What's the reasonable argument for significantly more AMD users, than NVidia users, choosing not to participate?
Plus it isn't like Steam Contradicts other sources:
Nvidia reportedly has 80% of the discrete PC GPU market, Jon Peddie Research claims.
www.pcgamer.com
I don't think it's an unreasonable argument to make, but there's two problems with using an unreliable source as sole support for such an argument.
The first is that the onus to provide support for a claim falls solely on the person making it. No one even need offer a counter argument and your own isn't any stronger for lack of them.
The second is that a single argument need compete against yours. Your argument isn't playing one on one against any others. Rather it's competing against the field of all other arguments.
If we were to posit that there are more AMD cards being sold than we suspect it's likely a result of dozens of very small reasons that each contribute a tiny amount as opposed to one single reason that's been overlooked. One anecdotal example is that I have a Mac which has an AMD GPU in it. I just don't use that computer to play games and it doesn't have Steam installed. It will never show up in the hardware survey even though I have Steam installed on other machines.
I wouldn't doubt that NVidia has sold more cards than AMD in the PC market for a good while now, but I don't necessarily believe that AMD's sales are as low as purported by some either. If I really wanted to substantiate that claim though I'd need a lot more than Steam hardware survey results.
If you think this standard of evidence is too burdensome, it's only the same that's used in the medical field or anywhere else where lazy reasoning based on bad assumptions or unreliable data could get someone killed. Speculation on forums probably won't lead to untimely death so it isn't necessary, but it doesn't change that unreliable evidence is still unreliable and can easily lead to bad conclusions and incorrect beliefs.
Ryan lives in Oregon near the giant fires. But since nobody can buy the cards anyway, them being late should not matter too much.
I wonder if there's a connection here. Cards that draw a lot of power and run really hot and wildfires in a place where someone is reviewing those cards... Hmm....
/s
There are two different things here,
What you are saying is that the RX5700XT can compete in Raster performance with the RTX2070 Super at $100 less in the latest games. Thats fine I havent disputed this one.
The other thing that im talking about is the Product market slot , where the RX5700XT was originally put in the Graphics Card market when released.
AMD wanted to compete in the $300-$400 TAM against the TU106 (RTX2060 and RTX2070 at the time). NAVI 10 was designed at 250mm2 just so to be able to slot in that segment.
That is why they attacked the RTX2070 that had a MSRP of $499 and made NVIDIA to release the RTX 2060 Super at $399 so they could compete against the RX5700XT at the same price.
Now if you say that RX5700XT is RTX2070 Super competitor, then you take a very small die Card and put it against a must better product both in Performance and Features. The result is that the majority of people will spend $100 more for more features (RTX) and same Raster performance when one product has NVIDIA in the name.
This is not what AMD originally wanted from RX5700XT, they wanted to compete against the RTX2070/2060 Super , because the RX5700XT have much better Raster performance at the same price. Not same performance at lower price.
So to sum up, you are talking about performance competition and Im talking about Product segment competitor.
Product segments aren't something that consumers care about and that companies can't predict with any accuracy. AMD doesn't have exact information on NVidia's plans any more than NVidia has exact information on AMD's plans. You can try to design a product for a segment of the market that exists as more of a mental conception than anything concrete, but it's just a guess to guide development or to serve as a planning exercise for business reasons. When the product comes to market that segment may not actually exist for a variety of reasons.
AMD need not even have to consider competing products to develop their own. They could merely approach those choices from the perspective of wanting to build cards that they can sell for $200, $300, $400, $500, $700, and $900 and develop solely on what they believe they would need to offer to get consumers to pay those prices and what's feasible to build to recoup any investment into the production of that product.
We've seen too many examples of AMD trying to build a product that didn't have a lot of things pan out. Drivers never materialized to utilize new hardware features, the clock speeds couldn't be pushed as high as necessary, a part of the architecture caused an unanticipated bottleneck, or any other number of issues that have plagued AMD cards for a while now. In the end any intentions that the might have had were dashed on the rocks, but since they have cards to sell the only thing most consumers care about is value per dollar and AMD can't escape the actual results along with the perception of their brand's value.
Also RT performance for everything below the 2080 Ti was garbage unless you were interested in the novelty of using RT. Anyone who bought a 2070 SUPER for anything other than raster performance was deluding themselves a bit in my mind. Hopefully NVidia keeps seeing the same kind of generational improvements to their RT tech as the jump from Turing to Ampere, otherwise it's going to be a long time before it filters into the mainstream in a way that's beneficial to consumers. I'm skeptical about how much the new consoles will be able to do with it and have a feeling it will end up being another gimmick used to push new hardware, but that's hardly NVidia's fault.