I guess what I really hate is the fact that AMD doesn't get the sales/credit that it is due. They have been putting out great products for a very long time. If they had the funds available you better believe we would have had Vega day 1. Why else would they just release the mid-low range chips? Why force a compromise if you don't have to?
You can't just give AMD a win because, well they're the underdog. AMD still has to deliver a product worth buying day 1, not 120+ days later.
HD 7970 - great card, I bought mine happily for $550, OC'd it, no problems. GTX 680 beat it, for less, and scored the "trifecta" because AMD was asleep with their drivers. The fact that this place seems to forget just how bad the drivers for the 7970 were blow my mind (digging up something I recalled in another thread reminded me that for the first 2-3 months of owning the 7970 you had to use the launch driver if you wanted CFX because it didn't work with any of the newer drivers and you had to wait until March to get an updated driver that was compatible with the 7970.)
Then in
April it got price gut to $480 and bundled with 3 games. So anyone who bought a 7970 between launch and March got screwed out of ~$100-120 in value. EDIT: Because I'm not a hypocrite, I didn't complain - I paid my early adopter tax, but you bet prolific posters here suddenly flip flopped and the 7970 was the best thing since slice breaded where as a month earlier it was overpriced and not worth it.
If they had been receiving income directly proportional to their engineering and actual video card values they would have had R&D budget to make this generation even better.
If they would not fumble out the gate, they'd probably be received better.
And guess what nvidia fans? That 1080 that's $600? It would have been $400 out of the gate if buyers had done proper research and AMD received higher sales in the 79070/290x generations. Instead AMD could only bring out Polaris and nvidia gets to charge whatever the feel like for the 1080.
Don't get me started on the 290X. The card that bent, but didn't break my AMD/ATI loyalty. It launched with a terrible cooler, you had to wait almost 3 months for custom coolers, and by then the
mining craze inflated the price up to $800 in some regions. I got a GTX 780 Lightning (note: refurbed but RMA'd to brand new) for $100 less than the Radeon 290 MSI gaming was selling for. I don't even completely blame AMD for this, but this is where someone like NV would jump on the market (such as now, their founder's edition.) You want a Radeon for mining, but the Radeon Bitming Edition MSRP $1000. Trust me, it would have sold, and all that money would have gone to AMD, instead retailers were gouging the cards and making bank while AMD would later face a used market that would drop their card's value under $300.
Do I even need to talk about Fiji? Another botched opportunity by AMD. "Let's sell a slower product, with less memory, and it uses more power for the same price as our competitor but at least we got a watercooler!" /facepalm Nano anyone? "It's the best choice for SFF the premium is justified" 3-months later "NANO PRICE CUT!!!" /facepalm
Sure, someone will chime in and say "that was AMD maximizing profits" yeah, I agree, but the Nano became a lot more popular even around here when it was $500, not $650.
EDIT: A lot of this might come off as me being angry/frustrated, because frankly I was. Years I supported AMD/ATI, only to keep watching them screw things up. Then posters here erasing the first 2-3 years of owning say an HD 7970 to "OMG, look at it go! Definitely the best card EVER!!!" Anyways, bah! Haha. Back to jovial Railven.