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Original source:
I hate to be nitpicky, but try to link the original, and post where you found it (GameRant) in the description instead.
Well, it’s no mystery:
It’s specifically desktop addin boards:
AMD’s RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 represent AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture, competing with Nvidia’s midrange offerings. Nvidia introduced two new Blackwell-series AIBs: the GeForce RTX 5080 Super and the RTX 5070. The company also announced the RTX 500 workstation AIB. Rumors have persisted about two new AIBs from Intel, including a dual-GPU model.
It is including workstation cards like the Blackwell Pro. But this is clearly not including server silicon like the B200, H200, MI325X and so on, otherwise they would have mentioned updates. They are not AIBs.
I hate to obsess over such a distinction, but it’s important: server sales are not skewing this data, and workstation sales volumes are pretty low. It’s probably a accurate chart for gaming GPUs.
I’m not sure the bulk of datacenter cards count as ‘discrete GPUs’ anymore, and they aren’t counted in that survey. They’re generally sold socketed into 8P servers with crazy interconnects, hyper specialized to what they do. Nvidia does sell some repurposed gaming silicon as a ‘low end’ PCIe server card, but these don’t get a ton of use compared to the big silicon sales.
Basically, consumer VRAM is dirt cheap, not too far from DDR5 in $/gigabyte. And high VRAM (especially 48GB+) cards are in high demand.
But Nvidia charges through the nose for the privilege of adding more VRAM to cards. See this, which is almost the same silicon as the 5090: https://www.amazon.com/Blackwell-Professional-Workstation-Simulation-Engineering/dp/B0F7Y644FQ
When the bill of materials is really only like $100-$200 more, at most. Nvidia can get away with this because everyone is clamoring for their top end cards
AMD, meanwhile, is kind of a laughing stock in the prosumer GPU space. No one’s buying them for CAD. No one’s buying them for compute, for sure… And yet they do the same thing as Nvidia: https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Professional-Workstation-Rendering-DisplaPortTM/dp/B0C5DK4R3G/
In other words, with a phone call to their OEMs like Asus and such, Lisa Su could lift the VRAM restrictions from their cards and say 'you’re allowed to sell as much VRAM on a 7900 or 9000 series as you can make fit." They could pull the rug out from under Nvidia and charge a $100-$200 markup instead of a $3000-$7000 one.
…Yet they don’t.
It makes no sense. They’re maintaining an anticompetitive VRAM ‘cartel’ with Nvidia instead of trying to compete.
Intel has more of an excuse here, as they literally don’t manufacture a GPU that can take more than 24GB VRAM, but AMD literally has none I can think of.
I’ve kinda lost this thread, but what does that have to do with consumer GPU market share? The servers are a totally separate category.
I guess my original point was agreement: the 5000 series is not great for ‘AI’, not like everyone makes it out to be, to the point where folks who can’t drop $10K for a GPU are picking up older cards instead. But if you look at download stats for these models, there is interest in running stuff locally instead of ChatGPT, just like people are interested in internet free games, or Lemmy instead of Reddit.
No shame in that; AMD and Nvidia traded between ‘optimal buys’ forever. There were times where buying AMD was not the best idea, like with how amazing the Nvidia 900/1000 series was while AMD Vega was very expensive.
Others, it wasn’t obvious at the time. The old AMD 7000 series was pricey at launch, for instance, but aged ridiculously well. A 7950 would still function alright these days.
This market’s such a caricature now though. AMD/Intel are offering these obvious great values, yet being looked over through pure ignorance; I can’t remember things ever being like this, not all the way back to Nvidia Fermi at least.
7900xtx is 24 gb, the 9700 pro has 32 gb as far as high end consumer/prosumer goes.
The AI Pro isn’t even availible! And 32GB is not enough anyway.
