Quoting: callciferUnless you are a time traveller, this is merely wishful thinking. AMD might become competitive, it might not.

AMD claim they did, and I don't see why they would make that up. If you want more details, see overview of their new microarch. They basically put people who worked on optimizing Zen to work on RDNA. Their focus was to optimize power consumption explicitly. So Nvidia lost their edge now, but as with Zen vs Intel, it will take a few iterations to polish stuff. With Zen it took them 3 generations to start beating Intel point blank.

Yeah, with the exception of best performance, best power consumption and a decade plus history of Linux (and BSD!) support, there is no point.

Are you even answering my comment? I already said it above. Nvidia has a bad history of support when it comes to drivers. I don't need to explain to you why, you should know it already. Performance of the hardware - yes, their microarch was the best, until today. But unlike AMD they don't have a new one to show, while AMD do. This SUPER release is not a new hardware, it's them squeezing the current one. So competition is going to kick in for real now.

I doubt though Nvidia will be so pressured as to open up their drivers. So I'll repeat what I said - no need for Linux gamers to use it, until they do. Next year there will be more options than just AMD with Intel making high end GPU with open drivers.

Quoting: callciferTo me there is only one downside: it's a blob. There, that's it.

It's pretty much the source of most of the problems that Nvidia driver has on Linux. Total lack of upstream integration. All the rest of its dysfunctions are just consequences of the above. So yeah, that's it. It's the root cause. Until it's fixed, Nvidia experience on Linux will remain subpar, with support always lagging behind. Come back to this topic, once they'll cover XWayland use case. Though at that point, they'll be behind 10 other new things.

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Quoting: seveni hope the radeon VII will drop in price.... i really want that one

I don't expect it to drop. It uses a lot of expensive VRAM (HBM2), that's the main reason for its high price. AMD don't really have control over that. It's also why they went with GDDR6 for Navi. It's a lot cheaper.

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Quoting: BeamboomDon't waste time on the less profitable markets unless there's nothing more to exploit in your current market and you need to focus on secondary markets for further growth - and by then you're probably better off defending your current position in the main market.

Not when you are aiming to reach more users, instead of "I want moar $$$". It's not about greed, but about creators increasing their audience. This topic really is about the commercialization of art in general. If you view art as pure business, that art quickly becomes garbage.

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Unusual for them to release upgrades so soon after previous iteration, but I think it's their response to upcoming AMD Navi.

AMD finally managed to produce more competitive microarchitecture (RDNA). It's a new hardware implementation of their instruction set (which they kept as GCN). They solved some major efficiency issues that caused high power consumption for them in the past. So in a few iterations, RDNA will be very competitive with Nvidia not only in performance, but also in power efficiency. Nvidia are naturally worried - competition is intensifying.

Regarding new cards, I don't see a point in buying Nvidia today for Linux gamers. With AMD totally caught up on the drivers side (radeonsi / radv) and close to catching up in hardware (RDNA), Nvidia's blob downsides are just not worth it. If you want a card that works properly with the Linux stack, get AMD.

I'll quote the leading Nouveau developer, Ilia Mirkin [External Link]:

Moral of the story... just get an Intel or AMD board and move on with life. NVIDIA has no interest in supporting open-source, and so if you want to support open-source, pick a company that aligns with this.

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Quoting: BeamboomThey are not two different things. It evens out since the larger platform they currently support have an even higher increase in numbers. Think about it: For the relative shares to remain the same, roughly a HUNDRED new Windows gamers must be added for every single Linux gamer. This is why the percentage number is what matters.

Supporting an entirely new platform is no small decision to make.

Related, but quite different. Let's say you have a hundred million users altogether. Even 1% out of that, already means a million users. That's a lot. I.e. probably enough to cover your production costs through sales. Who cares if total number is hundred million? For viability, it's not the market share that matters, it's the size of your market (which means total number of your users).

Or think about it this way - 90% of 10 is 9. Would it cover your costs? So forget about percentages. Absolute numbers rule.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Exclusive to Epic store for a year though

Huh? I've seen GOG, Steam and Paradox store releases announced. Where did you see anything about exclusivity?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/what-we-know-so-far.1163043/ [External Link]

NOT A EPIC GAMES STORE EXCLUSIVE

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I hope Hardsuit Labs who are working on Bloodlines 2 have someone experienced in Linux development, and it won't be like "ah...uh"-ing a lightsaber for them ;)

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I think this affects bigger markets too. Didn't some developers complain, that the market is overcrowded even on Windows, and it's harder to make profits because of tons and tons of games coming out? In the smaller market this issue is just more pronounced and you can more easily see all the shifts, but it affects all in general.

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Quoting: BeamboomThere's a lot of talk about market share here. Lots of assumptions and theories. But if there's one thing we DO know, is that the fact that Steam has been on Linux for several years now, and the Linux user base has been, for all practical purposes, completely stationary. Hasn't moved in any significant rate at all.

Total number of Linux gamers affects sales, not market share. From what I've seen, total number of Linux gamers has been growing, year after year. I explained the idea above though. As with classic supply and demand, potential profits depend on both. If there are too many games per certain amount of gamers, profits will go down for developers, even if amount of gamers is growing. So market will balance naturally by lowering the number of produced games. It's not a sign of anything negative.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe rest of what he said is pretty frightening though. He seems quite definite that Linux gaming is shrinking over time.

He mentioned their sales, not Linux gaming in general. It makes zero sense for it to be shrinking, when more gamers use Linux every year. In my view, sales go down due to natural balancing of the market. I.e. if amount of produced games is growing faster than influx of new gamers, people will be proportionally buying less from a particular developer (not less overall though!)

Market will naturally balance out, by developers making less Linux games, until amount of Linux gamers will grow over some point for them to increase it again. And if price of making Linux games will continue falling (due to Stadia and etc.), it will speed up tilting the market in the positive direction, like he said.

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