News AMD deprioritizing flagship gaming GPUs: Jack Hyunh talks new strategy against Nvidia in gaming market

[Admin]

We asked AMD's senior vice president and general manager if the company will have flagship GPUs for its next-gen RDNA 4 lineup. He discussed AMD's reasoning behind deprioritizing halo GPU products and growing market share.

AMD deprioritizing flagship gaming GPUs: Jack Hyunh talks new strategy against Nvidia in gaming market : Read more

 

[Makaveli]

This was a good interview and I agree with him 100%. As much as I would like to see a highend 8000 series card. AMD has to focus on long term and building market share. Most gamers are fickle and with NV marketing these guys will pitch a tent infront of a bestbuy to get a new gpu.

Focus on medium range where there is volume and increase market share while continuing to invest in the software eco system which they have committed to doing. Then comeback to the high end RDNA 5 with a different approach. AMD has more money to play with now is the time to try different things.

 

[Neilbob]

I'm not sure there is any overcoming the obscene (at times unwarranted) Nvidia mindshare at this point. This strategy of abandoning the high end, while it is the right and worthwhile thing to do on paper, didn't really pay dividends for AMD when they tried it before with the RX 480+rebrands to RX5000 series, and the 'technology' discrepancy wasn't even that extreme at the time (except perhaps the power consumption).

It'd be nice to be proven wrong because I'm sick of the state of the consumer GPU market lately, but unlike Intel, Nvidia haven't taken their foot off the pedal. I just can't see it happening within a reasonable number of generations unless AMD somehow manage to produce a product that's absolutely stunning from a price/performance perspective - and even then I rather doubt it. Mindshare is a powerful thing. Not to mention AMD are likely still heavily focussed on directing wafers to the nonsense that is AI.

 

[Blastomonas]

Gaining share will take a long time as people tend to stick with what they have used before or is percieved to be popular. I imagine that even if AMD sold a gpu at half price with the same performance as an nVidia card, it would be a tough sell..

This is probably one of the reasons that despite Zen being a better value cpu for a few generations, the % gain has been small.

 

[jlake3]

According to the experts in the YouTube comments and such, flagships are actually where the volume is and is how you win marketshare, and what they *really* need to do is just make a flagship card that beats the 5090 in both raster and RT, while using less than 350 watts, with 32gb of VRAM, and sell it for the non-inflation-adjusted price of a pre-pandemic, non-Titan flagship. Just win every tier of every generation while never raising the price in nominal dollars, and backfill any losses with the infinite AI dollars and all the datacenter money. 🤪

(Edit: The above take is being poked fun at, as I thought the zany face emoji implied. Spending "anything it takes" on R&D for a low-volume flagship and losing money on every card sold just to make the marketshare line go up is a TERRIBLE idea for operating a sustainable GPU business in the long-term.)

But coming back to seriousness, neither Polaris nor RDNA1 went for the crown, and both of them are still putting in a good showing in Steam hardware surveys (among AMD products, at least). Most people planning to buy a 5090 are probably not persuadable because they’ve already decided what they want and will pay whatever is asked, but down in the midrange there seems to be less brand loyalty… especially with the perception that Nvidia’s heart isn’t really in it for the 50/60-tier. Focusing R&D and marketing on a high-volume segment you stand a chance of winning is probably a smart play.

 

[Notton]

AMD is bad at naming and marketing, plain and simple.

They don't have bad products right now, just bad prices.
It doesn't help they keep screwing the pooch on launches.

Ryzen 9000 not performing as promised and taking a month to fix? check
Launching GPUs at higher than expected MSRP, and then dropping $50 off the next month? check
Ryzen AI 300 last minute, childish, name changes? check
Copying Intel's chipset naming scheme and confusing everyone who wants a B-series mobo? check
Putting stupid X's into every damn product line they have? check

 

[valthuer]

Avoiding competition for the high-end of consumer GPUs, has been a terrible decision on AMD’s part.

