11-26-2015, 07:02 PM
Quote:We are lucky that they have been duking it out for so long.
Are we? If you look at the most dominant parts of the past 15 years- GeForce DDR, Radeon 9700 Pro, GeForce 8800GT- they had *no* competition, were priced in a bracket we consider mid tier now and offered extreme longevity to gamers. Saying inflation over time doesn't really apply, SLI V2 was almost $700 back in the day years prior to the GeForce.
Quote:If AMD ever goes down, though, which it looks like they will, I fully expect nVidia to slow down their development just because they can afford to.
That is working under the assumption that AMD really impacts nVidia at all, which quite frankly I find extremely unlikely from an R&D perspective. Right now, 80% of the PC gaming market is nVidia- if they clean AMD's clock the biggest bump they can hope to get is a 25% increase over what they have now. Keeping their own customers upgrading is how they make their money. nVidia's biggest competitor at this point is the parts they have already shipped. That is the reality of the situation.
AMD going down wouldn't alter much from nVidia at this point. If they were splitting the market 50/50 or hell even 65/35 they would be a factor, as of now nVidia could qualify as a monopoly if the FTC considered the tiny sub segment of a market that is add in GPUs a valid one for regulation.