There's nothing wrong with refreshing a product range, especially in the case of the GTX 760 and 770, which are faster but cheaper than their GTX 600 equivalents. Also, while I'm very happy with my GTX 780, I do feel it was overpriced by about £150 (I paid £550 for mine). NVIDIA really should have released it as a replacement for the GTX 680 at the same pricepoint IMO, £420 at most, and then adjusted the range to fit the GTX 770 and GTX 760 in at appropriately lower prices. The Titan should have been the £550 card as well but, hey, what do I know about manufacturing and marketing graphics cards? Those cards would certainly have been more popular at lower prices but would they have been able to meet demands?
I did, their drivers have been excellent since Never Settle was out last November and problems have been scarce only really down to leaked/alpha drivers that people test with a few exceptions on official whql/betas. their card were already priced at a very strong rate when you look at price/performance. their Never settle game bundles with new cards is something extremely hard to turn down when buying a new card. they just did a price cut on the current 7 series of cards so their sales will increase even more. They also have new APU's out in the form of Richland which was very nicely priced as well and have enough GPU grunt for any average casual gamer. And now they have 13.8 out for frame pacing as well which has a lot of people thinking... how they did it improving their frame latency to meet or even beat Nvidia in a lot of games using crossfire. Not to sound like a fanboy too much, but what have Nvidia done recently? They released the TITAN and caused a massive price hike in GPU's. They released the GTX7xx series and priced it much much higher than it should of been thanks to them hyping and causing massive PR for the TITAN which they think justify's them charging people more for their cards. Go into the Nvidia driver section and have a look at how many people with a 7 series, TITAN, and high end 6xx series are having problems with their drivers and having to use much older ones to get things working properly... Whilst I like BOTH companies, you can't help but see that AMD have been pretty much on the ball lately. Nvidia seem to be focusing a lot on the mobile side of things, which is definitely NOT a bad thing Tegra4 running Ira and using 2-3watts look absolutely incredible. Give Nvidia a year or two and Maxwell will be out and I reckon that will dominate in terms of performance but not in terms of price.
True, but I think the problem with AMD is they have a lot of little variations between product lines, making them less likely to have a single extra-popular product. Nvidia is pretty straight-forward with their naming schemes, and have very little variation between series (so there might be a GTX 560 and a GTX 560-TI, but they don't get much messier than that). Intel is even more basic - they use the same product name regardless of hardware chagnes. A HD4000 found in an i3 is still called HD4000 in i7, even though they don't perform the same. I'm sure if Intel spread out their naming schemes, and if AMD dropped a lot of their sub-series (such as the HD7660, the HD7660D, the HD7660G, and I believe there's also a HD7660M) then they'd probably show up on the list. AMD overall needs to overhaul their naming scheme in general, because the numbers are becoming less significant. For example, the HD#900 cards should strictly be dual-GPU and nothing else.
Good for AMD ive always used NVidia since a bad experience with an agp radeon I got, But because of NVidia being overpriced my next card will definitely be AMD
How exactly is Intel's iGPU hurting the PC market? The majority of users have no need for discrete graphics and PC prices are actually lower as a result of integrated graphics. Intel didn't push away VIA. VIA made the mistake of buying Cyrix when they went bankrupt. Cyrix was never able to compete against Intel or AMD head to head. To remain relevant, VIA shifted focus from the desktop market to the embedded market. With Intel entering the mobile market, having an iGPU is a big advantage. Using your naming scheme example, the HD7660 would be a dedicated card. The HD7660D would be an iGPU and the HD7660M is a mobile part. It's actually pretty straight forward. Also, AMD doesn't use the same numbering for their iGPUs as they do for discrete and mobile parts. There is no HD7660 discrete card.
People only say that if they think a PC should only be used for gaming and nothing else, then those same people complain when non gamers start ditching PC's for tablets. At the moment my next GPU will be an AMD one, but i still don't think this article accurately reflects the PC gaming market right now. If AMD keeps the support and the bundles up then in the future then it might do, but right now i still think Nvidia is the dominant vendor when it comes to PC gaming.
To get an idea as to the "PC gaming market" you'd have to look at the "discrete" subsection of the graphics market and the game sales figures. If both have increased, PC gaming is doing well. If both sales figures have decreased, PC gaming is having problems. You can't look at the desktop graphics market to get an idea as to how PC gaming is doing because the total desktop graphics market includes mostly business oriented systems with integrated graphics. The "Desktop Graphics Market" includes Intel, AMD, NVidia, S3 and Matrox. S3 and Matrox are typically left out of market figures because their combined market share is negligible. AMD and NVidia maintain roughly 99% of the discrete graphics market (which also includes Matrox and S3 with their still negligible market share). I always have to remind myself that this is an enthusiast forum.... There's a lot of users here that don't understand how small the "enthusiast" or "PC gaming" markets really are.... "PC gamers" actually make up for a very small percentage of users..... There's probably more senior citizens using outdated computers to check e-mail than there are "PC gamers"....
