Airmantharp wrote:With the mining craze, AMD should have increased production to meet increased anticipated demand, right? No? That's on them. See, I can actually buy a GTX1070, GTX1080, or GTX1080Ti, for inflated but reasonable prices.
cynan wrote:How exactly was AMD supposed to increase production on Vega?
They're not 'supposed' to increase production now. They're stuck. And that's true for all of their products and limitations. Point is, they can't make enough for the very meager demand that exists, and the ones they can make are expensive.
Airmantharp wrote:If you want to talk about margins, well, you admit that they're worse off than Nvidia by a long shot- but evidence would be needed either way. I'm betting that the best anyone can do is infer.
cynan wrote:Yup. Gaming Vega is almost, if not exactly, a loss-leader for AMD. But it was never intended to be competitive with Nvidia on a profit basis. It was a stepping stone to Navi (which AMD will have a chance to be competitive with) to retain mindshare in the high end gaming sector while AMD launched Ryzen. In the short term, AMD will take a hit due to gaming Vega. But gaming Vega will serve AMD's long term strategy just fine, at least as long as HBM2 supply ramps up sooner rather than later.
Link for Vega never intending to be 'profitably competitive'?
And AMD's long-term GPU strategy- which hasn't changed since they bought ATi- is to be hotter and slower (and usually louder) than Nvidia, while operating on thinner margins because the absolute largest GPU they can make ith HBM2 is only competitive with Nvidia's aging half-GPU?
Airmantharp wrote:And hooray, FreeSync is free! Except it isn't, comes attached to lower-end monitors, and that's okay because AMD simply cannot make a card that's fast enough to warrant a high-end gaming monitor.
cynan wrote:
I do; now compare the maximum refresh rate. Still 75Hz on these as on the 1440p 21:9 FreeSync monitors, whereas the 1440p G-Sync monitors are good to 100Hz. [H]ard|OCP did a comparison between Vega and 1080Ti, and they got the monitors as close as they could- because they couldn't get the exact same monitors save for variable v-sync tech.
I will say that this is on the monitor makers. They could do it, but they don't, and if one has to asks why they don't push the limits with FreeSync monitors, AMD's lack of ability to compete on the top end for gaming has very likely been influential.