AMD, don't f*** this up, okay? We're making this video because we've had a number of people at AMD over the last week tell us that they don't know what the 9070 or 9070 XT will be priced at yet. That's a decision being made pretty high up.
And AMD is currently asking the media how it should price its GPUs. And the GPUs launch, well, the pricing launches, in, uh, two days! So this is concerning.
The answer to the question of what should the price of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT be is as low as possible. Andy, you can make more money next time. Right now, we think what you need is to make customers and to capitalize on the present golden opportunity to win goodwill. I believe in Corpo speak, this is referred to as a hearts and minds type of campaign.
We want to see what's best for enthusiasts. and for consumers. And for that segment right now, people want a hero.
AMD can either maintain status quo and make a slightly cheaper GPU following its NVIDIA minus $50 mantra, or it can really try to make an impact this time when its competitor is screwing up as much as possible. NVIDIA currently has shoved a fork into an outlet to see what happens. And now all we're waiting to do, everyone in the audience right now is watching to see, does AMD... grab onto Nvidia and discover Ohm's and, I guess, Kirchhoff's law, or does it simply walk away?
Remains to be seen. And you know what, AMD, we need to talk, so come with me over to camera two. There's no camera two, I need to move this one. Hello, AMD, we don't normally get to speak this intimately, but they can't hear us right now.
This is what you want. These are customers. Customers have money. Money. generally is liked by companies.
So in order to get customers money, we need to do some simple math. Currently, your formula is MSRP equals NVIDIA minus $50 plus social mockery by executives. Now, we are going to abbreviate this to the variable X. That is because this X is where the bubble is located that those executives live.
Now, Intel, their pricing strategy is a little different. Intel, their MSRP is equal to, please God, somebody buy our GPUs, we will wrap them in money if we have to. NVIDIA's MSRP strategy is lots of money. Just all of it.
Now look, if money is the tide that lifts all boats, then NVIDIA is the frigate. And AMD is the dainty to NVIDIA's frigate. Intel is drowning in the middle of the ocean. But we've done the calculus to work backwards from these different formula. And here's what we've come up with.
The money starts here at customers, and then it goes directly there. It's just straight there. It's literally just a line to NVIDIA. Well, we didn't need the whole whiteboard and the... Camera 2 and I'm just gonna move it back now.
We brought you this video turns out the GN store coupon code We made to make fun of us also works in this situation. You can use code about in time That's about FK and time at checkout for 10% off anything on the GN store right now We're majority funded by viewers these days So consider grabbing one of our functional and useful high heat resistant silicone project and soldering mats for your soldering and electronics Repairs or your miniatures painting and model building You might also want to grab an anti-static PC building mod mat, which we've been selling for around eight years or so now, and it's a hugely convenient, rugged work surface with great texturing to it. It's great for the garage, too.
You should also check out our seven-piece sharp-edge resin dice kits for tabletop gaming, which include an e-waste inductor model that uses actual e-waste copper coil inductors embedded in the dice, packed in a custom wooden box with a GN Alchemy logo and integrated roll tray. Or check out our Snowflake the Cat model of the dice, featuring a tiny snowflake miniature. Each set also comes with its own playing cards. We've made a huge push so far this year, getting deep dive testing live, like getting our fan tester operational and publishing the first data a few weeks ago, and we've been heavily digging into GPU performance. And that's all funded by you all.
Thanks for your support, and use code ABOUT4. time for 10% off anything on the store while the code is active. NVIDIA has just had the worst strain of screw-ups in a long time. The company hasn't had a launch this disastrous since the NVIDIA Grill Force GTX 480 Fermi cards. NVIDIA had immediate total high power problems with its 575 watt 5090, despite saying it had solved those issues.
That was a weird thing to say. Its GPUs were found to be missing physical hardware that was advertised as present, then when it responded, it excluded the 5080. Then two days later, it said, actually, yep, oops, that one was affected as well. It has had a dearth of stock, despite claiming the 5070 Ti would be well-stocked.
