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Few people have a TV that is really good for gaming in the first place

The hardcore gamer crowd who gets high refresh rate monitors are a relatively small segment of the market. Around 5%-10% by unit sales, which means probably around 2%-3% by number of people since they upgrade much more frequently. The other 95%+ of gamers are perfectly content to play on their TV.

Regular TVs are actually very good for gaming if you're content with a 60 Hz refresh rate. TVs all cover 100% sRGB and have good viewing angles. And they're designed to show fast motion (TV shows and movies) so the panels were pre-selected by the manufacturer to have low pixel response times and thus minimal image smearing. The only issue you might encounter is processing lag as the TV tries to refine what it thinks is a video image. But that can usually be disabled by putting the TV into PC mode (direct or 1:1, which also turns off overscan).

Here, let's try to save you from further embarrassing yourself.

Specification wise (cores and clocks) the two processors are pretty closely matched. So, for 13% less money, you can get a processor that delivers more than 200% the performance, this seems like the mother of a no-brainer.

It's that more processor for less money thing. Everybody gets it but you (well you are just a troll, we both know that)

It just looks like people are moving to tablets and phones over laptops and desktops in general. In addition, speed bumps for CPUs and GPUs aren't really noticable to non-gamers, I've been able to stick with the same machines for a long time now. On my MacBook Pro I'm running Linux so I wasn't affected by Apple cutting off OS support. It's still as speedy as ever.

Wrong.

You're mistaking concentration of profits with profits in general.

Yes, a single company profits more via a console than does the PC which is a diversified market that no one company really profits from exclusively. However, the collective profits of the PC as a platform vastly dwarf that of the consoles... and again... merely as a gaming platform.

http://jonpeddie.com/press-rel...

1. Gaming is a big issue with home users. Users that go with MacOS or Linux generally don't care about gaming. Merely choosing windows in the first place often has some roots in the knowledge that it is a superior OS for games merely because most games are written for it.

2. It is very easy to track console sales and console game sales since MS and Sony are aware of every single f'ing one of them since they get a cut of those sales and can track it on their own internal balance sheets. Tracking PC gaming revenue much less profit is very complicated because there are so many more players in the market. Saying PC isn't as profitable would mean you know how much nVidia, AMD, etc make on hardware for gaming, how much Steam makes for gaming, how much GoG makes for gaming, etc... you don't have those stats but even a casual look at the numbers will show you that the PC actually makes a lot more money.

3. If we're talking about profits and not revenue, you need to keep in mind that a lot of that profit is artificial and created through exploitative market tactics like exploiting captive audiences. Forcing users to pay a fee to play online games for example is just one thing you find on consoles that is exploiting mother fucking stupid console players. At a certain point, you're going to be arguing that you're better because you get raped harder by MS and Sony... if that's where you want to take this... I'll just concede you have a point... console players are idiots.

http://jonpeddie.com/press-rel...

http://jonpeddie.com/press-rel...

http://jonpeddie.com/press-rel...

NVidia has nowhere near 76% market share. Actually about 16% on the desktop. Even LESS in mobile.

AMD has spend a lot of time and money building low power SoCs. Tablets use low-power SoCs. That they can't make money in that market is a pretty clear admission they've bet on the wrong horse. High end desktops and servers died with the FX line and you know their laptop line is in trouble when they have to advertise this: Introducing mobile systems with AMD's highest performing APUs, exclusively at Best Buy. It can't be long until they're waving the white flag and pulling out of mainstream x86 processors altogether, they're losing on all fronts. They got lucky in "graphics" for a while with AMD card being far superior for cryptocurrency mining, but that's over and nVidia is now selling as many graphics chips as AMD does total, including the APUs. I expect the Q4 numbers to be worse as nVidia launched the GTX 980/970 and AMD isn't due for a new production until 2015. What's carrying AMD is now the console business, if they didn't have that to prop up volume they'd be done for. The way things are going they need to find money in the ARM business and fast.

Right, because promoting open source GPL-compatible drivers didn't work for Linux.

Oh, wait, it worked. The Linux hardware support is overall quite good (with many hardware manufacturers working with upstream to contribute drivers). In fact, Nvidia is a minority - Intel has the biggest market share in graphic chips (avobe 50%), AMD/ATI is second. Both have contributed open source drivers which are getting better and better.

Discrete graphics is going away, they seem to be leaning increasingly towards the HPC market but that is tiny compared to the consumer graphics market that their company was built on. I just don't see it. Anyone?

