DuronBurgerMan
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2017
- Messages
- 1,340
People complained that it was priced too high.
Not me. I think Polaris was priced perfectly. One of AMD's best GPU moves in recent history.
AMD will still have products in the $200/250 range. The trouble is that people think AMD should be selling a 2070 competitor at $250 and that's the problem. Getting back to your AMD losing mindshare as well as marketshare. Well, that's brilliant, because all that 10 years of lowering prices has done is to make AMD look like a budget brand. And trying to win market share with that Strategy hasn't really worked. They have made no significant gains but lost money.
Navi pricing is $449-$499 for 5700XT and $379 for 5700. 2070 and 2060 competitors, respectively. Drop that by $50-$100, and they'd fly off the shelves. The truth of the matter is that AMD is the budget brand with respect to GPUs. If they wanted to compete on absolute performance, it would be different. The AMD purchase is going to be primarily price-driven. I don't necessarily like this. I like the days when both were competing for absolute performance. But it is what it is.
A company can't keep cutting into it's margins to gain market share. It's not sustainable. And AMD weren't even winning market share, they have been in a steady decline for the last 10-12 years.
As harmattan said, AMD does not exist in a vacuum. If they want to increase marketshare, they must create a compelling reason to prefer them over Nvidia. Since absolute performance isn't in their wheelhouse, it must be price/perf. And it must be significant enough to move the needle - as roughly equivalent pricing will favor Nvidia as the stronger brand. The greater the price band difference, the more compelling the reason to favor AMD.
Chad's earlier point, however, was well taken. AMD may not care about increasing marketshare, and may instead be focusing GPU development on consoles, integrated solutions, etc... In other words, internally they might view the discrete GPU market as the leftovers, so to speak. If they sell some good amount of discrete cards, great. If not... well, they will sell a lot of GPUs anyway. It would explain a great deal.
Caveat: if the 3rd party benchmarks show the Navi cards as significantly faster than their respective Nvidia competitors - not just a little bit, but a lot - then their current pricing would be fine.