[brandon]

Depending on how much stock you put into the Steam Hardware Survey, it's worth noting that Nvidia still controls 74% of the market relative to AMD's 15%: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

I also feel like graphics cards are one of those weird things that command a lot of brand loyalty, so it's probably going to take more than near-performance-parity to move the needle.

[j-c-hewitt]

I think the marketshare contributes more to the actual inferiority of AMD cards at the midrange compared to the hardware specs.

Because AMD is a minority and game developers know it, driver-related bugs that would be priority 1 to fix if it affected nVidia users are bottom priority for AMD users. The AMD midrange cards are wonderful in terms of the hardware for certain displays and competitive in every way from a hardware perspective. Especially if you are looking for 60fps+ @ 1080p you can get awesome deals by going with AMD.

Just be prepared to occasionally have issues like BSODing whenever a game renders a lot of white textures like snow scenes for six months at a time unless you downgrade the drivers to a specific version, which will then be fixed in a driver update and broken again if you are an AMD user. Or to occasionally have driver crashes that developers acknowledge and don't fix for months. And to fuss with shader cache settings and things like that because those settings are busted for AMD for some specific game you want to play.

It's not even necessarily that the drivers suck. They don't suck. They're fine. It's that the developers don't have a big incentive to fix bugs that only impact a smaller segment of the market. While it's not like there aren't a lot of nVidia only bugs that crop up, because of its market share, those bugs are almost always a higher priority to fix and you really notice it if you have used both GPU manufacturers at the same time over a period of years or have used both at various times.

Most of the nVidia tech gimmicks usually suck and are uninteresting (HairWorks, physx, realtime ray tracing) and those that don't suck are usually matched quickly (Gsync). But the marketshare alone is sort of a perversely positive feature because it just means you are on the same drivers as the majority of the market so bugs that impact you are a higher priority for developers to fix.

[Mirioron]

>Most of the nVidia tech gimmicks usually suck and are uninteresting (HairWorks, physx, realtime ray tracing)

This isn't even a gimmick though. This is the future, because our current way of doing shadows and lights will keep increasing in complexity, but will never be good enough. Whether nvidia's solution will work is a different matter, but this most certainly is not a gimmick.

[eropple]

> competitive in every way from a hardware perspective

Power usage.

[jplayer01]

There's nothing gimmicky about real-time raytracing.

[j-c-hewitt]

Now, in the next 3 months, this year, it is a 100% gimmick that is all running on hybrid technology instead of full ray tracing. I own an RTX and I can tell you that it is a gimmick that no one turns on except to see what it looks like once and you can count the number of games that support it on less than one hand.

Over the next 3 years and the next generation of cards, absolutely, great technology.

[jplayer01]

Jesus, maybe appreciate the fact that just a few years ago real-time raytracing was nothing but a pipedream. Now we have cards on the market that can do a limited amount of real-time raytracing. That's huge. Next year they'll get faster. The year after that they'll get faster. More games will support it. Developers will buy in. This is a generational change that will take 10+ years. That doesn't make this any less significant. It's not a gimmick if it's going to take time for things to develop. That's how things work.

[j-c-hewitt]

In 2019 it is a technically interesting gimmick that tanks your FPS. This shouldn't be that controversial, because it is the nearly universal opinion of reviewers and of people who have the card. What is interesting from a technical perspective can easily be a gimmick from the perspective of a consumer. I bought an RTX for the regular performance and maybe DLSS (which although not widespread is not currently a gimmick). By the time actual ray tracing and not hybrid ray tracing gains wider adoption, the next generation of RTX cards will already be out.

I can even link you to a video from a Youtuber sponsored by nVidia that essentially says that it is a nice-looking gimmick that will be nice for cinematic single player games that isn't that useful for fast paced multiplayer games in which most gamers will pick performance over image quality most of the time. DLSS because it is a performance feature is in a different category. Like Hairworks RTX is a tech demo type feature that most users will turn off to get dozens of FPS more.

[jplayer01]

It's either this or we don't get raytracing at all. Do you not understand how things develop? They have to start implementing it somewhere and develop the tools and engine to support it, but the hardware doesn't exist for them to do raytracing globally. They have to gain experience and develop practices for implementing it. This is a good first step that will lead to more. How are you not getting this?

[raphar]

I will change my card Without looking back for any brand that can run the same games for 100$ Less...

The case is im not that picky when it comes for graphics. Ive seen too many games with wonderfull graphics and just plain boring.

[partiallypro]

Absolutely for gaming, Nvidia has a very loyal fanbase (myself included since the 4600GTX days) but for data centers? Different ball game. Both companies are now pushing into that territory pretty hard.

[shmerl]

At least Linux gaming shows negative trend for Nvidia (though it's still a big majority), and for the obvious reason - AMD provide open source drivers which have become very competitive lately.

See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

[pavon]

I'd say CUDA has an even bigger lead over OpenCL than Nvidia has over AMD in the gaming market.

[shmerl]

Not CUDA itself, but lock-in of various libraries that are CUDA-only. No one stops you from making a library that works with OpenCL or Vulkan for example for compute purposes.

[alfalfasprout]

No one stops you but it's a huge time investment. It's not only CUDA... it's the massive amount of optimized libraries NVIDIA provides. For example, CuBLAS (linear algebra libraries), CuDNN (libraries for deep learning). These things really need massive engineering teams to pull off and are very tied to the hardware.

[shmerl]

So there should be combined effort to make such libraries that are cross hardware. If many people need it, why don't they pool resources and create open libraries like that?

[ulzeraj]

I don’t know about brand loyalty but I’m not letting nvidia with that stinking binary blob near any of my systems any day regardless of technology. The new open source amdgpu drivers are fully open source and pack a serious punch.