Ctrl+Alt+Delete: AMD has never had a better opportunity to overtake Nvidia
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Ctrl+Alt+Delete: AMD has never had a better opportunity to overtake Nvidia

REVIEW: Nvidia has long been the king of discrete graphics cards.

According to Wccftech, Nvidia dominated the dGPU market in the first quarter of 2022 with a whopping 78% market share. AMD had a market share of only 17% in comparison.

We obviously have to consider other factors, such as supply shortages and the early 2022 release of the RTX 3050 and RTX 3090 Ti. But AMD didn't do much better either in the first quarter of 2021 or the fourth quarter of 2022, with market shares of only 19% and 18% respectively.

I can understand why Nvidia cards are apparently much more popular. While AMD cards offer competitive raw performance, Nvidia is ahead of advancements in ray tracing and AI technology. DLSS alone is a great incentive to opt for an Nvidia card, allowing you to play supported games at higher frame rates without seeing a major sacrifice on visuals.

AMD has since released FSR, which does similar work. But the tests prove that it is not as efficient as DLSS and therefore can leave the games a bit difficult.

But with this week's reveal of the RTX 4000 series, I don't think Nvidia has strengthened its hand. In fact, I think it provided AMD with the perfect opportunity to finally overtake its rival.

The main reason for this is the price. The recently unveiled RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 graphics cards are extremely expensive. The former is priced at $1599 / £1679, while the RTX 4080 is available at $1199 / £1269 or $899 / £949 depending on whether you opt for the 16GB or 12GB configuration.

The Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU

Nvidia claims the RTX 4090 is 2x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti when playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, while offering improved ray tracing performance. DLSS 3.0 support is also attractive, allowing you to increase frame rates even further for supported games. But I don't see anything here that would persuade me to invest over £1 in a new graphics card if I was on a 000 series.

I may have been persuaded if 8K gaming was finally realistic, or if a new advanced rendering technique could have a similar impact to ray tracing. But as it stands, the RTX 4000 series simply offers improved frame rates at an inflated price. I doubt many people would be tempted to spend $1599 / £1679 on such an upgrade.

This is where AMD comes in. The company has confirmed that it will unveil the new RDNA 3 graphics cards on November 3, 2022. If these new cards are able to deliver similar performance, but offer a more affordable price point than Nvidia counterparts, then AMD could be onto a winner. .

Of course, there's a real possibility that AMD will also increase the cost of its upcoming graphics cards. However, Tom from Moore's Law is Dead claims that the new AMD GPUs will cost significantly less to manufacture than Nvidia's RTX 4000 GPUs.

Apparently AMD won't be using state-of-the-art cooling for the reference model, which could significantly reduce costs. If that's true, it looks like AMD is trying harder than Nvidia to keep its graphics cards as affordable as possible.

AMD is unlikely to offer the same level of ray tracing performance as the Nvidia RTX 4000 series, and it's still a long way from offering a solution as effective as DLSS 3.0. But all that doesn't really matter if AMD's cards cost a few hundred dollars less.

It's also an important time to offer more affordable graphics card options, with the rising cost of living spiraling out of control and energy prices making it more expensive to run your gaming PC in the long run. While AMD can deliver impressive performance, I can see a lot of people preferring to opt for its more budget-friendly cards rather than investing over $1000 on an Nvidia GPU.

We still have a few months to wait to see if AMD has really succeeded in bringing the price down, but with Nvidia setting such a high price, AMD has the perfect opportunity to undercut its rival and increase its market share.


Ctrl + Alt + Del is our weekly IT-focused opinion column where we delve deeper into the world of computers, laptops, components, peripherals and more. Find it on Trusted Reviews every Saturday afternoon.

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