Indeed, if you listen closely you can hear the brown paper bags rustling....or are they green?
Battlebox for Origin, and then this announcement at the same time - chances are, it's probably more than a coincidence..
OUCH! He could at least try...PCWorld asked them about it and about being paid off to which Origin PC CEO Kevin Wasielewski gave the following non-denial. ”Not sure who told you that, but I would definitely like to comment on that because we absolutely do not want anyone to get that impression.”
It took Origin 15+ years to collect feedback on ATI/AMD based GPUs? In other words, a firm that sold high-end PC hardware put up with customer complaints and spent financial resources to maintain more customer support/technical staff for that long and finally they threw in the towel?
Do some of you realize that small firms are run by entrepreneurs that are very much in touch with their business. A small business owner would analyze their cash outflows and look at the cost/benefit analysis every single year in very great detail because small firms can't withstand economic downturns and declines in profitability as well as larger firms can. If the cost of dealing with technical issues from both a financial and labour point of view was very high, the management would have been taking steps to minimize these costs a long time ago. There is just no way they would have waited 15 years.
More likely than not they are just making higher margins on NV's products since now NV's flagship cards sell for much higher than AMD cards -- $650-1000. If you are a boutique PC builder, your goal is to sell your products for as high as possible and to maximize profits. It makes no sense then to ditch 780/Titans and keep selling HD4870/4890/HD5870/6970/7970s if you can sell $650-1000 GPUs in SLI bundles. This decision was likely made before they knew AMD would price R9 290X.
Being sponsored by NV for BattleBox also implies they likely get a very nice discount on 780/Titan SLI systems, something I bet AMD isn't providing with R9 290X cards to them. This might have been the final blow.
From Origin's point of view:
1) Keeping all systems to NV's cards simplifies their technical support
2) Keeping all systems to NV increases their ASPs/revenue and likely profit margins
3) Supporting point #2, now that NV carved out a new $1000 niche GPU pricing segment, this is unlikely to go away while AMD publicly stated they will not make $1000 GPUs in the near future. If you are Origin, this alone is incentive enough to move away from AMD entirely and push $1000 Titan/690 and their 20nm successors.
Another point, if AMD/ATI's GPUs were so broken for 15 years, why is it NV had faced so many issues (and that includes IQ problems for tri-linear textures / anisotropic filtering) during FX5000 series generation against 9700/9800 series and ATI destroyed them during X1900 vs. GeForce 7 showdown? For anyone who had a chance to use both during those eras, it is impossible to make any case for NV. GeForce 7 also had inferior IQ to ATI, especially AA. Finally, if AMD's GPUs were so broken, how did they gain market share during HD5000 series generation?
I can probably guess that 90% of the people who used NV hardware have used GeForce 5 and GeForce 7 despite those 2 generations ATi/AMD having superior product without a single doubt from both a performance and IQ points of view. What's consistent over the years is that NV having IQ issues, SLI also having scaling issues as tested by Computebase, GameGPU, Xbitlabs and other sites over the years, these are very often dismissed by NV users.
I still remember switching from ATI to 6600 and to 8800GTS and being in shock at how awful NV's 2d IQ was.
I think this decision was made mostly for profitability and ASP prices and Origin's business strategy much more aligned with selling $1,000 flagship GPUs that AMD does not provide. They cannot state this publicly which is why they made up another reason, but I do not believe it's the primary reason they are switching.
This is actually no different than Alienware selling flagship NV cards in their notebooks. If you can sell GTX780M for $400-500 more than HD8970, as a business you will want to do this. Why would you want to sell a product with 85% of the performance but has substantially lower profit margins? You have a lot less incentive to do that.
Is this the registry hack with the sound problem from AMD through HDMI?
Because I CANT FIND IT and I need to do it again. Right now, no one can watch anything other than WMC player on my hTPC because of AMDs stupid HDMI Audio issues. VLC will not display audio until I play WMP in the background (and mute it ofg course). Then the AMD card decides "Hey, I should probably play Audio!". It's so annoying.
Orgin PC dropping AMD was fine and all but apparently, according to PC-World, you can still special order AMD cards, which they wouldn't do if they were that much of an support issue.
The simple fact that they made the statement is enough proof of their guilt. You simply don't do pointless bridge burning in business - what are they going to do if Nvidia goes bankrupt?
If there was a real problem, they'd have done it quietly.
This, it seems really fishy.
I could buy into the nvidia payback scheme, which seems like the most likely answear to this intire thing.
Anyways shame on nvidia for useing tactics like this, and shame on "Orgin PC" for selling out.
This, it seems really fishy.
I could buy into the nvidia payback scheme, which seems like the most likely answear to this intire thing.
Anyways shame on nvidia for useing tactics like this, and shame on "Orgin PC" for selling out.
Shame on AMD for making such a half assed multi GPU solution.
If someone wants to pay you to do something you already wanted to do and would benefit you, that's not selling out.
Well, that certainly bought out the boys in Red........How dare they besmirch the mighty AMD...its untrue, it must be a lie!...wow, some have even done close on 1000+ words to prove its false...
Well, that certainly bought out the boys in Red........How dare they besmirch the mighty AMD...its untrue, it must be a lie!...wow, some have even done close on 1000+ words to prove its false...
Ah, a principled buyer. Did you also choose an AMD CPU over Intel?I will buy R9 290X for answer to NV+OriginPC.