Now We All See the Genius of AMD Going Lowend First

[zinfamous]

A small % of the market can get you big profits if you gouge consumers enough. I wouldn't be surprised if nvidia made more money from 1070 and up cards than 1060 and below, even though the lower end stuff has an order of magnitude or two greater sales.

Apple makes 90-something percent of all smartphone industry profits with 15% market share.

I also doubt that the 1080 and up market is only 3% of all dGPU buyers

Sure, but AMD's goal is regaining marketshare at the moment, which is really far more important for them in the longrun as they are already going to make a fair profit for the rest of the year anyway (finally).

Upper tier is probably more than 3% of the dGPU market, but it certainly isn't more than 3% of the GPU market (that's probably being generous, no?)

AMD is aiming to regain share in the GPU market. 1080 and Vega is reserved for a niche nerdbase that, while useful, isn't really their goal. I do agree with an earlier poster that making strides in that area does a lot for the company's perception and helps to improve success in the real bulk of the market for their products, but it just doesn't seem like AMD needs to worry about that right now.

 

[Bacon1]

A small % of the market can get you big profits if you gouge consumers enough. I wouldn't be surprised if nvidia made more money from 1070 and up cards than 1060 and below, even though the lower end stuff has an order of magnitude or two greater sales.

Apple makes 90-something percent of all smartphone industry profits with 15% market share.

Yep Nvidia is more focused on profits than market share, the whole Flounder's Edition proved that.

I also doubt that the 1080 and up market is only 3% of all dGPU buyers

$600+ is tiny.

 

[Erenhardt]

Those are great results. The MSI lightning at stock is 21% faster than a stock 980ti at 1440p and the stock fury X is still beating it at 1440p.

They had to OC the 980ti even more for it to actually beat the Fury X.

And even after OCing 980ti to da moon the stock 4GB FuryX is faster @4K nightmare and probably takes less watts doing so

 

[poofyhairguy]

Who the hell doesn't?

I would dare argue that the vast majority of people who buy high end cards, do so both with an expectation of better performance at the time of purchase but also with an expectation of more longevity than they would get from a mid range card, so in other words plenty of people buy high end cards for performance 1+ year away.

I think the reality is the $600+ GPU market is chasing bragging rights just as much as framerates and they are MORE likely to ditch a card in a year to get the next best thing to secure those bragging rights. They care more, so they pay more, and will continue to pay more, for day zero bragging rights. Nothing wrong with that, one of the rewards of having a career that gives you a good income.

Hell a lot of posters in this very forum jumped from a 980 ti to a 1080, and those same people will probably jump to 1080 ti and so on. Meanwhile you look at the thread that is basically"who wants a 480" and it's a bunch of people with 3+ year old cards. You rarely see people in here repping the 780 ti or OG Titan but there are a lot of low-end or midrange Kepler owners.

It is the middle segment that cares about performance a year out, because they will for sure be on the same card then when the high end buyer is off chasing the next dragon. AMD can't succeed in that market as is, so delaying until the market is more favorable (aka more Directx12) is their only choice to get a card that wins out the gate in enough games to make high end GPU buyers take notice.

 

[rgallant]

A small % of the market can get you big profits if you gouge consumers enough. I wouldn't be surprised if nvidia made more money from 1070 and up cards than 1060 and below, even though the lower end stuff has an order of magnitude or two greater sales.

Apple makes 90-something percent of all smartphone industry profits with 15% market share.

I also doubt that the 1080 and up market is only 3% of all dGPU buyers

but to keep nv market share nv needs to sell 4 cards vs 1 amd card.
and every amd card sold [and any ps4/xb1 ] could mean 1 less gsync tax collected.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I never said anything about AMDs drivers. And you're focusing in on one small thing I said which misses the point of what I was saying: fanboyism is hard to understand, or in other words, the passion and framing the hardware marketplace as if it were political. These are just corporations, not the people who set our tax rates and are responsible for picking up our garbage.

If you are talking about me I hope I don't come across as pure fanboy in OP. I mean yeah I have a lot of AMD GPUs right now but that is due to Ethereum. Last year I blew like $600 total on Nvidia GPUs so I go back and forth. I was just trying to make a case that maybe AMD not competing in the prestige part of the market isn't the disaster it seems at first glance. I was trying to stimulate conversation.

I am passionate about technology, not AMD. And the focus of my passion is dying quite frankly.

