Exactly JR. They need more than having faster cards. They need to blow people's minds away and in doing so they need every aspect from stock coolers and marketing it correctly and getting people to want there products to all be in place. They need to coordinate with AIBs sooner and more open with them. Let them release some leaks, it builds hype. They also need to set a standard PCB so watercooling companies make blocks and that opens up a small but dedicated market of watercooling enthusiasts. I think it all stems from there marketing people and there communications between there partners. They have the power already in place, just need to get everything else that matters to people in place and market them along with the speed. Really hope the new RTG under Raja can turn this around for them.
Regarding your point about water cooling, I totally agree. A lot of the young people I see on Facebook criticising AMD for being dead and forgotten follow the big water coolers like Singularity Computers and Snef; SC or Snef haven't used AMD in a long time. Apart from the odd project using older components like a pair of 290's or a pair of 7990 dual GPU's, all we're seeing are 980, 980ti and Titan X water cooled projects. This gives all these young impressionable people the impression that AMD are irrelevant, and they'll jump on that bandwagon. So I agree with JR23 as well: whilst the water cooling market is small, they influence a wide audience. A lot of people cannot afford a Case Labs case with €1000 worth of water cooling components, so they'll watch the guys that do. If all they use is 980ti's, AMD will be seen as irrelevant and they'll spread that BS everywhere.
Really? I know the Nano is slower than the 970 and i've seen it basically 99% of the time pull out ahead of the 970, and the Fury itself is faster than a 980(generally) so i find that hard to believe your fury is not running upto par compared to a 970, unless its old drivers?
While I do agree with what you say, they need to make a card i want to buy, doesn't that also translate to having a better card? Having a faster card makes people want to buy that over it's relative competition. The general opinion of gamers is Nvidia is faster which is why they are selling more. So while for you specifically that personally works, for the populous as a whole it clearly isn't since the better value cards aren't selling as well as the performance cards(if you can understand that?). Which leads right back to what I said earlier, that AMD need to win the battle next year. Or they may be in trouble.
My Fury is better than my overclocked 970 in GTA V at 1440p (but noticeably better in other games) but not by very much; that's my point. My 970 was ever-so-slightly behind a reference 980, but many 970's could scale past a 980. The 980 reference beats a Fury in GTA V at 1080p (though the Fury is slightly ahead at 1440p). That means that if a 970 at 1530/8000Mhz can match or even push beyond a 980, that's roughly Fury performance for £200 less. And 1530/8000Mhz is not exactly top 10% silicon lottery. Obviously you could say the same for the 970 vs a 980, which is why the 980 was a slightly overpriced card in my opinion, but the point still stands. In certain games, an overclocked 970 was an incremental increase when going up to a Fury, especially considering how crap the Fury was for overclocking. At the time I bought the Fury because I needed a new GPU as my 970 was faulty, I wanted to support AMD, and I wanted a Freesync panel as I couldn't afford a 980 or 980ti and a G-Sync panel. But in retrospect, I would have preferred to have had a functional 970 and waited for better Freesync monitors to come out and AMD to release a genuinely exciting card.
As for your second point, you're absolutely right. A card I want to buy is one that is better. But I said what I said because I didn't want to be caught up in that race, so to speak. I have decided I'd like to support AMD. In the same way I might want to arbitrarily buy an EVGA PSU to support EVGA versus buying a Corsair or BeQuiet PSU, I want to support either Intel or AMD, or nVidia or AMD because of choice, not because one is inherently superior. I feel AMD's lower end cards are very solid and are competitive, but I'm talking about the higher-end stuff personally as that is what is relevant to me. If I were still on a 1080p screen and wanted Freesync, I would have bought a 390X, and I may have even had a more enjoyable overclocking experience than I did with my Fury, which like other Fury's I've seen is a poor overclocker.
And yeah, AMD does need to win the battle. But in my opinion, the battle could be won by offering a cheaper alternative that easily competes
in every game. Then the only people who will buy nVidia are those that
want to, either because they enjoy nVidia cards and are used to them; they have a particular cooler they like (EVGA ACX for instance); are blind fanboys; or because they are tied to a particular technology like G-Sync or Shield. This nonsense where a 970 can beat a Fury X in Wolfenstein has to stop, in my opinion, even if it's a one-off. Whether that's drivers or whether it's the game developers being enticed by nVidia to build their games and optimise them with nVidia GPU technology in mind only, either way it's arguably what frustrates me the most right now about the GPU market. I want to see nVidia and AMD as equal. We know that they need to surpass nVidia to regain control of the market, but they don't need to do that to keep me interested. For me personally and my psychology as a person, I'd be happy to simply go through a GPU catalogue and go "hmmm, which one will I pick this time?"
).