I think you underestimate how desperate ML (particularlly LLM) tinkerers are for VRAM; they’re working with ancient MI50s and weird stuff like that. If AMD had sold the 7900 with 48GB for a small markup (instead of $4000), AMD would have grassroots support everywhere because thats what devs would spend their time making work. And these are the same projects that trickle up to the MI325X and newer.
I was in this situation: I desperately wanted a non Nvidia ML card awhile back. I contribute little bugfixes and tweaks to backends all the time; but I ended up with a used 3090 because the 7900 XTX was just too expensive for ‘only’ 24GB + all the fuss.
There’s lingering bits of AMD support everywhere: vulkan backends to popular projects, unfixed rocm bugs in projects, stuff that works but isn’t optimized yet with tweaks; the problem is AMD isnt’ making it worth anyone’s while to maintain them when devs can (and do) just use 3090s or whatever.
They kind of took a baby step in this direction with the AI 395 (effectively a 110GB VRAM APU, albeit very compute light compared to a 7900/9700), but it’s still $2K, effectively mini PC only, and kinda too-little-too-late.
Ehh, 5% market share is not fine.
AMD’s server GPU division is not fine, either, so don’t bet on that saving them.
AMD/Intel graphics divisions need R&D money from sales to keep up, and if this keeps up, they’re gonna drop out of dGPUs and stick to integrated graphics (which Intel is already at extremely severe risk of doing).
I don’t get this.
Well, if this includes laptops, I get that. Just try to find a dGPU laptop with AMD or Arc these days.
…But in desktops, everyone seems to complain about Nvidia pricing, yet no one is touching Battlemage or the 9000 series? Why? For gaming specifically, they seem pretty great in their price brackets.
Maybe prebuilts are overshadowing that too?
I’m not one to bang on about the year of Linux, but honestly, the floor is falling out from under ‘consumer Windows,’ and they are doing little to stop it.
At some point, even OEMs are going to get fed up and start offering their own wine/proton centric distros on some laptops/big tablets. They will be awful and bloated, and business laptops will probably be stuck with Windows forever, but still.
there are plenty of crappy indie games, too
This is a massive understatement.
There’s this fantasy that indie = high quality, but just look through Steam chronologically. 95%-99% of indie games seem to be good ideas that faded into obscurity, buried under the tidal wave of other games, that their creators probably burned out making for little in return. Many are just… not great. But others look like bad rolls of the dice.
Basically zero indies are Stardew Valleys or Rimworlds.
This is the nuance the Baldurs Gate dev is getting it. It’s not ‘games should develop like indies’; they literally can’t afford a 95% flop rate.
But that doesn’t mean the metrics they use for decision making aren’t massively flawed.
Yeah.
That’s the vibe I get from Lemmygrad too, like they assume the rest of the world is constantly pondering how much they hate China, as a dominating thought.
It’s bizarre, and I am by no means generalizing Chinese people either. Some researchers I’ve interacted with (which is pretty much my only other exposure to China) are not like that at all.
From my perspective as a millennial, people are running out of time and energy too.
Like, I know a couple, both working, no kids, avid and techy gamers who know to play stuff like KCDII, yet they mostly plop down for YouTube at the end of the day. A VG or longer form TV is too draining, and too long.
Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
It’s far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.
Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.
You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example, nvidia-smi -pl 80 will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC). nvidia-smi by itself will show all its default settings.
I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.
Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU’s “efficient” range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it “power up” for really intense workloads.
FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.
Also, you might be able to fix that!
I clock limit my 3090 to like 1700MHz-1750Mhz with Nvidia-smi (built into the driver) since any faster is just diminishing returns. You might check what “stable clocks” your 3070 runs at, and cap them slightlt lower, and even try an under volt as well.
Be sure to cap the frame rate too.
Do that, and you might be able to handle RT reflections and otherwise similar settings without much noise. The hit for just that setting is modest on my 3090 but much heavier with full “low” RT
I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that’s what they put in the game. Early ‘bro’ devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.
And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.
TL;DR the root cause is billionares.
Like aways.