Discrete GPU market is growing. See JPR's analyst reports http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/embedded-graphics-processors-killing-off-igps-no-threat-to-discrete-gpus/

here is the full report http://jonpeddie.com/download/media/slides/An_Analysis_of_the_GPU_Market.pdf

Discrete graphics is going away, they seem to be leaning increasingly towards the HPC market but that is tiny compared to the consumer graphics market that their company was built on. I just don't see it. Anyone?

Discrete GPU market is growing. See JPR's analyst reports http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/embedded-graphics-processors-killing-off-igps-no-threat-to-discrete-gpus/

here is the full report http://jonpeddie.com/download/media/slides/An_Analysis_of_the_GPU_Market.pdf

Umm. Should I even bother to point out how many things are wrong with what you said?

PhysX itself is used by developers. The card being capable of running it is fairly irrelevant. "Do you want shiny extra visual-only effects? Yes/No". PhysX GPU acceleration is fairly useless, and even many Nvidia users turn it off to save framerate.

You have a video card, which you presumably use for a game. If PhysX is used by the game...good for you, unless of course it uses PhysX software only (as the overwhelming majority oft PhysX licensees do). If it doesn't...or it's unsupported, have you somehow lost something?
You're effectively putting to task the expectation that A( 'everything' uses PhysX, B( 'everything' must support PhysX.

You're effectively (and naively) blaming Nvidia for the lack of PhysX on AMD/ATI cards, when AMD itself hasn't been interested in it, hasn't developed its own comparable libraries, and let the Havok deal fall through. AMD has done, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing to compete or interoperate in this area, not even encourage open source as do the work for them (as they're now doing for UNIX drivers).

The ultimate defense for libel is the truth, the ultimate defense for anti-competitive practices, is the competitor's own incompetence/inability to stay afloat. Nvidia had much (but not everything; NEC was the bigger factor there) to do with the demise of 3DFx, and absolutely nothing to do with the decline of AMD's competitive quality and their image in the eyes of the consumer. If more people bought AMD cards, then AMD would have a greater market share, logically. Nvidia hasn't sabotaged them in any way whatsoever, not even a teensy bit, nor do they hold the Lion's share of the GPU market.

Why not also blame Nvidia for not porting PhysX to Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, and Solaris while you're at it? Come on. This is the real world, not 'every company does what you want before you want it' land.

The market for PhysX, is specifically developers, not you, the end user. Why are you so hell bent on getting a few extra graphical effects due to PhysX? That's what it's used for in most cases, and the most cases are...what, MAYBE 10 games released ever that directly support hardware PhysX from the GPU? And another 10 that supported the Aegia PPU, but not an Nvidia card?

Market share is also a non-issue for you, the end user. After all, do you get PhysX acceleration a Havok game either? No. Does it matter how much market share Havok or Bullet Physics have, if the game you like uses it? No.

You're...kinda wrong about MS and monopoly. They were ruled a monopoly for anti-competitive practices and various licensing deals they made to hurt the any competition. It has nothing to do with Apple 'not available on x86'. That's...very very strange. Apple backed IBM PowerPC, after they backed Motorola 68k. That it wasn't available on x86 was simply, they didn't want it to be. Just like they don't want it to be available for general non-Apple computers still today. Microsoft had nothing to do with that, and even periodically developed software for MacOS/PPC. They even developed a version of Windows NT 3.51 for PPC (which didn't hurt Apple at all).

Nvidia is far from a monopoly in the graphics market, with a mere 29% of the market and AMD 17%. Intel dominates with 44%. At least according to JPR, whom I'm sure you distrust as well: http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/amd-soars-in-q209-intel-and-nvidia-also-show-great-gains/

Could AMD's loss of market share (and I seem to recall that Nvidia and ATI were fairly neck and neck in the Geforce 2/3 era) be due to their own problems which they have yet to resolve, despite ATI/AMD merger? Maybe possibly? If people don't trust you and your product to work particularly well, people will be less likely to put down $100+ merely for you to disappoint them. The door swings both ways.

Nvidia are getting very scared now that ATi are beating them senseless.

Nvidia is really feeling the pinch with ATi taking up the higher end of the market (pro-gear/high end HD) and intel suring up the lower end (GMA, etc). Nvidia pretty much are stuck with consumers buying their middle of the line gear (8600/9600).

When you aim high you tend to hurt real when you fall from grace, the whole 8800 to 9800 leap was abysmal at best unlike their main competitor who really pulled their finger out to release the 3xxx & 4xxx series.

I guess you're referring to AMD/ATI's successful HD 4000 launch about a month ago, but you also seem to be omitting NVIDIA's GTX 200 series. At the high end (non-workstation), the GTX 280 outperforms the HD 4870. The $550 HD 4870 X2 (released about two weeks ago) outperforms the $450 GTX 280, but consumes a heck of a lot more power.

