[EDIT]hmmm.....whats going on at AMD? (and history of 3Dfx Rampage)

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/23...on-quarter

Any discussion of these trends inevitably raises the question of how and where AMD will offer competitive performance. Right now, we’re in the doldrums as far as competing directly with Nvidia’s high-end. We’ve known this would be the case until Vega launches, and I don’t think AMD is somehow critically behind simply because it’ll launch later than its competitor. Fermi, after all, debuted nearly a year after the HD 5000 family. It also took AMD nearly a year to build a decent competitor to Nvidia’s G80 back in 2006, and yet by 2008 the HD 4000 series was offering strong competition against Nvidia.

What Nvidia has done, that AMD doesn’t seem to have an answer for, is differentiate its GPUs into a variety of markets. OpenCL and HSA may be great on paper, but uptake has been nil. Three years after promising a version of Java that supported HSA and talking up multiple games and applications that would take advantage of Kaveri’s benefits, the number of HSA apps in the market is very nearly zero.

AMD’s Boltzmann initiative from last year was interesting and may be winning some small support, but the company needs to launch both Zen and Vega in the next few months. Based on their mutual performance, we’ll have a much better idea how well-positioned AMD is to slug things out in the CPU and GPU market. AMD’s console wins are what’s keeping the company alive these days, but it needs to demonstrate stronger performance in PC gaming or other segments if it wants to take on Team Green across the entire computer industry.

What’s particularly ironic about this, of course, is that after AMD announced that its future CPUs would actually integrate graphics chips, plenty of people thought this could be the end of Nvidia as a GPU manufacturer. Clearly, that’s not what happened. And while yes, there have been controversies in the gaming community about programs like GameWorks, Nvidia has done an excellent job winning business and executing its strategies in markets that have nothing to do with gaming or game performance.