Nvidia is dog walking AMD and Intel right now

Like it or not, Nvidia is on top of the world of graphics cards right now. That’s nothing new, with Team Green often sitting at an 80% market share or higher compared to its main rivals. But this moment is different. Nvidia’s recent RTX 50-series GPUs haven’t been met with the best reception, and they’ve largely relied on the new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) to find performance advantages. Meanwhile, AMD has introduced what is likely its best architecture in a decade with the RX 9070 XT, and Intel has released its best graphics architecture ever with the Arc B580.

And yet, Nvidia is still dominating.

Market share shifts are akin to moving a mountain, so it’s not surprising to see Nvidia maintain its position. But right when Nvidia is starting to slip, AMD and Intel seem to have backed down from the fight.

Limited availability, even more limited options

Nvidia is flooding the market while AMD and Intel sleep the day away

Let’s get a grip on the current GPU generation. Nvidia has released 6 GPUs so far, and it has a seventh on the way in the form of the RTX 5060. The rollout of this generation has been much faster than previous Nvidia generations, but we’re still nearing half a year since the first Blackwell card hit shelves. In that same timeframe, AMD and Intel released two graphics cards each. However, AMD and Intel leveraged the same GPU for both of their releases, and positioned them very closely in price.

For AMD, we have the RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. Both are based on the Navi 48 GPU, and at list price, they’re right next to each other. AMD priced the RX 9070 XT at $600 and the RX 9070 at $550. Similar to the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT in the previous generation, the non-XT model here mostly serves as a way to push buyers toward the RX 9070 XT. After all, what’s an extra $50 when you’re already spending above $500 on a GPU?

Intel is in a similar situation. We have the Arc B580 and B570. Both are based on the BMG-G21 GPU, and they clock in at a list price of $250 and $220, respectively. Although AMD and Intel have technically released two graphics cards this generation, they’ve really only released one each. The proximity in pricing and performance is similar to something like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, not two distinct steps within a larger lineup of options.

That’s the situation even before we talk about rising GPU prices, tariffs, and the ever-increasing issues with availability. Even with ideal market conditions, it’s hard to imagine AMD and Intel being successful in this generation given what’s available now. There’s effectively only one point of competition. The Arc B580, despite being a great graphics card, can’t scale up to the RTX 5060 Ti, which only leaves the RX 9070 XT and its cut-down sibling to counter Nvidia’s current generation. Need something more powerful? You have to go Nvidia. Can’t spend $600? You have to go Nvidia. There are last-gen options, if you’re lucky enough to find them in stock. But if you’re after the latest hardware, you don’t have a lot of options.

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Hitting them where it hurts (but not hard enough)

Effective undercutting needs broader scope

Intel and AMD know what their position in the market is. Neither can afford to release a broad lineup of GPUs to tackle Nvidia at every price point. AMD has tried to do that for years, culminating in cards like the RX 6900 XT and RX 7900 XTX. And even then, AMD’s market share dropped compared to Nvidia over the course of the RDNA 2 and 3 generations. You may have strong opinions about those GPUs (I think they’re great, for what it’s worth), but from a business perspective, they didn’t move the needle in the way they needed to.

AMD and Intel need to counter Nvidia where it makes sense. Instead of chasing the flagship crown, where Nvidia has proven time and again that it will dominate with cards like the RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 4090, AMD and Intel are forced into mass market price brackets. For AMD, it’s targeting the sweet spot for high performance and a reasonable price. At around $600, the RX 9070 XT answers Nvidia’s 70-class offerings. Intel is in the business of undercutting, shaving performance with the Arc B580 while arriving at a $250 price point that Nvidia has ignored for two generations.

Those are the correct moves for AMD and Intel, but they aren’t broad enough. No, AMD and Intel can’t afford to compete with Nvidia across the full lineup, but there needs to be more than one answer from both companies. As it stands currently, the RX 9070 XT and Arc B580 have been sold out for months, all while Nvidia’s Blackwell lineup is readily available. A couple more options would spread the demand, and hopefully, make it so that viable alternatives to Nvidia’s Blackwell range are available.

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Hopefully the GPU situation changes soon

Signs point to more options throughout the year

Although Nvidia has flooded the market and started off this generation with a strong lead, it’s possible AMD and Intel could catch up. AMD and Intel haven’t done a great job establishing their current generations among the deluge of Blackwell offerings, but it looks like we’ll see new GPUs from both companies in short order. For AMD, we’ve been hearing rumors about the RX 9060 XT for months, and apparently Team Red is set to launch the card at Computex this month. And despite rumors of cancellation, Intel’s fabled Arc B770 could show up at the event, too.

With Intel punching up and AMD punching down, we may have counters to Nvidia’s 60-class offerings soon. Combined with another surge in supply, hopefully that means more effective competitors to Nvidia. It’s not that Nvidia’s recent GPUs are terrible that I’m advocating for more competition. It’s that cards like the RTX 5070 have been allowed to run away with the show despite pricing and generational performance gains that don’t match up in the way they should.

More importantly, more competition from AMD and Intel pushes Nvidia to make its products better. With Blackwell, we’re seeing minimal generational uplifts with the same node at the heart of the architecture, as well as an increasing reliance on frame generation to improve performance and push visual fidelity forward. Features like MFG aren’t bad inherently, but they fall on deaf ears when the generational improvements fall short of expectations. And we’ve seen plenty of that out of Nvidia’s lineup this generation.

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Better graphics cards for everyone

Right when AMD and Intel could get a leg up, it feels like they’ve given up the fight. Hopefully that’ll change soon, and rumors certainly suggest that’s the case. But as it stands right now, Nvidia is dominating the GPU market even if some of the options from the current Blackwell lineup aren’t particularly good. If nothing else, I hope that the RX 9070 XT and Arc B580 see better availability in the coming months. That’s been a major struggle this generation for all GPUs, but the extremely narrow focus on AMD and Intel isn’t helping on that front.