned that ATI bought that from a small (now forgotten) company.

This video so far is " ok yeah AMD lost the gpu wars but they really did have the best tech! ". Is that supposed to make us feel better for all the issues we had with our ATI cards? I had a Radeon 9700 Pro (still have it), and I had driver issues for 6 solid months with Quake 3 (having to swap back to an nvidia GeForce3Ti500 repeatedly to be able to reliably play in Q3 clan matches), until I gave up on it 6 months later.

At 25 min into this video, he so far has completely skipped over all these other peripheral issues...

Here is a grain of salt.. got enough for everyone.

Edit:
Finally, at 32:00 he mentions driver issues because AMD was doing new architectures every year. Just skip to 30:00, not much point watching all 37 minutes. I only listened because I was doing stuff around the house.
 
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This guy has a history of being anti-nvidia and pro-amd. He's a bit biased.

His other video where he bashes nvidia, for, among other things, buying 3DFx. Which was incredibly smart to do, for all the patents 3DFx had, plus the engineers. But here in this video, he talks about how great ATI's RV300 was (9700 Pro), putting ATI on the map, he still hasn't mentioned that ATI bought that from a small (now forgotten) company.

This video so far is " ok yeah AMD lost the gpu wars but they really did have the best tech! ". Is that supposed to make us feel better for all the issues we had with our ATI cards? I had a Radeon 9700 Pro (still have it), and I had driver issues for 6 solid months with Quake 3 (having to swap back to an nvidia GeForce3Ti500 repeatedly to be able to reliably play in Q3 clan matches), until I gave up on it 6 months later.

At 25 min into this video, he so far has completely skipped over all these other peripheral issues...

Here is a grain of salt.. got enough for everyone.

Edit:
Finally, at 32:00 he mentions driver issues because AMD was doing new architectures every year. Just skip to 30:00, not much point watching all 37 minutes. I only listened because I was doing stuff around the house.

Yep i remember how he tries to prove majority of people only buying nvidia by showing the financial between AMD and nvidia (back in the fermi era). Those that has been following AMD and nvidia closely at the time very well aware the financial situstion of both company at the time. AMD end up in the red for the year does not prove about people does not buy AMD GPU. We know AMD have the debt that originally stem from their initial acquisition of ATI back in 2006 when nvidia have no such problem. If anything AMD having hard time to keep up with the demand and even brag about how many DX11 GPU they have sold. Their market share was on the rise that it is enough to trigger nvidia to initiate price war with GTX460. And he never mention this in his video.
 
AMD buying ATI is quite likely what led to the downfall of their high end graphics.. even if the timeline doesn't appear to point it out. AMD made CPU's... their biggest customers were corporate. Buying ATI meant they had patents, engineers, and gave them a big jump closer to selling CPU's with integrated graphics, or cpu/gpu chipset pairs, to corporate customers... so the majority of those were for pc's running Excel, etc.. high end graphics was a niche market and not where the volume was.

ATi had a lot of debt that AMD has to absorb if I remember right as well. If AMD had not bought them, it's possible they might have went under... back then, it was only 4 or 5 years away from when there used to be 6+ graphics card companies and all those failures and bankruptcies were not forgotten. So here is ATI, has a lot of debt, looking for a way out.. AMD wants some GPU to go with their CPU.

Could have gone either way. But I don't think they should be on some pedestal.

nVidia has had much better drivers, starting with the Detonators.. we'd get a new driver and a 15% performance boost would come with it.. it was crazy. Not that there weren't some bugs along the way, but generally they were stable, and often you got speed jumps too. We had issues at work with the (ATI) video driver corrupting the OS.. and later, no drivers because those were "HP"'s responsibility.. sorry mr executive, there's no drivers for this laptops video card for this new windows... so you need to stay on winXP... ugh, it was always something.

I wish they would get their shit together, but I think it's a bunch of separate camps and they don't work well together. Or there just wasn't enough leadership to make sure things worked well together.. or they didn't work more closely with game dev's to help them past any issues. Or it was all of these things.

At least Ryzen and threadripper are close to competitive now. They needed a win. But I doubt they have anything to answer RTX with, and that gap will just get wider...
 
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Wait for Nav!i, it'll be good I swear! :cautious::shifty:

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I hope so. XD
 
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