You’d think several consecutive years of declining market share would’ve tipped them off.

But it turns out no.

 

[Gururu]

It’s smart. AMD is second to Intel for CPU and Nvidia for GPU and it’s because of market share for volume. It takes a lot to compete against two behemoths for sales, so I admire AMD a lot. NVidia will reign in NPU too if they can muscle out competing non-GPU platforms. I am sure AMD will have something new faster than the 7900 and that’s what I will be looking at.

 

[magbarn]

5090=$2999 pre-scalped price.

 

[strobolt]

I didn't quite follow the comments about developers. Is the point that game developers are not optimizing the games for AMD GPUs and AMD is saying that they would perform better in comparison to Nvidia if the developers cared more?

 

[Gururu]

I didn't quite follow the comments about developers. Is the point that game developers are not optimizing the games for AMD GPUs and AMD is saying that they would perform better in comparison to Nvidia if the developers cared more?

My take: Developers will devote valuable resources towards products which have a wider reach. It's nothing against AMD, its simply that they need to sell more to get developer attention.

 

[baboma]

Apart from the unsaid low-priority issue--AI being more profitable--also left unsaid is that AMD likely doesn't have the capability to compete against the 5090/4090 at the high end. So the question isn't "should AMD compete at high-end," as posed by THW, but rather "should AMD try anyway, even if it can't compete."

Per the 7900XTX's lackluster reception, the answer would be a big fat NO.

If anything, 7900XTX's weak performance vs 4090 did more to hurt the Radeon brand than to help it. If you can't win a fight, it's better to avoid the fight in the first place, than let the world know you're a loser.

The response is so obvious that I'm surprised the question is even asked. But I suppose it must, since the whole crux of "enthusiast PC" revolves around gaming these days. The GPU is now considered more important than the CPU, costing multiple times more, using up much more power, taking up much more space. The CPU's role is as a second banana, to not bottleneck the GPU.

So, it's understandable but at the same time somewhat amusing that J.Huynh had to repeat his "don't worry" three times. It's like a politician handing out campaign promises to constituents. You have to talk nice to everyone, even if you don't have much substance to offer.

Huynh's "I'm for scale" is of course a plausible rationale, just as THW's "halo products matter." But rationales tend to be after-the-fact excuses, and the fact is that AMD has neither the capability nor the motivation to compete on high-end GPU. No need to overthink it.

 

[MoxNix]

My take: Developers will devote valuable resources towards products which have a wider reach. It's nothing against AMD, its simply that they need to sell more to get developer attention.

That's half of it. The other half is NVidia actively encourages and even pays developers to do things in a way that makes AMD look worse. The over tessellation trick from years ago for example.

 

[Makaveli]

That's half of it. The other half is NVidia actively encourages and even pays developers to do things in a way that makes AMD look worse. The over tessellation trick from years ago for example.

There is alot going on with NV now with investigations and stock price dropping also due to this. So we will see how things look in a year or two. Is Nv doing shenanigans in the market that got intel sued for a billion dollars we shall see.

 

[oofdragon]

Someone already nailed it here: launch a really good card at a really cheap price, even if it means LOSES to backfill with the AI data centers sales. Why? Because they want to win marketshare!!!!

 

[vanadiel007]

It's smart. Most people do not run a 4090 for gaming. It's a small minority that does.
And by not chasing this small market share, but instead chase the medium performance and much bitter market share, they can make money on volume rather than performance.

It's good they realize what their weaknesses are.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

That mentality is also what got ATi into trouble in the first place.
They can't keep under cutting and not making enough profit margins to sustain the next round of development.

This is simply a "War of Attrition", you need the financial funds from your profits to sustain the next round of development, under-cutting by a huge amount isn't going to keep AMD wanting to continue the fight if they aren't making enough $ back.

The Radeon Technology Group needs to hold up their end of the bargain and make a reasonable amount of profits from it's share of sales.

You can't get enough profit in this market when you already have a entrenched encumbent like nVIDIA and lose profit-ability.