Prices aren't real, with even MSRP running rampant, and with first-party partners scalping their own customers with their own inventory with undesirable combos. Claims of, quote, awesome overclocking on the 5070 Ti were debunked by awesome overclocker Der Bauer. Marketing around the card uses MFG4X to... unfairly artificially inflate the relative performance on the charts.
Intel in 2016 was a massive moment for AMD. That's when Ryzen was created and it pulled the best products possible out of both Intel and AMD in that time. But NVIDIA in 2025 has one key difference from Intel in 2016 that we think really matters.
And that difference... Is this guy. Okay, one, two, three. Sensing it with me, I really.
This is the part, this is the part. Like NVIDIA. All right, very good, very good. Okay, to be fair, I thought the editors were going to use a clip where he was more fearsome or intimidating or something.
Do we have anything like that? Like that. I am the sound effect. Look, the point is, Jensen Hwan. CEO of Nvidia gets very aggressive when Nvidia is beaten down.
Nvidia, unlike Intel, has a history of at least briefly turning the ship around and regaining public sentiment. It has teams of people who are skilled specifically at managing and rebuilding and recovering public sentiment. Intel talked about how its competitor glued CPUs together, is in the rearview mirror even though it was in front of it in a semi-truck, and something about snake oil. So the opportunity is Intel 2016, but the competitor is much different. And we're not sure if AMD's executives recognize all those factors.
Internally, the people at AMD, from what we've heard, who are in touch with reality and close to the consumer segment, understand what the pricing should be, are fighting for competitive pricing on the 9070 series. The difference is that the people in touch with reality are not the ones in control of pricing. The people who are in control of pricing say things.
like this. I'm next level up in gaming. Personally, I've been playing some of my favorite games on a new 900X3AD like Hardware's Legacy, Far Cry 6, and Ashes of the Singularity.
I, well, Ash, now is the time that AMD has an opportunity to capture market share if it wants to. It's up to AMD. They're in charge of what they're doing over there.
And I remember being at a Polaris launch event. Several years ago, it was the 480 or the 580 refresh event, but we were at that event and I remember someone in the media asking then-AMD's Raja Keduri why AMD only had 12% market share. And I distinctly remember Raja Keduri answering by saying, sorry I didn't hear the rest of your question after you said 12% because it's 17%.
as if that really mattered in the context of things but now it's actually 10 percent here's the market share situation for amd as of the end of year 2024 john petty research reported that nvidia now holds 90 percent of market share in discrete gpu sales the remainder obviously is 10 for amd jpr had briefly shown intel as holding up to 1.33 2023 and 2022 but that receded to zero percent as of december last year It may be higher now with B580's launch though. But looking just at NVIDIA and AMD, what we're seeing is NVIDIA's successful total domination of the discrete GPU market. There's almost nothing left to even take.
From 2023 to end of 2024, NVIDIA climbed from 81.5% share to its current 90% via JPR. The lowest in JPR's data since 2010 is 55.5% when AMD held 44.5% of the market. NVIDIA saw large gains from 2014 to 2015. skyrocketing from 68.6% to nearly 80% for NVIDIA.
It had some losses after that, stabilized nearly a 70-30 split for four years, and then took off like a rocket again with the 30 series in 2020. We're going to get into some ATI-era data now. We're not sure how precise this table is just because it's going so far back, but this image was compiled by 3dcenter.org using John Petty research data and Mercury research data. So as long as the compilation is good here...
Both of those research firms have been around for quite a while. It was then posted to the TechPowerUp forum. This shows back to 2002. There were times that NVIDIA was outpaced by ATI, which was acquired by AMD in 2006 and had its branding fully absorbed by roughly 2010. But ever since around 2006, ATI and then AMD have slowly trended downward with some up years. 3D Center helpfully highlighted the two major crypto boom cycles, with the second one coinciding with COVID lockdown and work-from-home purchasing. The first round of mining helped AMD.
