Why is the gpu market so utterly fracked?

Slutmonkey57b

Bear with me here.

Although Maxwell has finally moved the goalposts back towards performance within a reasonable power envelope, both Amd and nvidia appear to be desperate to balls up potential sales with different strategies.

The bulk of gpu sales and profits are in the sub $/€200 market. Improved CPU graphics over the last few years have rendered the huge glut of product variations both companies sold for under 100 unnecessary and even more worthless than they had been before.

The long slow death of the desktop pc means that the available market for expensive halo products hasn't shrunk but mainstream sales have, dramatically.

Nvidia's response has been to focus practically all its attention on ever more ridiculously priced top of the line products which they do a price dump on if it looks like there's competition coming over the hill.

Amd, much like their cpu division, has found itself with relatively uncompetitive products which perform at massive power envelopes, and has responded, like the cpu division with endless rebrands to cover the whole thing up.

So in the all important 100 to 200 space, what have we got?
Nvidia have the 2gb 750ti, which can be had for around €115. Then there's absolutely nothing at all other than increasingly overpriced variations of it, until around €175, where the woefully overpriced 950 arrives, only to be overshadowed by the 960 which is 25 percent faster for a premium of about 25 quid.

Amd meanwhile has no less than 3 generations of GCN architecture bundled in on top of each other. They go from 260, 260x, 265, 360, 370, 270, 270x, 280, 280x, 285, 380. 11 products in the same price range that Nvidia has 3! What's worse is their sneaky naming schemes don't make sense at all, with GCN 1.0 parts numbered "above" gen 1.1 ones, and the 370 being the equivalent not of an updated 270 but of a 265. The whole thing seems designed to confuse people into buying whatever overstock they need to get rid of, not providing useful products.

And what's really galling is that performance in relative terms has been pretty static in this price range; all the offerings are *just* good enough for midrange 1080 gaming but the jump to the next tier is huge, up to €350 for the 970 last time I looked.

Anyone got any thoughts?

BloodBath

Because the gpu die shrink to 20nm was supposed to come last year but it wasn't suited to gpu's supposedly so we have to wait until next year to see any major improvements when both companies go to 14-16nm from the current 28nm. HBM memory will be the standard for both companies by then as well.

They can only do so much at 28nm which they have been using for the last 4 years or so.

There should be significant improvements in performance and performance per watt in the next gen of cards. It will still probably take a while longer to trickle down to the cheaper end though. Developing these things is not cheap.

Slutmonkey57b

You're right about the process tech, but I still don't see AMD's logic about the massive over-complication of the GCN launch.

Who decided they should launch 6 tiers of parts, each with an "x" variant and multiple memory configurations? A nightmare for production, because instead of focusing on, say, 3 clearly delineated parts which don't overlap and you can predict sales for, there's multiple product lines which all have to be supported and which are cannibalising each other's sales.

Nvidia is simpler in that their attitude seems to be "**** whoever isn't spending €300+".

BloodBath

Well it's the same reason. No real new tech so we get rebrands with the only new cards being the high end stuff. Nvidia have done this as well. The 700 series was pretty much all rebrands. They only got their **** together with Maxwell.

Before then as far as I'm concerned AMD were making better cards for years. It's just gone a bit crazy with the delays in new manufacturing processes forcing rebrands and overlapping stock.

Saying that it's been a rough couple of years for AMD. Next years new CPU and GPU tech is make or break for them. I expect them to be back with a bang though especially if they beat Nvidia out of the gate with the new process nodes on gpus and if they can at least challenge intel on price to performance again without using 200w of power to do so.

A lot of ifs but if they can their share price at the moment is a steal.