I guess hurting the entire PC market was an incorrect overstatement - what I should have said is they're hurting the PC gaming industry. Spending an extra $30 for a significantly better GPU would probably make PC gaming much more popular, and reduce some of the anticompetition problems intel has. It'd still be a sub-par experience, but it wouldn't be an abysmal one. The HD4000 is the only GPU Intel made that is within acceptable performance for gaming purposes. While Intel's graphics are generally pretty power efficient for laptops, I'm not sure how much power you actually save in an optimus or enduro setup. If someone can supply stats on that then great, but regardless, both nvidia and AMD could work a little harder on making better idle power draw for laptops. I'm not saying AMD's naming scheme is hard, I'm just saying it's messy, which can be confusing to some people. This is especially true when it comes to laptop GPUs with the same number scheme as a desktop GPU, since they tend to have stats that don't even come close to the desktop counterpart. Anyways, I don't see your point when saying that my naming scheme would mean a HD7660 must be a discrete GPU. If it's a new naming scheme, that means the old one is thrown out - the point of my naming scheme was to simplify it where there would NOT be any sub-series like D or M. The way I see it, a HD7660 should have the exact same stats no matter what platform it is, whether it's a discrete GPU, an APU, or a laptop GPU. Obviously my opinion doesn't matter, but life would be easier even for hardware enthusiasts if we didn't have to figure out "wait... why does my HD5770 outperform the HD5870M?" (I'm not sure if it does, but lets say it does for argument's sake). Also, it'd be easier if AMD dropped all their numbers by 100 and used the #900 series as dual-GPU cards only.
I definitely put more credence into the Steam survey because you KNOW those are gamers. No sense in counting those e-mailing senior citizens. On Steam, looking at DirectX 11 cards, i.e newer generation cards, Nvidia represents more than half of PCs, while AMD is barely a third. So anyone complaining about Nvidia's horrible prices needs to understand they are selling their mid to high end GPU's at a rate of almost 2 to 1 over AMD..... at those terrible high prices. AMD, on the other hand, is selling theirs on the cheap, because they have to, to sell cards and compete. All you have to do is go back to the introductory price of the 7970, $550US, to know that if AMD could charge more, you better believe that they would.
Intel's Iris Pro (currently only on mobile Haswell) is considerably more "powerful" than the HD4000 series iGPUs. It even (quite easily) manages to outperform AMD's HD7660D (top-end iGPU from AMD's desktop Trinity APUs). There's also plenty of room for Intel to improve on Iris Pro since currently it's performance is in line with discrete budget cards....and in some cases, even mid-range mobile GPUs. Depending on how well Iris Pro's architecture scales, Intel could easily double the execute units (and possibly it's overall performance) and be on-par with mid-range discrete cards... AMD's naming scheme is no different than NVidia's. NVidia offers mobile GPU's that share names with their desktop parts but with reduced performance. The naming is used as an indicator of market position. The naming scheme isn't really the problem....it's the marketing. Neither company makes it obvious to consumers that the mobile parts have drastically reduced performance compared to the desktop counterparts. Steam's poll is very misleading. Not every "gamer" uses Steam, which makes the results inaccurate. I'd venture to say that more gamers avoid Steam, than the number that actually use the service (which AMD and NVidia's own sales figures prove). Also, market share is done quarter to quarter and year to year based on sales during said period (because that's all that actually matters to investors). The computer industry doesn't revolve around gaming. As I stated in my previous post, gaming actually accounts for the smallest % of computer usage scenarios. Market share figures are based on total GPU sales as opposed to sales to "gamers" because the figures are verifiable and accurate (which is actually a legal requirement for financial reports).
Just because every gamer doesn't use Steam or even agree to participate in the survey doesn't mean that the overall ratio is off. There is nothing to indicate that the ratios are inherently biased for or against AMD or Nvidia. For example, there is nothing to indicate that more Nvidia owners use Steam and are therefore overrepresented; or that more AMD users refuse to participate in the survey and are underrepresented. The ratios are accurate, Nvidia is outselling AMD by nearly 2 to 1 in the DirectX 11 gaming video card segment, and prices reflect that.
I'm curious, does the AMD iGPU systems count towards them as it does for Intel? If so, that could help explain some the difference. I'm curious to know what the discrete market share numbers are.
It doesn't matter, statistically it's going to paint a fairly accurate picture. I'm happy to see AMD ahead, but keep in mind it's just for this particular quarter. Not to mention Nvidia's prices are just too high for what you get these days from them. A solid product, but not much else. Also, trying to say more gamers avoid Steam than use it is a pretty hard sell, unless you're trying to say Zynga game players count as gamers.
The fact that not every gamer uses steam, proves only part of my point. The second part, is that Steam has zero link to per quarter or per year sales. It's impossible to use Steam to track sales figures with any degree of accuracy at all. Market share figures are based on unit sales per quarter and unit sales per year. NVidia and AMD have sales exceeding 100M units each....whereas Steam has far fewer than 100M users. So, exactly how do you come to the conclusion that NVidia outsells AMD 2-1 based on Steam's "usage statistics"? You're only seeing a small portion of gamers. Also, how exactly do you relate "usage" with sales? Steam users don't even account for 10% of NVidia's GPU sales.....
I think this is a clear reflection of AMD including great gaming bundles with their cards. NVIDIA just cannot compete with that atm.