Consumer CPUs are boring since Sandy and will forever be boring if Zen is a flop (due to a lack of competition). Smartphones are saturated and the form factor has somewhat plateaued. Set top boxes are boring as it boils down to the major players. TVs are boring because it's either the LG OLED or bust. AV audio is boring, Atmos is overrated and HD audio is lossless and you can't beat that. Solid states are fast enough to be boring, home networking is boring (the flopped Google router was the best chance for interesting in that segment), laptops are boring (nothing new), tablets are boring (same), monitors are boring (where is OLED or cheap and good 4k?), and new product categories that come out (smart watches anyone?) are hyped beyond imagination to fill in the boring gap and fail to do so. And consoles? Nothing is more boring than the modern x86 consoles that are just midrange PCs really. The cool custom chips are all gone.

Basically unless you are into drones (I am not), or you want to talk to your house (I don't), or you can afford a Tesla (I can not), or you buy what will quickly be obsolete VR equipment (again cannot waste that kinda dough on the next Betamax) there are no really interesting and dynamic segments in technology left. I got hooked on the VC&G forum last year trying to scratch that itch right as the once exciting mobile segment cooled. But thanks to the Fiji flop this market is getting close to boring as well unless AMD's plans pay off.

That is why I care, and that is why I write about it with passion.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Yeah, AMD's low-end strategy is going to work when the "$300+ for most of it's life" 970 is far and away the most successful GPU in the Steam survey ever.

 

[Insomniator]

What is genius exactly? The fact that they haven't had anything competitive in the mid-high end for CPU's or GPU's in years? Granted the picture is much worse with CPU's, but nothing is exciting about their GPU lineup either. Unless Vega is some huge turn around, its Nvidia all day if you have $250+.

 

[railven]

Man this thread truly brought me back to the HD 4800 days.

All that marketshare AMD gained by upsetting NV's pricing didn't do squat for them. They barely inched out of the red with HD 5000. And by HD 6000 they were holding ~40% Marketshare but hemorrhaging.

This is why they shifted back to "big chips" because they wanted to return to a premium product and thus get those sweet sweet margins. Too bad that blew up in their face too.

I don't get the the hooplah of AMD capturing the bottom. They had the bottom of the CPU section covered but still are barely getting by.

Mindshare is not built on bottom feeding. And while I know it sounds like I'm making a rude comment about those with limited funds, but brand isn't built on that.

AMD is just running head first to being the "bargain bin champions." But maybe, MAYBE, this time the end results will be different.


NV sold like what, 20% of what RX 480 had sold up to that point. But the numbers were something like NV $3Million to AMD's $400K. And I'm not even saying NV's approach is the solution, but they are just walking all over AMD.

On the CPU side, Intel is pretty much doing the same thing. I doubt you guys will hear the AMD CPU side go "yeah, lets get the mainstream buyers!!!" They want the crown! GPU side should too.

 

[guachi]

AMD is aiming to regain share in the GPU market. 1080 and Vega is reserved for a niche nerdbase that, while useful, isn't really their goal. I do agree with an earlier poster that making strides in that area does a lot for the company's perception and helps to improve success in the real bulk of the market for their products, but it just doesn't seem like AMD needs to worry about that right now.

Think of what more marketshare gets you - more game companies willing to code for things (DX12 and Vulkan) that will make their product more appealing to more buyers.

I mean, Doom became more appealing to me knowing I can run it at higher settings than I could last week.

 

[poofyhairguy]

What is but nothing is exciting about their GPU lineup either.

A $200 8GB (after flashing bios) 480 is pretty exciting in a Celeron 300A kinda way. But yeah if you can afford to pay twice that what Nvidia offers is faster, no debating it.

 

[Genx87]

Think of what more marketshare gets you - more game companies willing to code for things (DX12 and Vulkan) that will make their product more appealing to more buyers.

I mean, Doom became more appealing to me knowing I can run it at higher settings than I could last week.

Meh developers put in the bare min when it comes to optimizations. That is why Gameworks was created. AMD also helps with optimizations.

These devs typically target a base and run with it. A lot of these are targeting consoles. Hardware years old now.

AMD has both consoles and like 30% of the discrete pc market. If they cant get game companies to optimize for them now. A few more % in PC market share wont change that problem.

 

[Bacon1]

This is why they shifted back to "big chips" because they wanted to return to a premium product and thus get those sweet sweet margins. Too bad that blew up in their face too.

