AMD drops price on Radeon RX Vega 56 to Battle GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

Regarding Polaris and Vega it's worth remembering that for a not insignificant part of their lives, especially early on, it was impossible to get a card based on either architecture at anything approaching a reasonable price due to mining. Many of those cards probably won't show up in the Steam survey anytime soon I wager.

I firmly believe that, everything else being equal, Nvidia would outsell AMD regardless but the mining situation surely did not help.

We may have enjoyed a long time where the RX 570/580 have been the clearly superior choice to the GTX 1050/1060 but this was at the tail end of both architectures and I doubt most of the sales happened during the second half of last year and up to today.

 

Vega was released just over a year ago, and AMD has had more than enough sales due to mining. Further, both the RX 400 and 500 series of cards must share many production similarities to chips used in current consoles, so AMD must have had significant production level benefits and no shortage of demand. Clearly, it is neither logical nor reasonable to assume AMD are losing money, while not considering actual financial indicators or the long term impact of their decisions.

Looking forward, my understanding is that Vega remains a very relevant architecture, partly due to its compute capabilities. Of course, only time will tell what direction AMD takes in light of current policy of concentrating on its significant mid range presence in the gaming industry. However, I would be both surprised and disappointed if AMD decided to hold back much longer from recent industry wide advancements, although recent news coming out of the company and other significant players (Radeon Rays 3.0, Windows 10 19H1 DXR, Crytek etc.) suggests at least some counter balance to competing products is very likely on the horizon.

In fact, even given the sparse applicability, an optimist may even think the next WHQL driver release could coincide with Windows 10 19H1 and include hardware based DXR support.

 

Good stuff. If gtx cards can get it we can get it too.