News Computex 2016 is upon us!

IntoxicatedPuma · Jun 3, 2016

But the issue is if Nvidia releases a new 1060 at that price and performance, AMD may find itself in the same position as now, few buyers and its only impact is to reduce the cost of Nvidia cards. AMD is having trouble gaining the initiative in this market and I feel their poor software support is contributing to this. Many people give Nvidia a higher perceived value even if performance is lower. I tried to convince many friends and coworkers to buy the R9 380 over a GTX960 but they wouldn't even consider AMD even if you could show that in many cases it was superior and cheaper.

So my point is not that the 480 is meaningless, my point is it may not have a significant impact on AMDs position. They might have the same or less market share in a year as they do now if Nvidia can simply lower their prices or release a budget oriented product to match. I would guess the 960 outsold the 380 and 285 by quite a bit even if it was inferior on paper and cost the same or even more.

PlayfulPhoenix · Jun 3, 2016

I don't think we're in disagreement, then, really. I just think that NVIDIA being forced to be competitive in this way counts for a heck of a lot. AMD is treading water right now even though they have very old hardware at the low end, very compromised hardware at the high end, and quite a while to go before we see any silicon that's >$200 at the exact moment that NVIDIA released new hardware in that price range. It's hard to conceive of worse timing and market realities for them. And yet, they've still managed to launch the most aggressive, highly competitive silicon I can recall, and at one of the most populous price points no less. And there is no indication from NVIDIA that they will or even can address it in a timely way.

I don't see how AMD goes anywhere but up, unless NVIDIA positively slashes prices - but even then, AMD still wouldn't go down, because NVIDIA isn't going to ever try to undercut them at the low end. Rather, AMD would simply not see the big strides in market share growth that it's seeking. Meanwhile, they'll be the ones with all the new silicon in 6-8 months, so across the pricing spectrum things are only going to improve for them anyway. They'll be going from a good start to all cannons firing in Q4 16/Q1 17.

No matter which way you postulate, it's a victory: If AMD beats out NVIDIA in price-perf and NVIDIA doesn't respond, well, AMD's going to get a lot of market share, and users at the low end will have pretty fantastic silicon. And if NVIDIA does respond, well, now everyone wins, because pretty much everyone will get faster silicon for less, and the market (and market share) dynamics between the two companies don't really change that much since their releases are staggered.

Sure, AMD tends to be rougher around the edges, but that's as much a criticism as it is to say that NVIDIA doesn't really try that hard to increase their price-perf. Just look at the Founders Edition. NVIDIA is not practically or culturally a 'value' brand. AMD knows this, and they're acting as the perfect counterpoint to that in order to capture the lower end of the market. I think that's pretty smart.

TLDR: Having multiple companies with contrasting pros and cons, but competing vigorously, is in my mind the best-case scenario, and the 480 is an actualization of that. Either the 480 significantly impact's AMD's long-term trajectory, or it significantly impact's NVIDIA's pricing, but either way, customers on both sides are victorious.

Phuncz · Jun 3, 2016

IntoxicatedPuma said:
But the issue is if Nvidia releases a new 1060 at that price and performance

That's just it, it's being speculated that Nvidia is not going to have an answer to the RX 480 in the coming months. Look at the timeline from the past with Nvidia:
GTX 980 >> GTX 960: 4 months
GTX 780 >> GTX 760: 6 months

That 200$ price is absurdly low, that's a GTX 960's price right now, but with almost twice the performance.

IntoxicatedPuma · Jun 4, 2016

R9 380 = 3500 GFLOPS - $200 = $17.5 (June 2015 release price)
GTX 970 = 3400 GFLOPS - $320 = $10.7
GTX 980 = 4600 GFLOPS - $500 = $9.2

R9 380 had what impact on 970/980 prices? Even after the 970 VRAM scandal. Why is the RX 480 going to be any different? If the RX480 is going to dent the market, it needs to be performing at GTX 980 levels, but judging by the last generation, it's going to be close to 970/R9 390

I think you are looking at the situation completely wrong, even ignoring what AMD repeatedly has been saying themselves.

Phuncz is right, the RX 480 will kill the 950 and 960 in price and performance. The 950 is going to have to drop to close to $110-$130 to be a rational option at this point (and we still haven't seen the R7 360/370 replacement that is rumored). I'm guessing Nvidia will kill of the 960 soon and replace with a sub 1070 card at $225-$249. So the result will be, Nvidia kills off a 1.5 year old card a few months early, and drops the price on a budget level card. I really doubt the RX 480 is going to impact the 1070 or 1080 prices at all.

PlayfulPhoenix said:
Would NVIDIA do that if there wasn't a RX 480? If they didn't feel that AMD was being aggressive?

Look, even if we just accept that all of the refrains you mentioned are true for everyone (which isn't even remotely the case, but just for the sake of argument let's go with it), the RX 480 remains a really big deal, even for folks who would never buy an AMD card.