Also, NVIDIA seems to have been beating AMD/ATI senseless for years. According to Jon Peddie Research, for total graphics chips, NVIDIA had 31.4% market share in Q2 2008 vs. AMD's 18.1%. In Q2 2007, NVIDIA had 32.5% and AMD had 19.5%.

For notebook GPUs, NVIDIA led AMD 23.6% to 17.9% in Q2 2008, and 27.0% to 17.4% in Q1 2008. For "graphics add-in boards", NVIDIA led AMD 65% to 35% in Q1 2008.

The "leap" from NVIDIA 8000 series to 9000 series (which was hardly "abysmal") is more appropriately compared to ATI's leap from HD 2000 series to HD 3000 series. NVIDIA's 8000 series was better than ATI's HD 2000 series. ATI responded with the slightly improved (but well-priced) HD 3000 series, and NVIDIA countered with their 9000 series and price cuts to 8800GT/GTS, which drove down the prices of ATI's best-performing cards even more.

Until AMD released the HD 4000 series a month ago, AMD couldn't produce cards that could compete with NVIDIA's $400+ cards. After the successful HD 4000 launch, NVIDIA was forced to slash prices, but this is a very recent develpment. Personally, I'd choose an ATI card over NVIDIA now, but AMD/ATI has been getting whipped by NVIDIA for years.

Nvidia are getting very scared now that ATi are beating them senseless.

Nvidia is really feeling the pinch with ATi taking up the higher end of the market (pro-gear/high end HD) and intel suring up the lower end (GMA, etc). Nvidia pretty much are stuck with consumers buying their middle of the line gear (8600/9600).

When you aim high you tend to hurt real when you fall from grace, the whole 8800 to 9800 leap was abysmal at best unlike their main competitor who really pulled their finger out to release the 3xxx & 4xxx series.

I guess you're referring to AMD/ATI's successful HD 4000 launch about a month ago, but you also seem to be omitting NVIDIA's GTX 200 series. At the high end (non-workstation), the GTX 280 outperforms the HD 4870. The $550 HD 4870 X2 (released about two weeks ago) outperforms the $450 GTX 280, but consumes a heck of a lot more power.

Also, NVIDIA seems to have been beating AMD/ATI senseless for years. According to Jon Peddie Research, for total graphics chips, NVIDIA had 31.4% market share in Q2 2008 vs. AMD's 18.1%. In Q2 2007, NVIDIA had 32.5% and AMD had 19.5%.

For notebook GPUs, NVIDIA led AMD 23.6% to 17.9% in Q2 2008, and 27.0% to 17.4% in Q1 2008. For "graphics add-in boards", NVIDIA led AMD 65% to 35% in Q1 2008.

The "leap" from NVIDIA 8000 series to 9000 series (which was hardly "abysmal") is more appropriately compared to ATI's leap from HD 2000 series to HD 3000 series. NVIDIA's 8000 series was better than ATI's HD 2000 series. ATI responded with the slightly improved (but well-priced) HD 3000 series, and NVIDIA countered with their 9000 series and price cuts to 8800GT/GTS, which drove down the prices of ATI's best-performing cards even more.

Until AMD released the HD 4000 series a month ago, AMD couldn't produce cards that could compete with NVIDIA's $400+ cards. After the successful HD 4000 launch, NVIDIA was forced to slash prices, but this is a very recent develpment. Personally, I'd choose an ATI card over NVIDIA now, but AMD/ATI has been getting whipped by NVIDIA for years.

Except in the way that really matters: Intel provides open source drivers and documentation.

Not to mention that Intel has about 43% of the market, while ATI has 26% and Nvidia has 18%. If ATI or Nvidia want to compete with the market leader, they can open source their drivers as well.

Because this issue keeps cropping up from time to time ("Huh, I didn't know Intel sold more graphics units than ATI/NVIDIA") here's a link to page listing graphic unit sales market share for 2005.

If this organization says one in two PC's, how are they defining a PC? Is a PC a computer that is already running XP, or is it any computer running any version of Windows including those still on 3.1 or 2000? Or even worse (for sake of their statistic), is it any personal computer, including Macs, or personal linux boxes being used for simple tasks with a simple 8mb graphics card?

I'd guess that almost half of all PC's today can't even adequately run Windows XP without being bogged down because of graphics and RAM requirements.

While I'm sure that many PC's won't be able to run the new Aero Glass of Windows Vista, I think the Researcher should have been a little bit more specific about his estimate. People have uses for computers without upgrading to the "latest and greatest."

and link to research press release: http://www.jonpeddie.com/index.shtml#vista