And AMD needs a 4090 competitor.....
Right now, AMD needs to focus on taking market share away from Nvidia. People still, largely (despite all of its kerfuffles and screw-ups) yearn for GeForce cards. AMD can't just make a competitor to the 4090 or eve the 5000 series, until it's products are performance-competitive. At this point in time, an AMD "RX 9090 XTX" or something, would not be a winning part. Why?
Because as much as gamers today detest the idea, raytracing/pathtracing truly is the future of gaming, and Nvidia is the undisputed king of raytracing. It's 5090 card, like it or not, is best-in-class. Also, Nvidia has been making absolute gangbuster developing enterprise machine learning solutions, for years now; AMD, on the other hand, only recently released products that are AI-focused. They spent the better part of a decade developing FSR as a software-based solution to Nvidia's hardware-based DLSS, because they were determined to provide a "better solution" than vendor lock-in, going so far as to add extra longevity to even Nvidia's older cards that DLSS did not support because it lacked the hardware. Unfortunately, a software solution to a hardware problem was always going to be inadequate. They eventuall
y caved (after 3 versions of FSR failed to achieve parity with DLSS), because the gap between the software and hardware was not closing fast-enough. Gamers are notoriously fickle, plus the big bucks now are in machine learning and AMD are late to the party. If they wanted to be a serious rival to Nvidia, they
should have been better about responding to market trends and made similar decisions (be they bad for the consumer or not), but they decided to be mostly customer-focused and
not pull nickle-and-diming schemes, like locking away DLSS 1 to 2000-series cards and telling customers to "suck it up and buy the new shiny thing". How were they rewarded? With less market share and less revenue than Nvidia.
That is reality. They cannot compete with Nvidia at the high end, because they decided to be "the good guys" and the good guys do no always win. Sometimes they don't win at all. Why are they focusing on the mid-range part of the market exclusively? Because they know that they do not have an answer for the RTX 5090; they barely have a response to the 5080. But, they
do have a response to the mid-range and below. That is their bread-and-butter.
On the bright side, the lack of availability of 5000-series cards is a golden opportunity for them to appeal to people's desire for "better", not simply "more". If you cannot get a 5070 (though, with the revelation that some 5070s are defective, that might be changing), then you can always go Team Red. Better features, better value, better products. AMD would be foolish not to "seize the day"...
