Here is the article in question: If RDNA 5 can’t turn things around I have a tough time believing AMD will stick around in PC graphics for much longer

The thrust of the article is, essentially, that Nvidia has absurd GPU market share (80% or higher, usually) while AMD has struggled to gain ground (15% market share before Intel ARC, around 10% today), and the numbers from Steam hardware surveys seem to back this up. AMD just doesn’t hold a significant portion of the stand alone GPU market, not compared to Nvidia.

The author goes on to attribute AMD’s lack of progress to the fact that Nvidia is always rolling out new features and new hardware, leaving AMD to play catch-up. Nvidia pushes G-Sync, AMD has to catch-up with FreeSync, Nvidia has DLSS, AMD has to catch-up with Fluid Motion, Nvidia has hardware dedicated to ray tracing, AMD tries to catch up with brute force.

This disparity in feature sets is what has given Nvidia such a market advantage, or so the author suggests, and why they think AMD won’t be in the GPU market for much longer. To the author’s credit, if you listen to much of the conversation around GPUs, there are really two big standouts in the decision process: Features and price. Which priority wins out is going to come down to the individual consumer.

For my part, I don’t think AMD is going to leave the GPU business any time soon, if they were, they wouldn’t be investing into new technologies like frame generation, but I don’t think AMD’s GPU division is going to thrive until they address how the PC community perceives them. As long as people think they’re getting more with Nvidia, they’ll keep buying Nvidia; AMD can either grow their cards’ feature sets more quickly than Nvidia is growing theirs’, or AMD can do a better job selling the features and performance that their cards do have, or, ideally, both.

People don’t get excited about AMD’s products the same way they do about Nvidia’s, and a lot of that is just because Nvidia has way, way more customers, but another part of that is because AMD doesn’t do as much to sell it’s product or it’s brand as Nvidia does. We’d all like to think that branding doesn’t matter, but when it comes to getting people interested and selling a product, it can make a big difference, and AMD’s GPU branding is nebulous at best.

AMD isn’t going to gain market share until they overcome people’s perception that they’re an “also ran.” In a nutshell, they need to gain mind share, be that through cutting edge features and performance, better marketing, or, ideally, both. When I read some time ago the headline “AMD engineer claims they could have made a card that competes with the RTX 4090, but it wasn’t cost effective to produce,” it bugged me, because even if they’d just made a single in-house sample it would have been enough to get people’s attention. “One-off AMD GPU beats RTX 4090” does nothing in terms of improving existing products, but everything to get customers to look at your existing products. It’s dumb, but humans are weird.

Okay, this was just me thinking out-loud. TL;DR: AMD needs to keep adding more features, more quickly, and do a better job selling and getting people to consider their brand.

Have an awesome Halloween, everyone!!!