I don't quite see a big problem for AMD when they abandon, for the moment, the top tier GPU segment like you guys are diacussing. If they can concentrate their resources to the mid and low tier GPUs and come up with really good GPUs to gain more market share, so that in 3 or 5 years they might come back strong to the top tier GPU segment, it's a great strategic move.
In my dream world, I repeat that in my dream world, imagine we can use the 4080 or even 4070 super as the barrier and AMD can release a mid tier GPU, for exp 8800xt, as good as the 4080 or 4070 super, with less power consumption and cheaper. A 4070 super in Spain now is around 800- 850euros, so if the theorical 8800xt is around 600-650, I'll buy it without blinking an eye.
It's simple: This line of thinking is the same line of thinking AMD displayed with both polaris and rDNA1. That they had limited resources, and it was better to focus on the smaller, easier to make, more popular products and less on the flagships.
The result was the same both times: Their main competitor took the entire high end market for themselves, printed an absolute mint, and used that money to pull further ahead while AMD fought for scraps. The 480 only competed with the 1060, and the 1070, with no competition, had free reign to sell more and make more money then the entire polaris lineup, not to mention the 1080 and 1080ti.
After that nvidia had free reign, prices started to go up, and progress stagnated. Meanwhile AMD's marketshare degraded further to where it is now.
Leaving your consumer base out to dry is a bad move. People like me, who bought high end AMD, now have nowhere to go but nvidia, so if we want to upgrade in the next 2-3 years, we'll have to go team green. Now while some of us are brand agnostic, most go with familiarity. It's HARD to get consumers to switch ecosystems, look at the server market, or the mobile market, and how hard AMD has had to fight to claw away market-share despite offering better products. The same applies to GPUs, evident in how long it took for AMD to claw back a smaller number of high end buyers.
We dont want them to make this mistake a third time. in 3-5 years, there will be no base of high end AMD users left, and they'll have to fight from 0 yet again, then get discouraged after 2 generations and give up again.
Which Linux distro are you using? I have Manjaro on my laptop (that I didn't buy for gaming) but I've thought about my next desktop going full Linux. That said, I recently upgraded my current one to Windows 11 and was able to avoid some of the shenanigans like a Microsoft account (apparently a group policy setting works well). But I'm still thinking about switching to Linux, and my experience with Manjaro shows it's not too difficult to run Windows apps on it, but there may be other options.
I've heard that AMD is better on Linux, too, but I find that surprising since so much of the Nvidia AI stuff runs on Linux. What has your experience been?
I run manjaro, its recommended since steamOS is now arch based and the debian distros based on ubuntu have issues with keeping MESA updated, which is crucial for Proton compatibility.
AMD is "better" on linux because the driver is open sourced, so if you are an open source absolutist and hate binary blobs with every fiber of your being, the choice is obvious. Nvidia definitely does not give linux the same level of game optimization as windows, so depending on the game AMD pulls ahead since the community does a pretty good job of maintaining the cards. They also have corectrl, which gives you nearly the same GPU tuning availability as you get in the windows AMD driver, which is nice to have on linux.
AMD is dependent on kernel updates and MESA for driver improvements, so if you prefer a more stable setup like Mint, nvidia actually does perform better. The new ubuntu distro is moving to fix this, we'll see if they can maintain the momentum.
