Mining vs Gaming Products or something *spawn*

Yeah.
The crux of mining though is not just now but importantly also how to protect ones product strategy and product pricing once the mining market drops enough that consumers are flooded with cheap 2nd hand cards.
History has shown what happens when an IHV increases manufacturing/logistics to support both and the future ramifications it has on consumer retail perception and product value; it became a nightmare for AMD launching new products since 2xx in this regard and product margins.
My concern is AMD may be doing the same again with current dGPU market share change this quarter albeit not on the same scale but more so than Nvidia, unfortunately the data for quarterly dGPU shipments is too crude to be sure.
I feel Jensen narrative with regards to gamers and miners is actually to cover the fact Nvidia is looking to protect future product value/margins/perception and their product strategy rather than actually concern for gamers specifically, which the data may be showing in not significantly increasing production and possibly nudging-incentivise a bit partners/distributors to better manage the ratio but how much involvement here is difficult to say or even if it was followed through.

 

nVIDIA has as a dominant position that AMD so far has not managed to threat, so it is not like they face any pressure to help gamers at all. Gamers will still buy their hardware regardless of the price increases as they have nowhere to go. The higher the price, the more revenue nVIDIA will get, even if some gamers do not upgrade. Go back and review history to see who did immediately start to increase GPU prices, as soon as AMD started to not be able to compete, even before the cryptocurrency boom! See again what happened after AMD's R600 blunder and for how much nVIDIA launched GTX280, until AMD surprised us all with HD4800 series. nVIDIA could really care less about how expensive their cards get on the marketplace..
Next thing you will be telling us that a monopoly is the best thing for the consumer....

 

I

Where have you seen those at all?

EDIT - nVIDIA limiting the number of mining GPUs on a system can easily be seen as them preparing to have mining SKUs to overcome that and cash in on them? All that can be as easily seem as that, preparing for a mass entry into the cryptomining market, not as having the goodwill of protecting gamers.. in fact, all this GPP stuff is ANYTHING but protecting gamers.

 

Funny thought that you choose to address something I wrote out of irony, while ignoring all the rest of the text. I guess it does not go along your nVIDIA gaming friendly narrative?

 

Let me contribute one of those. I mean "Vega FE marketing as a blockchain champion" is not even some special or obscure page or anything, it's Vega FE's main page:

https://pro.radeon.com/en/product/radeon-vega-frontier-edition/

 

What's the GPU limit in NV drivers? I have a bunch of NV GPUs mining so that part doesn't seem to work.

 

Do you have 9 gpu's in your system? I think with Nvidia the limit is 8 as shown usable.

 

That is the Vega Frontier edition, which is a prosumer part, just like NVidia's Titan. It was never sold as a Gaming Card and is not even close in price to Vega 64 to be able to threat gamers. That is no different from nVIDIA supposedly working on a cryptomining SKU.

 

See my answer above to the same point.

Make the same question, but replace mining SKUs for Quadro SKUs and you will have the answer. They may be looking to sell cards for cryptomining at a price premium.

So you basically agree with me that nVIDIA has no need at all to act in any way to preserve a core market that is not in danger, quite the other way around, its ripe for abuse as GPP shows. Can you drop your nVIDIA gamer's friend bullshit now then?

 

Lurking again? All it takes is a look at the thread title to realize where this conversation was bound to end up, or maybe the title is what drew you in.

 

The "within $20" meant that cards have been actually available within $20 of MSRP, nothing to do with any rebates of any size.
I'm not asking about what Gibbo said, I know what he has said and I'm not taking that as some sort of gospel when reality clashes with it.

You completely ignored what I actually said in the post, so let's try again:
If the advertised prices were just launch prices (+black friday) with rebates, how do you explain the new stocks that popped up every once in a while which were priced at the MSRP (again, within $20 or so of the actual MSRP) and nowhere near either launch or black friday?
Which option sounds more likely:
1) eTailers and Retailers decided it would be fun to take some loss or at least severely cut their profits by offering cards at MSRP
2) The MSRP was actually real, not some rebate-deal

If you actually followed the markets, all those cards sold at ~$100 more than MSRP had at least games bundled with them - they were Radeon Packs, which always had higher MSRP than just the card.

 

AIBs who signed up to GPP are now doing PR acrobatics around the issue, and the results are hilarious.
https://www.computerbase.de/2018-03/gigabyte-gaming-box-rx-580/#update1

The product called "RX 580 Gaming Box" is "not gamer focused". Get it?