I don't get the the hooplah of AMD capturing the bottom. They had the bottom of the CPU section covered but still are barely getting by.

Mindshare is not built on bottom feeding. And while I know it sounds like I'm making a rude comment about those with limited funds, but brand isn't built on that.

The problem is, even with a premium cooler on the Fury X and performance almost the same as the 980 TI @ release for the same price, people shit all over AMD.

They can't win by offering better quality at the same price, they HAVE to provide better price/perf or people won't even give them a look. Its sad but many people won't even buy AMD when they are better price/perf (see low end cards last gen with 960 selling like crazy).

So how can they win? Even with 290(x) providing much better price/perf over the 780 (ti) they couldn't gain lots of market share. Every high end they've released has been very good but still lost market share to nvidia.

Taking back market share is very important for PC gaming because of how optimizations are done per game.

 

[Silverforce11]

Fury X did not match 980Ti on release, it was slower. It only started to match the reference 980Ti a few months later. But custom 980Tis run 20% faster.

The problem with the Fury X is 3 things: 1) lack of performance, 2) lack of overclocking headroom and 3) 4GB vram.

It should have been $100 cheaper than 980Ti on debut, would have been a hit launching at $549. But they didn't have many cards due to Amkor not ramping up interposer stacking til a few months after the launch, hence they figured they can price it higher and it will sell out anyway, which it did.

If AMD has a good GPU @ a good price, the market will reward them. RX 480 situation is exactly that, despite bad publicity on the PEG issue, it's still selling very well.

 

[3DVagabond]

The thing is I was talking about release cost as it's had awhile to get improvements in the way of drivers and now this.

Yes they can be comparative in price now but again this is for such a limited market and the 1070 beats it in 99.999% of the rest of the games out there very badly and again you are comparing their top of the line card to the 1070 that's the issue here as the 1070 is not that on nvidias end right now.

I know what you were saying. And I responded to what you were saying. I also said if we see more results like this. Not just one bench. Again, what the Fury X used to sell for is irrelevant now. It's last gen and it's showing it might be better optimized for today's games. And I said might be not that it definitely is. They are both currently ~$400 cards. If someone is looking for a card today that'sall that matters, as far as pricing. Now, you might prefer the gaming efficiency, and that's fine. Just like you might see more value in the much quieter AIO cooler on the Fury X.

 

[HiroThreading]

Fury X did not match 980Ti on release, it was slower. It only started to match the reference 980Ti a few months later. But custom 980Tis run 20% faster.

The problem with the Fury X is 3 things: 1) lack of performance, 2) lack of overclocking headroom and 3) 4GB vram.

It should have been $100 cheaper than 980Ti on debut, would have been a hit launching at $549. But they didn't have many cards due to Amkor not ramping up interposer stacking til a few months after the launch, hence they figured they can price it higher and it will sell out anyway, which it did.

If AMD has a good GPU @ a good price, the market will reward them. RX 480 situation is exactly that, despite bad publicity on the PEG issue, it's still selling very well.

With such terrible margins, Fiji should have been scrapped early on in its inception. Period. Shooting for HBM was overly ambitious and a terrible miscalculation.

AMD's resources should have been put toward improving GCN or building a better balanced, upscaled version of Hawaii with GDDR5X -- akin to what Nvidia did with Maxwell and Pascal.

Hawaii was a fantastic chip. It bested Kepler and will outlive Maxwell. However, AMD's decision to scale up its SP count while leaving the front-end unmodified in Fiji was a poor choice. Furthermore, all the extra memory bandwidth from HBM and memory compression in GCN 1.2 basically went unused in Fiji. Very expensive for not much return.

A beefed up Hawaii with more CUs, an improved front-end, slightly longer pipeline for higher clocks, memory compression and running GDDR5X would have been a fine chip to rival Pascal. It would probably have lower R&D costs than Fiji too.


On the marketing side of things, AMD should never have gotten rid of the ATI brand name. Big mistake, in my opinion. ATI had a lot of goodwill (despite R600) and was seen as an equal rival to Nvidia.

It's akin to why the VW Group doesn't get rid of the Audi brandname despite it owning Audi. A lot of people view Audi as a premium brand rivalling BMW and Mercedes. If you replace "Audi S4" with "VW S4", a lot of people get put off by the cheaper image of VW.

 

[Bacon1]

Fury X did not match 980Ti on release, it was slower. It only started to match the reference 980Ti a few months later. But custom 980Tis run 20% faster.

