Surprisingly, the PC gaming hardware market’s revenue crossed the expected $30 billion threshold last year. NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices both took this opportunity to ramp up their sales, and the fact that the gaming hardware market shifted toward high-end and middle range graphic cards was clearly in their best interest.
AMD’s strong comeback
In 2016, AMD offered gamers the best GPUs at magnificent performance and, as a result, AMD’s market share in GPUs has increased. This increase led to the continuation of the rivalry between the two leaders in this industry.
AMD is currently also going after the high-end segment, as it plans to release the Polaris successor aka the Vega, hoping to shake NVIDIA’s GTX 1080’s dominance. AMD plans on packing more computing power and also on offering competitive prices with NVIDIA. Leaked benchmarks from multiple sources show that AMD’s GPU accelerators, MI8 and MI25, will help Vega to perform much better than NVIDIA’s TITAN X intelligence apps. MI25 accelerator should be twice as fast as NVIDIA’s Pascal X, and it’s meant to go directly against the GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA’s next GPU.
NVIDIA’s response
NVIDIA plans to respond with its new-gen Volta architecture and speculations suggest that the successor of Pascal is scheduled for release by the end of this year or at the beginning of 2018.
NVIDIA plans to employ Taiwan Semiconductor as the manufacturing partner for the Volta cards and this is going to lead to a more effective manufacturing process. The Volta will use a 12 nanometer node, while AMD’s Vega node is 14 nanometer. This should be able to lead to better performance. It’s estimated that a 12 nanometer process can deliver 15% better performance and can also consume 50% less power. NVIDIA’s goal is to surpass VEGA with its last generation features.
But AMD still has enough time to continue grabbing market share, until Volta is released.
“NVIDIA plans to employ Taiwan Semiconductor as the manufacturing partner for the Volta cards and this is going to lead to a more effective manufacturing process.” = Meaning a cheaper labor force.