AMD's RX 400 series was also a pretty good success for them. It targeted the $200 market, and aside from whatever presents Fiji and Fury X still had, it basically capped out at $250. AMD gained share then, too. AMD is now retargeting that market, except apparently that affordable mid-range market has doubled to tripled in cost.
depending on which of these companies you ask. Looking at the end of this chart for 2024, AMD doesn't have much left to lose here. AMD certainly gets more margin out of chip allocation to epic CPUs, and likely even desktop CPUs, but we think it would be short-sighted to entirely sacrifice even a chance at the GPU market. If they keep sidelining GPUs perpetually like it seems like they've been doing, and they just live with status quo, we think...
I think there's a real risk that just really doesn't make sense for them, and they're there as a token piece to stop a total monopolization of the market. If you don't like that data, though, we can also check Steam's hardware survey. This also includes laptop CPUs, so the data gets muddied by Intel's and AMD's integrated presence in laptops.
Even still, even with that dilution, Nvidia's at 75.54% usage, with Intel taking up now some of the share. Drilling down of the 30 most popular GPUs, including integrated graphics, NVIDIA occupies 26 slots. Intel has two with integrated graphics, and AMD has two in distinct Radeon graphics solutions detected, which also might be integrated. So that's four of 30 that are not NVIDIA.
The most popular cards are former $200 to $300 models. AMD is right that most gamers do buy cards under $700. They said it in the press deck that video cards obtained, but By that same logic, we can say that most gamers buy cards under $2,000 too. That's $200 to $300 is under $2,000.
Why not $1,000,000? All gamers buy cards for less than $1,000,000. Why not $1,000,000,000?
But this data supports that, more precisely, most gamers are on cards that once cost them between $200 and $350 if they bought it retail on average, depending on what year they bought it, all that stuff. In the Steam survey, Andy... does eventually show up for identifiable cards for our audience. The RX 6600 is its most popular, which was largely available for $180 to $230, depending on when you bought it, especially towards the end of sort of its sellable lifespan. That holds 0.84% of distribution in this chart.
The RX 580 is next, a $200 to $250 card in its time, depending on the memory spec. The 6700 XT is after that. then the 5700 XT, then the RX 580 again, but it's the 2048 SKU, which was big in China, and then the RX 570. In fact, AMD's only modern presence from the 7000 series is pretty far down the list. It's just the 7900 XTX and the 7700 XT.
AMD has to make ground here, but lying to itself by saying most people buy under $700 is disingenuous at best, because the only card anywhere near over $700 in this list of AMD's most successful cards is the 7900 XTX. The 6700 XT and 5700 XT were among the more expensive ones in the list, and those were typically under $500, especially later in life. But even at launch, they were.
So AMD is correct. Most gamers are under $700, but they are a lot under $700. Like, half. And AMD has historically thrown away launch reviews via pricing.
And those launch reviews, they persist, and they continue to get views or readership over time. And they are all based on awful pricing normally that then changes sometimes within weeks, sometimes within maybe three months. But the global constant is you can bet that the price is going to change.
And that's not a good message to send for a lot of reasons, one of which is it tells everyone, just wait, because we're not going to stick to our guns. Here's the price, and if you don't like it, then that's okay. We're sorry. We'll drop it in two or three months. What AMD really needs to do here is come out aggressively and say, this is the...
price and it's good and that's where it needs to stick and so now we get to the opinions based on just experience doing this for a while and at this point the only way they can really screw up this launch just because nvidia's was so bad is really by price this is a 9800x3d situation i had this conversation with people at amd around the 9800x3d launch uh because the 9800x3d followed the zen 5 launch which really wasn't good for AMD. It was a mess. They kind of slowly started cleaning it up, but it was just a, it was complete chaos, Zen 5 launch. 9800X3D came in after that, and after Intel had spent its own couple weeks of floundering around out of water, and so they're both floundering out of water. 9800X3D comes in.
All they had to do was not fuck up the price, and they at least set it to be equal to roughly the 7800X3D, and that was key. That allowed AMD to get good sentiment. They created a monstrous chip. The 9800XPD has been one of the most exciting that we've worked on in a long time.
Excellent overclocker, actually, unlike the 5070Ti. Very high performer, and it's so good that it even lets the 5090 stretch its legs in 1080p situations that we test. It was really well received, and that's the repeat that AMD, we think, needs to be looking for. But even though AMD's CPU and GPU divisions are under the same roof, they still behave like two separate companies.