The problem with the Fury X is 3 things: 1) lack of performance, 2) lack of overclocking headroom and 3) 4GB vram.

It should have been $100 cheaper than 980Ti on debut, would have been a hit launching at $549. But they didn't have many cards due to Amkor not ramping up interposer stacking til a few months after the launch, hence they figured they can price it higher and it will sell out anyway, which it did.

If AMD has a good GPU @ a good price, the market will reward them. RX 480 situation is exactly that, despite bad publicity on the PEG issue, it's still selling very well.

Right, performance was close to 980 TI @ release, but it came watercooled. Cheapest watercooled 980 TI was the Evga @ $100 premium.

Again, AMD shouldn't have to have similar performance + watercooler for $100 less than the competition. There is no profit in that which is the whole point of having high end cards from what I was originally responding to

 

[3DVagabond]

A $200 8GB (after flashing bios) 480 is pretty exciting in a Celeron 300A kinda way. But yeah if you can afford to pay twice that what Nvidia offers is faster, no debating it.

It's not just being able to afford something. Some people have to see value in what they are buying and $600 GPU's that seem to perform worse with each passing month doesn't offer much value long term (To me anyway). I can afford to spend $10K on a PC and not worry about it. I would never get $10K worth of value out of it, though.

Then there are the nerdy enthusiast types who like to buy something cheaper and tweak the performance to a higher level. Things like unlocking shaders and 4GB cards that can be turned into 8GB cards are fun and entertaining to some people. Owning an aftermarket 290X and being able to outperform 980's is fun. And remember the 980 has only been last gen for a few weeks. Before that it was state of the art and was getting beaten by cards that were previous generation and were cheaper on top of it.

People like GPU mining as a money making hobby.

Then there are people who like open standards (Giving Mantle to Khronos to become Vulkan and making Adaptive Sync/Freesync a free and open standard. The GPU open program instead of black box dll's that require special licensing and NDA's.). A company who pushes the state of the art instead of just going along with the status quo (What Mantle did for low level API's on the PC, HBM memory).

People who don't want to worry that the specs on the cards are lies. Or a company who when they are confronted with an issue, Crossfire frame pacing or over drawing the PCIe connector, they own up and work on fixing it. They don't try and claim it's a "feature" and brag about the engineering involved.

One issue AMD has is the vast majority of people, even if they would care, have no knowledge of what AMD does and the value their products offer. That is 100% AMD's fault! If I was a major shareholder or on the BoD I'd have been issuing severance packages to people a long time ago for that failing. These idiots who go on Twitter and Facebook and put up poorer arguments than the average forum member does to support their product would be gone instantly.

Look at the power of media and how poorly it's used by AMD. Go look at TPU's front page right now. There's a 1070 review on the top. You look at their "Today's reviews" section and you find two GTX 1070 reviews listed. You look at the day before's and you see a 1070 and a 1080 review. You look at the day before that and you see a 380 review (WTH? 380!) and again a 1070 and a 1080. Go to TFT Central (Who I consider the preeminent monitor review site). There are 6 monitor reviews listed on their home page. Of that six, three are Gsync and one is Freesync. And the Freesync one is a $1200 Eizo premium high end display. While that's fine, and it's good to see there are high end Freesync models, that's not the main target audience for Freesync. And considering there are more Freesync models than Gsync available why is it 3/1 Gsync over Freesync on their home review page?

This isn't unusual. You can look around the web on any given day and you'll find it the same way.

TL/DR AMD is a group of great engineers doing a fantastic job, but they are morons when it comes to selling their stuff. /rant. Sorry for the wall of text. I could go on and on, but I'll spare you all.

 

[3DVagabond]

Meh developers put in the bare min when it comes to optimizations. That is why Gameworks was created. AMD also helps with optimizations.

These devs typically target a base and run with it. A lot of these are targeting consoles. Hardware years old now.

AMD has both consoles and like 30% of the discrete pc market. If they cant get game companies to optimize for them now. A few more % in PC market share wont change that problem.

Some people might not know this but market share is a huge "KPI" (key performance indicator). CEO's will lose or keep their jobs over that one measure of a company's health. I really can't overstate it. It's h-u-g-e.

 

[railven]

The problem is, even with a premium cooler on the Fury X and performance almost the same as the 980 TI @ release for the same price, people shit all over AMD.

