Intel’s B580 GPU shows how much AMD has dropped the ball with Radeon

For years now, the king of the graphics card castle has been obvious. NVIDIA is and continues to be the gold standard for graphics cards, and AMD’s Radeon cards could just never quite stack up. The bad news doesn’t end there; Intel’s recent launch of their B580 GPU makes matters much worse. In only their second launch, Intel has done what AMD hasn’t been able to do for generations: create a graphics card that will fly off the shelves. The B580, despite its continued teething issues, is out of stock basically everywhere and shows exactly how AMD can’t keep pointing the finger elsewhere for its poor management of the Radeon division.

$100 isn’t enough

Undercutting NVIDIA by a little isn’t the way to go about this

AMD has made a bad habit of making a card that’s a few percent worse than an equivalent NVIDIA card, and then pricing it around $100 less. This strategy just isn’t working, and Intel’s approach with the B580 proves that. $250 MSRP for what is a direct competitor to the 4060 Ti is very impressive. It’s also scary for AMD, who have only been consistently losing market share since what feels like the days of the R9.

That might be ancient history, but it’s not too late to correct course. To gain some of the pie back, AMD really need to drop their prices significantly, especially if they can’t compete in ray-traced workloads. With more titles turning to ray tracing exclusively for their lighting, AMD could be in big trouble if the upcoming RX 9000 series is poor in RT workloads. Catching up in pure raster and cutting the price by a hundred bucks just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Related

AMD’s keynote left me confused

So, AMD’s CES keynote just ended, and while it contained lots of AI, it had some notable absences. Dr. Su didn’t take the stage once, which is the only time I’ve not seen her at a hardware launch or keynote since the first Ryzen launch event (please correct me in the comments if I’m mistaken here). Also, Ryzen mobile branding is changing to be closer to Apple Silicon branding, and there was no sign of the next Radeon graphics cards. I’m left very confused by this: Ryzen is beating the competition, so why change the name again, and also what it might mean for the GPU market? Does anyone else feel like it was a canned, low-effort presentation? Anyway, hopefully, we will hear something about GPUs soon because Nvidia is going to hog headlines later tonight.

So close, yet so far

AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity

AMD absolutely deserve their flowers for what they’ve done with their CPUs. The lengthy lifetime of the AM4 platform and the initial X3D CPU launches on AM5 were exactly what consumers needed in that department. In the GPU department, however, AMD continues a long-standing tradition of missing opportunities with their lackluster RDNA 4 announcement at CES. Flanked by their bread and butter, CPUs and APUs, the GPU information was a complete afterthought to the point where most people found out about it through third-party outlets after the fact.

Regardless of what benchmarks are leaked and what AMD says about the performance of its new cards, brushing RDNA 4 under the rug at the biggest tech show of the year when everyone is expecting you to talk about your new GPUs is a giant red flag. RX 9000 GPUs could come out and be competitive with pricing and performance, but AMD’s current actions suggest they’re not exactly proud of what they have to show off at the moment.

Related

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series promises RTX 4090 performance for $549

It’s like an RTX 4090 only much more powerful and with considerably more RAM.

Not competing at the high-end is fine

(For now)

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX, side-by-side

AMD threw in the towel trying to compete with the likes of NVIDIA’s best offerings, and I think everyone would be fine with that strategy in the interim. They did something similar with Ryzen; create a product that is of great value that doesn’t necessarily go blow for blow with Intel’s big guns. Build up market share and the architecture enough so that you can compete at the top of the product stack in the future. But AMD hasn’t been doing that with Radeon. They refuse to take a play straight out of their own playbook. Continuing to fumble the bag while also not having any high-end offerings will only hurt them further.

Related

AMD showcases RDNA 4 with more AI and new GPU names

You’ll want to learn more about AMD’s RDNA 4 AI.

PC enthusiasts need this launch to be good

Personally, I’m quietly optimistic about RDNA 4, and hope that the reason for the false start was because they really want to make sure they get this right. It might be wishful thinking, but what else do we have at this point? We desperately need some competition; Intel has initiated the dogfight at the entry level, but we need that up the stack as well. The absolutely massive price chasm NVIDIA has created with their product segmentation has left gamers with few choices, and we should all be rooting for RDNA 4 to be a hit.