Is the door open for AMD to mount an offensive in the wake of nVidia’s DLSS5 announcement last week? Here’s the tale of the tape over the past few GPU generations. And my outlook on the objective impact of last week’s announcement.
RDNA 5 maybe starts rolling out the end of this year, but more likely 2027. AMD GPU launches are typically barely a drum-beat from being a paper-launch. When the 9000’s launched you only got two SKUs, limited in their availability, nowhere near MSRP, and didn’t convince enough people they were a challenge to the 5000-series, even though low-end 5000-series didn’t show up for 3 – 4 months after Radeon 9000’s. RDNA5 will have FSR Diamond, which is all tech meant to close the gap with nVidia…more ML, higher FP precision, AI upscaling, FrameGen, Ray Regen…all stuff to chase down DLSS and RTX. And no different in its generativeAI nature and foundation.
The 9000-series was the best chance AMD had to hit nVidia while nVidia was way overpriced and weak with inventory…and it didn’t make a dent. MSI skipped the 9000-series; coming back is a significant cost to spool back up.
My prediction is the DLSS5 thing in its noise will be a peep by the time DLSS5 rolls out in the fall. I can’t see AMD mounting some huge offensive out of nowhere; they have less market share in the post-launch 9000-series window. Is there an nVidia “loyalist” bias in the market? I personally think there is less of an nVidia loyalist effect on the market, as much as broad swaths of the market who look around at benchmarks and the supply when it is time to upgrade and see nVidia parts as easier to obtain, easier to maintain, & with more forward-looking features. Most of those buyers aren’t aware of Jenson’s comments. And I think social media is making more of a deal out of a molehill than consumers will actually respond to.
I hope AMD mounts a challenge; better for competition. But they had Radeon 5000’s in ample supply when you couldn’t get an RTX 3000 due to crypto and the pandemic, power parity with Radeon 7000 vs RTX 4000, and then, like I said, a weak nVidia in inventory and retail cost for the RTX5000 launch vs the Radeon 9000’s. I can’t see an upending occurring because people are making a lot of noise on social media because they didn’t like a tech demo.
Rounding Off Infinity 