Less memory, more power draw, pump noise issue, slower, and short in stock. While I'm sure you won't believe me, I tried to buy a Fury X. But I couldn't. Why I settled for a reference GTX 980 Ti I bought after saying screw it. I can show you my receipt where the order was literally made at 1AM almost into July because I couldn't wait anymore.

Throw in a $10 Gift card, two free games, and buying the EVGA Hybrid cooler separate, my card cost me less than Fury X and is water cooled

They can't win by offering better quality at the same price, they HAVE to provide better price/perf or people won't even give them a look. Its sad but many people won't even buy AMD when they are better price/perf (see low end cards last gen with 960 selling like crazy).

Well, that is due to their bargain bin repertoire. One they cultivated for years. Hell, the backlash here for $550 HD 7970 was astounding. Even when AMD had a better product, faster, used less power, and $50 less than the 3GB GTX 580, it went pretty much unrecommended by a prolific poster here. AMD jacked up MSRP from HD 6970 almost 50%. That was a no-no. I happily paid the cost of admission and loved my HD 7970, until I tried CFX and then just realized mGPU (specially at the time AMD's implementation of it) was terrible.

When perf / price is pushed so hard by one side and this trickles into other forums, I'm not surprised people WONT spend extra money for AMD. This is where I feel NV by even spitting in the face of majority of buyers did right. The Founder's Edition is nothing special, but it created this perception of value. And NV is reaping the profits because of it. I mean, look at the Fury Brand. I said it from the start, I don't think AMD handled it right. Fury should have been their premium name, one that demands a little extra. But because of performance and the AMD leadership, Fury was no Titan. And we go on to see Fury get price cuts Titan does not. Even if most consumers know Titan is not worth it, the perception is still there.

AMD launched the RX 480 with the sales slogan of "$500 GPU for only $200!"

So how can they win? Even with 290(x) providing much better price/perf over the 780 (ti) they couldn't gain lots of market share. Every high end they've released has been very good but still lost market share to nvidia.

One of those things here a lot of people promote actually hurt AMD. Bitmining. Radeons between 2013 and late 2014 were going for 20-50% over MSRP because of bitmining. When that bubble burst the market was flooded with used cards. It went from $800+ Radeon 290X to literally <$350 Radeon 290X in a little under a month.

This too hurts perception. Then R9 300 series launched and every scoffed at AMD raising the price because 290X could be easily had for <$250.

Taking back market share is very important for PC gaming because of how optimizations are done per game.

I disagree. Because even when AMD had a strong market share, games devs weren't going out of their way to optimize for AMD. That's why I loved AMD's Gaming Evolved push in 2012-2013. Lots of games they sponsored. Then that dried up and GameWorks showed up. AMD must have run their coffers thin because even the Mantle sponsored games can be counted on one hand. EDIT: And I think this is what ultimately hurt AMD for higher end GPU buyers. Mantle delivered so little and so late. And the mantra of "wait for the DX12 push" was heralded since basically 2015. 2016 is almost done and this onslaught of DX12 games is still lacking. Sure someone will rattle off a list of games, just like someone else did in 2015, but I won't be surprised if half the list gets blocked by NV-Gameworks money hatting. The other subset of every-day games will not be pushing these boundaries until well into 2017 if not beyond. I mean, come one look at some of the biggest sellers - they are literally still using modified DX9 code!!! in 2016!!!!

Now with the consoles trend, I see NV more than ever blocking AAA titles from running optimized on AMD day 1.

And NV is laughing all the way to the bank.

 

[railven]

On the marketing side of things, AMD should never have gotten rid of the ATI brand name. Big mistake, in my opinion. ATI had a lot of goodwill (despite R600) and was seen as an equal rival to Nvidia.

Yerp.

Not to mention essentially bastardizing the Radeon name.

Radeon SSD
Radeon RAM

I'm glad that stopped because I think they probably would have gone all the way and we'd have Radeon PSUs and Radeon Keyboards.

 

[krumme]

Some people might not know this but market share is a huge "KPI" (key performance indicator). CEO's will lose or keep their jobs over that one measure of a company's health. I really can't overstate it. It's h-u-g-e.

This.
Todays economy is different from earlier times.
The advantages of beeing the big guy is just overwhelming. It goes for tech dev but mostly on marketing and brand side.
Better communication and IT working platforms, and platforms strategies in general, mean you can use your size to eat smaller and perhaps more innovative companies.
The real profit is where you have 50% plus share. And going for something like 90% within your market is what to go for. Its worth taking a risk for what is perhaps not rational for the single company but from an portfolio of investments its the rationale choice.

