The surprise was intel getting market share to begin with as their prime market would have been the budget concious gamer - but as most of them are still on PCIe 3.0 systems that don't support resizable BAR features the discrete intel cards are a non-starter.
PCI-E 3 supports Resizable Bar / Smart Access Memory just fine?
I have three AMD B450 systems and all of them support Resizable Bar.
iirc it was part of the PCI-E specs for ages but just wasn't used until AMD finally did and NVIDIA soon followed. Intel does rely on it far more heavily as Arc performance with it disabled is abysmal.
I'm not surprised that nVidia has 88% of the GPU market share, what I find surprising is that there are 12% of the market choosing the less capable cards that AMD puts out.
I picked up the Radeon RX 6700 XT for the same price as the RTX 3060 12GB went for. The card is so much more powerful that even in some raytracing titles performance is about on par. Without Raytracing it's clearly the better card - my partner has the RTX 3060 which at the time of purchase was the better deal so performance is really easy to compare and I'm definitely not unhappy with my choice.
In the low-mid range their offerings are definitely not less capable and if the price is right (not the case at all times) imo great buys.
No, AMD is hurt by their abysmal software. Their drivers are just as bad as Intel's and have NEVER not been that way. They absolutely ruined ATI when they bought it, and they've been limping it along ever since. I work in IT and have for over 20 years. 99.9% of the time, the issue is AMD's software/firmware. It is not stable. Even if they somehow perform better from time to time, you can't rely on their stability. Any of my customers that use AMD get switched over or they get dropped as a customer. I refuse to deal with AMD's incompetence.
Is this due to any software in particular that's a bad match? The ITers I know have never had a bias against Radeon unless CUDA was required. In my personal experience I have never had any major problems either (not more than with NVIDIA at least) and I've been using both sides for like 24 years now under both Linux and Windows. (Linux went from NVIDIA being the preferred choice to AMD being the preferred choice)
The only person I know that has sworn to never buy AMD again had a Vega card with the black screen of death and used the system professionally so downtime was a big no-no.
And yes the black screen of death was bad and took them too long to fix. But it's not like NVIDIA is free from screw ups like that either, hell - GPUs desoldering themselves (was it the 8000, 9000 series?) cost them Apple as a customer forever.
Definitely wouldn't put them in the same league as Intel where hundreds of games refused to launch or crashed when they first launched (much improved now, but they're still behind).
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Oh I'll add to my previous post that NVIDIA didn't just play dirty in software with Gameworks, they also 'de-incentivized' their partners to sell Radeon products. XFX became a victim of this, they used to be NVIDIA only but then started selling Radeon products. NVIDIA wasn't having that and nowadays XFX is AMD exclusive. Bet their partners have some regrets playing along now that NVIDIA is putting in more efforts at selling their founders editions in greater numbers.
If that's too long ago for you younger readers, in 2018 NVIDIA had to pull their "
NVIDIA Partner Program". There's tons of rumors about similar behavior if you listen to channels like Moore's Law is Dead etc that supposedly have industry contacts (yes, rumors - but they seem credible).