Remember, this is a LONG battle, think 100 Years War.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

That is a good approach, I got to agree with the AMD’s VP here. Now they need to release a few products which will be not only price competitive but also at all three main areas of gaming i.e. raster, ray tracing and upscaling,

 

[rluker5]

I didn't quite follow the comments about developers. Is the point that game developers are not optimizing the games for AMD GPUs and AMD is saying that they would perform better in comparison to Nvidia if the developers cared more?

AMD does have the consoles so they do have huge dev buy in to RDNA.
On the other side Intel is getting decent performance with 0% market share, virtually no dev buy in and basically no historical dev buy in.

This isn't for better dev cooperation to get better game performance, it is just for chasing profit.
AMD probably wouldn't gain a lot of Nvidia market share even with spending a ton of money trying to get the most powerful GPU out there. It wouldn't be money well spent.
I guess the vice president couldn't say that though because it sounds worse. But a company has to make money.

 

[thestryker]

Assuming this means AMD is optimizing die size and board complexity the strategy could pan out. When I bought my 3080 the 6800XT was the same price, but with much worse ray tracing so given roughly equal raster performance AMD wasn't a real option to me. This sort of thing played out again with the 7000 series launch where the XTX had mediocre rt performance, was compared to the 4090 by AMD when they should have just targeted the 4080 and the XT was too expensive. If this current strategy shift includes marketing then there's plenty of room for success.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

This sort of thing played out again with the 7000 series launch where the XTX was compared to the 4090 by AMD when they should have just targeted the 4080 and the XT was too expensive. If this current strategy shift includes marketing then there's plenty of room for success.

This is false, AMD was adamant that the XTX was competing against the 4080, however the ray tracing performance of the XTX was so abysmal compared to the 4080 that even the $200 price difference didn’t make up for it.

 

[valthuer]

This sort of thing played out again with the 7000 series launch where the XTX was compared to the 4090 by AMD when they should have just targeted the 4080 and the XT was too expensive.

Yeah, AMD labeled XTX as enthusiast, so comparisons with 4090 became pretty much unavoidable.

 

[baboma]

>>On the PC side, we've had a better product than Intel for three generations but haven’t gained that much share. So, to me, that means that it's the developers, it's the go-to-market, and that's where I'm focusing now.

>AMD does have the consoles so they do have huge dev buy in to RDNA. On the other side Intel is getting decent performance with 0% market share, virtually no dev buy in and basically no historical dev buy in.

Yep, Huynh's blurb is schlock. AMD CPUs don't need "developer buy-in" to succeed, yet it still trails in share to Intel.

Huynh's "I'm for scale [by focusing on midrange]" blurb also doesn't pass the smell test, as the midrange & high-end aren't mutually exclusionary. AMD can indeed have high-end with a robust midrange.

In fact, midrange & high-end not only aren't mutually exclusionary, they're mutually complementary. High-end establishes brand wins with benchmark wins, while midrange rides on said coattail to get volume and share.

That they are complementary also explains THW's "halo product matter," and why AMD had the sense to avoid the high-end that it can't compete in. A crappy AMD high-end that allows Nvidia to stomp all over it (like what 4090 did to 7900XTX) is worse than no high-end and no halo product.

High-end buyers aren't price sensitive. For AMD to go high-end, it has to beat 5090 on performance. Bang/buck is not a thing for high-end. AMD can't win on pure perf, so it goes bang/buck, which means mid and lower.

 

[strobolt]

My take: Developers will devote valuable resources towards products which have a wider reach. It's nothing against AMD, its simply that they need to sell more to get developer attention.

Yeah, I got that. It's just that I don't quite understand what exactly do they need the developers for? Is it the game engines themselves so it's the game engine developers we're talking about here or the game developers?

My naïve ass was assuming that DirectX is some standard interface between GPU and the game.

 

[Giroro]

"Nvidia gave up on gaming GPUs, let's do that too"

Classic AMD