That probably stems from when AMD bought ATI, and it just never changed. We've been told over the years that AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, or RTG, doesn't let experienced and successful CPU group members with a track record of victories have control over the GPU launches, leading to internal conflicts, contributing, we think, to Radeon being the screw-up in the family. So from a consumer viewpoint, which is really the only one we care about representing, this is a situation where it really needs to change because the duopoly that exists needs two competitors that actually want to fight each other, not... One that is just trying to pick up the scraps and maintain status quo because, eh, good enough, we've got CPUs, we've got server. They really need to go after each other here in a big way.
If one is the leader and the other one is content to follow so closely that it can smell the leather jacket, Do you like my jacket? then that's just not going to create a healthy market. Not sure what they use to treat the leather either. That also might not be healthy to keep. breathing in as deeply as AMD is when it's following Nvidia that closely.
Intel is present, so it's not truly a duopoly, sort of, but it has approximately 0% market share. And they're making good inroads, but they're not a major factor yet, and they already launched their new architecture GPUs. So it really is AMD that's the focus right now. They're the only ones who haven't put something out yet, and they're about to. But AMD can do what it wants.
If AMD is content... with jebaiting itself while it clutches its pearl-encrusted power cables and follows NVIDIA with NVIDIA minus $50 pricing, then AMD is never going to make any real headway in graphics. If AMD screws up the pricing this time, it is an accessory to the murder committed by NVIDIA in the interest in building a computer in the enthusiast segment right now.
What's up gamers? So here's what we think about all this. I mean, again, this is like, does any of this matter?
I don't know. It's just like, this is just me talking. Sometimes I just, we've seen a lot over the years now, and sometimes I feel like I can see the train coming down the tracks, and it's like, please, please get off the tracks. I would really prefer if you'd get off the tracks. So that's this video.
Does it help? No! But, who cares? Let's just, once again, like with that NVIDIA thing, now it's AMD's turn for me to say, sometimes, it just feels good to rant about stuff. Tune in next time for the third installment of the big three companies that control the world of hardware, screw things up, and everybody watches in horror.
It'll probably be Intel. Again. Again. Again.
So here's where we are with all this. Andy's been a straggler for, I don't know, 10 years in the GPU market in a sort of big way that we've been observant to. Maybe longer if you go back further. But for it to finally make some progress... We feel like AMD needs two factors to be true.
One is internally. AMD needs internal change. The GPU prices come from within. And the second factor that AMD needs is for NVIDIA to screw up big time.
And that's the hard one because that is an external factor that AMD has no control over. They can't make it happen. Internally, AMD Radeon has had a recent change in leadership.
This will be the first massive architectural launch for new leadership, which could be good or bad, depending on those leaders. Externally, NVIDIA is stepping on all of the rakes. RTX20 was the last time this happened, and back then, AMD wasn't prepared to combat the change in tide towards ray tracing.
It was also diverting more supply towards consoles that were coming up, which limited its production of desktop GPUs. Both the internal and external factors exist, but they won't last long. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang once was described to me by somebody who worked closely with him as, quote, a vicious attack dog when he's down. That was the exact quote I looked up recently.
I'd said aggressive before, but the quote was vicious, which conveys a little more meaning. I was once told a story about how Jensen Huang held an all-hands meeting, and apparently, the story goes, he got in front of all the employees who were called there after a major screw-up of the launch. I'm not sure precisely which one it was.
Got in front of everyone and said, apparently, who did this to me? Which is a hell of a way to start an all-hands meeting with employees after a company screw-up. I mean, whether or not you think that's a good management style, that's a separate discussion topic.
But the key takeaway related to this is that is an aggressive mentality. I think that's what contributes to NVIDIA's history of really trying to turn it around, at least for public sentiment, if not because they believe they were wrong, when something goes wrong. And...
That's what AMD is up against. They're not up against Intel 2016, where Intel's approach to that situation was probably, what else are they going to buy? AMD?
Don't think so. Intel had that ambivalent mentality, and it turns out the answer is yes. Yes, that is exactly what they will buy.