When Pascal and the 1080/1070 came out, I did a quick analysis of the perf-per-dollar in raw compute terms to demonstrate the value the newer parts were delivering. These were the figures I calculated at the time (and are basically the same now), in order from least to most value. Note that I was comparing the perf-per-dollar of NVIDIA's Maxwell and Pascal options in current-day terms (so, with current-day prices that reflect how cheaply you can get Maxwell now):

980 SLI: 8298 GFLOPS / $880 = 9.42
980: 4610 GFLOPS / $440 = 10.47
980 Ti: 5630 GFLOPS / $530 = 10.62
1080: 8900 GFLOPS / $599 = 14.85

I think any reasonable person would agree that a ~40% improvement in perf-per-dollar between generations is pretty great, right? People were excited for this hardware, and I felt that they had good reason to be. And again, this is comparing current-day prices for hardware, not launch prices, so this is giving the old hardware the best possible chance to shine. Yet, the 1080 is such a big improvement that it's actually the value buy right now, for folks that can budget for it. That's pretty awesome.

So remember that figure: 40%. Now, let me add both the GTX 1070 and the RX 480.

Look at what happens:

980 SLI: 8298 GFLOPS / $880 = 9.42
980: 4610 GFLOPS / $440 = 10.47
980 Ti: 5630 GFLOPS / $530 = 10.62
1080: 8900 GFLOPS / $599 = 14.85
1070: 6500 GFLOPS / $379 = 17.15
RX 480: 5000 GFLOPS / $199 = 25.12

Not only does the RX 480 deliver over 46% more perf-per-dollar than the GTX 1070 - it delivers nearly 70% more perf-per-dollar than the GTX 1080. 70%! Are you kidding me?

NVIDIA could only reach 40% against their own, over-one-year-old hardware, and AMD is absolutely crushing their just-released (and not-even-released) hardware right out of the gate. They beat down NVIDIA's 1070 in perf-per-dollar, and you'll basically have $379 MSRP versions of that card available at the same time as the RX 480.

And by the way, this assumes that AMD's ">5 TFLOPS" figure means "5.0001", so I'm not even giving them a fair shake right now. I think it's a wash since past testing has found that TFLOPS on AMD cards don't correlate as strongly with gaming performance when compared to NVIDIA (mostly due to some architectural differences), but still.

Frankly, anyone who looks at that and isn't floored is crazy. Anyone who thinks that isn't going to affect how NVIDIA prices their hardware is crazy. This is almost certainly a move by AMD to accept razor-thin margins, in exchange for massively boosting their market share as quickly as possible. And for NVIDIA customers, that means two things - either better prices, or better competition. Either way, everyone wins.

EdZ · Jun 4, 2016

I'll be holding off on judgements until the 480 is actually benchmarked. As with every past GPU launch, the TFLOP rating has meant pretty much naff-all in terms of practical performance in games, even when comparing cards of the same architecture.

Phuncz · Jun 4, 2016

IntoxicatedPuma said:
So the result will be, Nvidia kills off a 1.5 year old card a few months early, and drops the price on a budget level card. I really doubt the RX 480 is going to impact the 1070 or 1080 prices at all.

The problem is that most of the cards sold aren't 379$ and up cards, but mostly below 300$, according to AMD over 80%.
So that budget card could become an issue for Nvidia but on the other hand they have sold more expensive and less performing cards than AMD for a while now, seemingly riding on brand loyalty.

IntoxicatedPuma · Jun 4, 2016

But most of the money is made on the $379 and up cards, which means AMD is still going to be hurting if they aren't even competing in that segment.

iFreilicht · Jun 4, 2016

They aren't competing in that segment YET. I think the deal with bringing out low-performance cards first is that your manufacturing process doesn't have to work as well yet because you can disable a lot of processing units. So with the RX480 they're starting Polaris of and are optimising the process so they can then release the stronger cards in the future at a similarly competitive price and achieve better availability than in the past, because they don't have to bin as many chips or downgrade them.

alamilla · Jun 4, 2016

http://hexus.net/tv/show/2016/06/ROG_G31_takes_SFF_PC_performance_to_new_level

I had to laugh after watching this video.
The power supply alone looks to be bigger than an Ncase!
They had 20L to play with as well

IntoxicatedPuma · Jun 4, 2016

alamilla said:
http://hexus.net/tv/show/2016/06/ROG_G31_takes_SFF_PC_performance_to_new_level

I had to laugh after watching this video.
The power supply alone looks to be bigger than an Ncase!
They had 20L to play with as well

Jonsbo makes an ATX case that's about 23L. Too bad 1080's aren't designed for Triple SLI

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News Computex 2016 is upon us!

IntoxicatedPuma

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IntoxicatedPuma

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IntoxicatedPuma

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