Here's the box with the RX580:



And this is the box version with a GTX1070:

Yes, that's exactly the point.
First they tried to close the thread, now the focus is on derailing.
Notice how the only other answer to your post was mostly about your character assassination? Just some more flamebait tactics.
The subject in this thread is pressing some buttons, that's for sure.



Returning to the subject at hand, I had prepared an answer to a post that was eventually deleted, but I think the context here is appropriate enough so I'm bringing it back from the dead, if I may:

I don't agree.
That's not how marketing works, and marketing is the next most important factor for success after product quality/performance (some would argue foremost important, actually).
Asus, MSI and Gigabyte own a sizeable share of the market and this new gaming sub-brand for AMD will be unknown, whereas nvidia cards will be dancing alone on the laurels of all the marketing time and money AIBs spent on making ROG/GamingX/AORUS known to the public.

Blockbuster movies spend as much in marketing as they do on production. Same with AAA videogames from major publishers. Samsung spends billions marketing the Galaxy S line (attention here: not Samsung phones: the Galaxy S exclusively!). This means their marketing budget can actually outmatch the BoM for the sum of phones being sold.

And when Asus sponsors major gaming events and gets youtube ads for gaming devices, they don't advertise "Asus". They advertise "ROG".

 

It is difficult to ignore the validity of Overclockers claims who are very open and detailed about the rebate supports when it is also backed up by an investigation by GamersNexus and what AIB-partner said off the record.

You are looking at this from a different perspective/POV rather than what I have raised and Gibbo's fact-ramification around SEP price AMD suggested to public with no margins for retailers but relied upon rebates, and outside of this financial incenctive schemes from both IHV that mask retail pricing fluctuations reasons beyond supply/demand.
This is from AMD matching context of without "bundle"

I cannot see how prices remained within $20 of SEP since Vega has launched and up to say December 2017, further compounded that nearly all retailers will not talk about the rebate support program publicly (off record see some articles), and the rebate as I keep saying applies to both IHV and compounds understanding the price as it is usually hidden from consumers and exacerbated by supply/demand in certain situations.
Also one cannot use game bundles as a comparison/counter argument to my posts as it is a subtly different financial incentive, both IHV as I stated have more than one financial incentive scheme, which gaming bundles is just one other example of a scheme also done by both in various ways, and there are more that go beyond retailers.

But for further clarification GamersNexus summed it up nicely and noticed the leeway in how AMD marketing responded officially and to their further questions in link 2.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3023-aib-partners-to-gn-yes-vega-price-will-change
https://www.gamersnexus.net/industry/3025-amd-statement-on-vega-pricing-retailers-fault
And the AMD statement in their investigation does not match up to the AIB and retailers they spoke to which is in line with the open-ness from Overclockers on the support rebate, again to reiterate both IHV offer such financial incentives (and not just these ones) beyond the current discussion.

And the 1st article further aligns my point of relationship with Overclockers and AMD-AIB partners.

However like I said Overclockers mentioned when rebate was again re-introduced last Black Friday and they dropped their price a notable amount, people complained in the forums when it ended and the price increased again even though he was very clear in the forums about this at the time.
Anyway one last quote that shows how the rebate is structured in this case with Vega launch

BTW not all retailers get the same level or rebate support, same way AIB partners get different incentives at times.
For reference this expands on previous my previous post on the subject.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...rced-gitg-from-hell.60649/page-9#post-2024738
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...rced-gitg-from-hell.60649/page-9#post-2024676

Anyway I will just refer to this post in future as we are not contributing anything new to this thread and this is digressing about the AIB partners situation, which is not the same situation although does show that there are financial incentive schemes (this is not the only one) run by both IHV beyond the current discussion.

Edit: 23/03
Toned down.

 

All they did with the recent driver was fix the cryptonight bug that had been hampering Vega 56/64 hashrate performance on normal drivers.
Vega cards weren't detecting Compute mode on newer drivers, which is why anyone mining e.g. Monero could only use the old drivers from August 2017.

This was not a problem for large-scale miners as those don't give a shit about game optimization updates so they were happy to use the old driver.
There's no "blockchain optimization" to increase mining performance of AMD cards. It only allows gamers with a Vega 56/64 to be able to mine Monero during idle times.

As a gamer who's been using his Vega 64 to mine XMR to keep the house warmer during winter and eventually hold some very solid cryptocurrency that is actively fighting Bitmain's centralized PoW, I welcome these news.
It might also get more gamers onboard to pay more for a Vega card when production scales up and prices go down, if the algorithm change the XMR team is imposing to kill ASIC efficiency is successful (which it should).