But Nvidia behaves differently. An example of this that we covered in recent history was the 20 series. The 20 series was a disastrous launch.
There were a lot of 10 series cards available regularly on the market. 1080Ti's were a little cheaper than the 2080s. 2080Ti's were astronomically priced, made no sense. And the namesake feature had no namesake feature games to use it with.
And then the Space Invaders thing. So that was a problematic launch. The 30 series was what they followed it with. And initially... NVIDIA really turned around.
The 3080 looked great on paper, which is good because it turned out to be made of paper. Now, whether or not that was a paper launch, we don't know. That was kind of the beginning of the supply issues era, in a big way, at least. And it's kind of always been around.
You look back to the 10 series, it's kind of there too. But the 30 series was bad. And that's because with the impending or incoming COVID shutdowns around that launch a little later, everybody was buying systems to work from home or whatever the case may be. And so The supply killed its momentum and extinguished it. But the point is that with a pricing to performance standpoint, there's a big swing in the 20 series to the 30 series.
And it didn't really swing back the other way till like yet later in the 30 series when they knew you were going to buy a card no matter what because it was just that bad of a situation, which is kind of back where we are now. But they went hard with the 30 series launch after the 20 series failures. And initially it did work. Love them or hate them. NVIDIA dictates this market.
NVIDIA is the company that forced competitors to care about ray tracing, upscaling technologies, frame generation, latency-reducing technologies, adaptive refresh. NVIDIA compelled competition to care about multi-GPU when it took over SLI from 3DFX, and then when it took it away and killed it, so did its competitors. Some of that aligned with explicit multi-GPU.
Hell, it even managed to distract AMD into caring about software suites with screen recording. Look at what AMD and Intel both have to do when they announce a product. They spend time talking about not only the hardware, but software that seems intended to directly counter NVIDIA. For Intel, we already talked about how we think they need to just get the basics right first. They did seem to mostly listen because they ripped out a lot of unnecessary bloat from the drivers.
But the underlying factor here is that NVIDIA, for as easy it is to bash them for their issues and mistakes right now, they are in the driver's seat. NVIDIA has created the market for the counter-narrative to even exist. That's what happens when you have an incumbent as huge as NVIDIA.
There's a desire for a counter-narrative, and that appears to be AMD. But if the counter-narrative is just a discounted version of the one that's in charge, people won't go for it. Let's do some word association.
Ray tracing is to ray tracing. That one's simple. They both do that. DLSS to FSR to XESS.
Reflex to Anti-Lag to XELL. Shadowplay to GVR originally to Relit. frame generation to fluid motion frames.
Hell, even the very name is now associated. 50-70 to 90-70. If this were the Scooby-Doo meme, you'd pull the mask off of AMD's head and it would just be NVIDIA.
Strategically, NVIDIA has also managed to completely overrun the market with GPUs every $50 to $100 between its multiple synchronously selling generations. For AMD, continuing to partake in status quo of NVIDIA minus $50 is just not good enough and NVIDIA minus $75 to... adjust for inflation is not good enough either.
Intel launched in December already. Intel already kind of tested the market. To quote Gordon, it was like one person ran out to see if they were going to get smashed by the truck coming down the road, which was Intel at the time.
Except this time, the truck is NVIDIA. And the CPU team has a good history of taking opportunities that Intel presents and making the most of them. And these Radeon team does not do that with NVIDIA.
AMD's Radeon team has a well-documented history of screwing up opportunities where instead of doing something with it, its executives take to Twitter to mock NVIDIA and then turn around and do exactly the same thing themselves. Poor Volta, debated. A $10 bet that they'd have supply, which AMD still probably hasn't paid out, wait for Navi, or even panic changing prices 24 hours before launch.
And here's another one. It's right here. This is the next one. If they don't capitalize on it, that goes on that list. And look.
I get it. AMD Radeon is angsty. It's at the end of those angsty years, right before life hits it in the face.