 

[Sheep221]

AMD's poor attitude towards things will always make them, and their hardware second tier. They do occasionally release stuff that has a good value(price to performance ratio) but not much more. In fact, the only reason AMD was more favored for short time between 2003 and 2006 is because Intel just struggled with design flaws in netburst/prescott at the time. It's not hatred, it's not fanboyism, it's the truth.

 

[Dribble]

The proof will come in the sales results as always, but I can't see how AMD is a genius. They have 1 mid range desktop card worth buying - no mobile, no high end, no low end really, no professional, no hpc. That card is about to get eclipsed by their competitors response. Doesn't matter how many times people here say the 480 is amazing, it'll still get out sold 4:1+ by the 1060 (which won't just be brand but also because almost certainly the 1060 will be faster in most games played today as well as more power efficient, quieter, etc).

This is obviously not even taking account of the fact AMD is primarily a cpu company, and that market is nose diving to nothing and the great hope next gen zen is no where to be seen.

What AMD have going for them is console revenue (but hardly any profit) and a few hundred million from effectively selling off more of the company (which you can't keep doing).

 

[Cookie Monster]

Less memory, more power draw, pump noise issue, slower, and short in stock. While I'm sure you won't believe me, I tried to buy a Fury X. But I couldn't. Why I settled for a reference GTX 980 Ti I bought after saying screw it. I can show you my receipt where the order was literally made at 1AM almost into July because I couldn't wait anymore.

Throw in a $10 Gift card, two free games, and buying the EVGA Hybrid cooler separate, my card cost me less than Fury X and is water cooled



Well, that is due to their bargain bin repertoire. One they cultivated for years. Hell, the backlash here for $550 HD 7970 was astounding. Even when AMD had a better product, faster, used less power, and $50 less than the 3GB GTX 580, it went pretty much unrecommended by a prolific poster here. AMD jacked up MSRP from HD 6970 almost 50%. That was a no-no. I happily paid the cost of admission and loved my HD 7970, until I tried CFX and then just realized mGPU (specially at the time AMD's implementation of it) was terrible.

When perf / price is pushed so hard by one side and this trickles into other forums, I'm not surprised people WONT spend extra money for AMD. This is where I feel NV by even spitting in the face of majority of buyers did right. The Founder's Edition is nothing special, but it created this perception of value. And NV is reaping the profits because of it. I mean, look at the Fury Brand. I said it from the start, I don't think AMD handled it right. Fury should have been their premium name, one that demands a little extra. But because of performance and the AMD leadership, Fury was no Titan. And we go on to see Fury get price cuts Titan does not. Even if most consumers know Titan is not worth it, the perception is still there.

AMD launched the RX 480 with the sales slogan of "$500 GPU for only $200!"



One of those things here a lot of people promote actually hurt AMD. Bitmining. Radeons between 2013 and late 2014 were going for 20-50% over MSRP because of bitmining. When that bubble burst the market was flooded with used cards. It went from $800+ Radeon 290X to literally <$350 Radeon 290X in a little under a month.

This too hurts perception. Then R9 300 series launched and every scoffed at AMD raising the price because 290X could be easily had for <$250.



I disagree. Because even when AMD had a strong market share, games devs weren't going out of their way to optimize for AMD. That's why I loved AMD's Gaming Evolved push in 2012-2013. Lots of games they sponsored. Then that dried up and GameWorks showed up. AMD must have run their coffers thin because even the Mantle sponsored games can be counted on one hand. EDIT: And I think this is what ultimately hurt AMD for higher end GPU buyers. Mantle delivered so little and so late. And the mantra of "wait for the DX12 push" was heralded since basically 2015. 2016 is almost done and this onslaught of DX12 games is still lacking. Sure someone will rattle off a list of games, just like someone else did in 2015, but I won't be surprised if half the list gets blocked by NV-Gameworks money hatting. The other subset of every-day games will not be pushing these boundaries until well into 2017 if not beyond. I mean, come one look at some of the biggest sellers - they are literally still using modified DX9 code!!! in 2016!!!!

Now with the consoles trend, I see NV more than ever blocking AAA titles from running optimized on AMD day 1.

And NV is laughing all the way to the bank.

Well said!