That's funny, I just built my first new home Linux desktop in maybe 7-8 years, and installed an AMD RX 480 GPU into it, because the increased openness in their devices is finally really allowing for a first class open source driver for Linux to be written for this generation of GPU. At this point it really seems to be just starting to pay off in the performance & stability departments. If they keep it up, there will be good reason (at least on Linux) to favor AMD video cards.<p>Here's to hoping the new AMD CPU does well too, it's good for the market that Intel has competition.
I am still loyal to AMD CPU's, but I haven't been loyal to AMD GPU's since they were ATI. I always found their driver stack to be more cumbersome in the past, and I had a rash of bad cards that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not sure if it's changed since, but I still have faith in their CPU's. The way I see it, the benefit of supporting innovation that drives Intel to improve outweighs the benefit of having an arguably faster computer for arguably the same amount of money.<p>Without Chevrolet we'd be driving Model-T's. Without AMD we'd by running 8080's. Support the little guy, even though they've historically not always made the right choices.
I was loyal to AMD's CPU from 1999 - 2013. Price and not nerfing advanced features (overclocking, VM extentions) kept me coming back. However, there aren't many recent server/workstation options. So I begrudgingly switched over to Intel Xeon chips.<p>I bought an AMD RX 480 this year. I hadn't bought a discrete GPU in decade. I looked at Nvidia, but saw you needed Quadro/Grid to use with VT-d. AMD's GPU work with VT-d out of the box.<p>It'd be a damn shame to lose a company like AMD that doesn't disable features for marketing reasons. I'll happily buy another AMD CPU if the zen line comes close to the hype.
AMD's CPU offerings have been lackluster in recent years, Intel has taken the cake in that department. I'm not surprised people are building Intel more and more. Ryzen is going to change all that, though. AMD is squaring that up to be the next big competitor. On the GPU front, the 8GB RX480 is making quite a dent in the market. It's beating out NVidia's 6GB GTX1060 in DX12 games, creeping towards the 1070's benchmarks, while costing less than $250. They aren't catering to the high-end market that the GTX1080 latches onto, but the price for performance is hard to beat. I surmise Ryzen to play out the same way.
The really interesting "loyalty" aspect I've seen recently is AMD users (/r/amd, etc) buying into AMD stock, big time. It's not just loyalty on hardware purchases anymore, it's literally propping up their stock price.<p>Of course they seem to have been correct that AMD was way underpriced where it was before - but at some point it'll come back down too.
The lack of a competitive consumer CPUs from AMD gave the year to Intel when it came to new gaming systems. With RYZEN and Vega GPUs coming Q1 2017, AMD’s 80%+ rally in the market, and Intel’s lack of innovation, I expect a comeback for AMD in the gaming PC market. Their move back into the Professional and HPC GPU market will also be a huge financial push for AMD to get back where they want to be.
We all know AMD is losing market share to Intel and Nvidia, but it's interesting to see that there was so much loyalty to AMD GPUs among people who bought AMD CPUs. This is starting to decrease as Nvidia wins more of the GPU market. AMD CPUs were only included in 11% of PC builds in the last six months on PCPartPicker.
Never had any loyalty to any manufacturer.<p>When I need a new CPU or a new GPU, I just open the latest benchmark and go for the best price/performance ratio for gaming.
I don't know how many of you here keep up with AMD but their drivers have lately been great, on par with Nvidia at least. The Crimson edition showed a change toward quality. I still think that for the price AMD cards are competitive.
The data sample is for the past six months -- from my limited understanding, most big-ticket items have their prices raised prior to the Christmas holiday shopping frenzy so that grandiose claims of price cuts can be met with a straight face.<p>Perhaps most AMD GPU products have seen a higher price raise in the past six months in preparation for this shopping frenzy?
It's pretty obvious why: Nvidia's top 5 GPUs wipe the floor with every current AMD offering.<p>The GTX 1070, GTX 1080, Titan XP, Quadro P6000, and Tesla P100 are all faster than every AMD GPU in similar price brackets.<p>Additionally, GloFo 14nm (used by AMD Polaris) is generally thought to be less efficient than TSMC 16nm FF+ (used by Nvidia Pascal).
I've always supported AMD because they were the underdogs. However, overtime the cost advantage disappeared for it's GPU.<p>I will continue to buying AMD CPU but I've already switched to Nvidia for GPU. I will switch back if the next offering is something like Maxwell cards, silent, low power consumping GPUs.
I still purchase AMD CPUs since the price difference between Intel is so huge. I have however given up on AMD GPUs, the price and performance are usually around Nvidia, but it's just always a little crappier or buggy.<p>I always want them to do well, since I don't want just on company running the x86 market.
That's no surprise. AMD's CPUs are now objectively inferior except for a few narrow use-cases: highly threaded workloads, VM hosts that need lots of physical cores to pin to machines, maximum iGPU performance, ECC RAM support on a budget (note that i3 also supports this), or very cheap fileservers/media PCs (especially AM1). A high-end FX-8350 is going to significantly underperform an i3-6300 while gaming - especially in minimum frametimes. The single-threaded performance of AMD's construction cores (Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator) has always been abysmal.<p>The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall. Nice if you want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming, and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU.<p>AMD's future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen. Right now they essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive mobile/server market, productivity users, or gaming). They run the games, the averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly and they use a lot of power. Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the cumulative frametime charts here (both are "badness" metric for measuring stutter) and you can see that AMD's single-threaded performance really torpedoes some games far beyond expectations. The FX-8350's 99th-percentile frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5).<p><a href="http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/5" rel="nofollow">http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-rev...</a><p>AMD's GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive - although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games). The RX 480 is a solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM.<p>In particular, there's a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs. AMD's GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred pairing. Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing <i>minimum</i> frametimes rather than averages.<p>They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there's still a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements.<p>Conversely NVIDIA's driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on good single-threaded CPU performance. So perversely, if you are running on an AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU.<p>Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now <i>by far</i>. The CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don't but the Asus AM1M-A does. It makes a nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.
I used to be quite loyal to AMD (and I'm typically not loyal to any companies), but their latest chips are meh. Their GPUs perform very good in benchmarks, but are buggy and poorly supported otherwise.
My last 3 discrete GPUs for PC were AMD, and while AMD keep reasonable prices, Linux Kernel support, and supporting standards on Linux (OpenGL, OpenCL), I'll continue buying from them.
Not counting Zen there are considerably more reasons to buy an AMD GPU than a CPU.<p>Everyone I know with an AMD GPU has an Intel CPU (Core i5/7) since buying AMD GPU's for gaming is an utter waste of money.<p>The CPU's are slower, and the platform is old and buggy, not modern PCIE, storage performance is garbage, and USB 3/3.1 support is laughable.
My kids and I game on the family computer some, but nothing that requires bleeding edge technology. To me the performance of AMD GPUs is good enough, but they produce a ton more heat and require more active cooling than a comparable NVidia GPU. Even with very good fans there is no way to get a quiet PC that performs well using AMD GPUs.
its funny its decreasing now... because now Vulkan is released which put amd back in the market tbh with power consumption and performance. the cpu's i've ditched after i couldn't get the octa core properly stable. but i'm learning towards their gpu's now as it's less than half price for same performance...
After a AMD driver update removed audio pass through over HDMI on my HTPC build I'm not going back for more, Nvidia seem to support their gear for longer too.