Radeon turns 25 on April 1st, and just like every other 25-year-old on April 1st, it's going to debate itself off all day about how funny it is on Twitter while it pointlessly and relentlessly maintains status quo while erecting a defensive facade of mocking that very quo which is statist. Radeon's modus operandi is being just present enough in the market to profit off of Nvidia's gradual marching of the prices and worsening of value, lifting the tide of all boats, as it were, without actually disrupting the market and maintaining the appearances that creates this counterculture on which Radeon Rebellion thrives. But deep down inside, despite presenting this Radeon Rebellion counterculture that AMD has been presenting for eight or nine years now, AMD is just another corporate suit that grew up and realized it's a lot easier if you let someone else do the dirty work and you follow their blazed trail while you pick up the crumbs. But maybe they'll surprise us on Friday. That's the hope here.
The hope is this gets sent around at AMD and someone goes... You know what? That lunatic on the internet yelling into a camera who really has absolutely no power over anything, he's got a point.
I don't think they'll do that, but I hope maybe it's like reverse psychology. Like I said, I don't think they'll do it, so now they're going to do it because I said I don't think they will and they want to make me look like I don't know what I'm talking about. And, you know, I'd be okay with that.
That'd be an okay outcome. Anyway, the point is I've been covering this stuff a long time now, and just from past experience, I see an opportunity here where it's like there's something. Will they do it?
I don't know, but there's an opportunity. And I've been doing this long enough that I've seen the memes shift, frankly, from Jon Snow to Gandalf the White. I mean, look at him. Was I ever so young? GPU makers, you're hurting me.
Please stop. Please, please just... It's so clear. It's right there. The opportunity is right there.
But anyway, for years, AMD has mocked NVIDIA for its missteps and fumbles. The only difference between AMD's missteps and fumbles and NVIDIA's missteps and fumbles is that NVIDIA has market share. And AMD, our opinion, is that you need customers. I'm going to commit to this. NVIDIA has probably, I don't know, a quarter, half the spots on our eventual 2025 disappointment tour t-shirt.
AMD, if you screw this one up, we're gonna make a whole shirt for you. It's gonna be a whole Disappointment Tour shirt of all the missed opportunities from AMD, and it's gonna be the pettiest shirt I've ever made. It'll have all the greats. It'll have poor Volta, the $10 bet, Jebaited, wait for Navi, fine wine. It's up to AMD to make the right decision.
We'll cover it regardless. I mean, I'll stand by and wait and see what they do, I guess, but... Again, this all kind of came up because I was talking to people and realized, wait a minute, they have no idea what to price this thing at.
It's 48 hours away from being announced. This is concerning, but let's see what happens. Just because NVIDIA is f***ing up everything right now, it doesn't mean AMD is safe. AMD will get every bit as much criticism as NVIDIA if it does the same things.
If that kills interest in building PCs for a little bit, so be it. We've got plenty of other stuff we can cover. for all the other components, and there's still things you can do.
I mean, we've been through these cycles before in the industry, and if AMD wants to be an accessory to NVIDIA, that's their choice, and we're ultimately here to represent consumers. So if all of them suck, we're going to tell you they all suck. Hopefully that's not the case, but we'll see what happens.
The last message for AMD here is that NVIDIA is under no obligation to make itself worse or slow down or make less money if its competitors don't compel it to do so. It doesn't matter how much consumers kick and scream and the media kick and scream like us about what NVIDIA is doing right now if there's no other option. So this is up to AMD to figure it out for itself. And if AMD wants market share, NVIDIA minus $50 isn't going to do that, nor is minus $75.
They have to be really aggressive here. And that's our opinion on all this. So hopefully this video had something insightful, entertaining, or cathartic for you to relate to.
And it served some kind of purpose. And if it didn't, then sorry for wasting your time. We'll be covering the AMD news as soon as it's official.
Hopefully the pricing's good. We're not going to know how they've capitalized or not on the opportunity fully until the actual performance numbers with the reviews, which comes a little bit later. But the pricing is on February 28th, so check back for that. Thanks for watching.
Subscribe for more and go to store.gamersaccess.net to grab a shirt, a mod mat for PC building, highly heat-resistant project and soldering mats, or our dice kits on store.gamersaccess.net or patreon.com slash gamersaccess to throw a few bucks our way every month, and we'll see you all next time.