"AMD GPUs provide more value to the average gamer" — for years, this has been the consensus among reviewers and the larger online community. And it makes sense. AMD does offer more performance and VRAM per dollar than Nvidia in general. Except for high-end shoppers who have no choice but to buy Nvidia, AMD GPUs have been the better choice for the vast majority of gamers. With the latest RX 90 series cards, AMD has even made strides in ray tracing performance, and its FSR stack now handily competes with DLSS. Old complaints with respect to drivers and thermals have also been resolved, but Nvidia still enjoys the lion's share of the market. 15 years ago, AMD sold almost 50% of the GPUs on the market; today, that figure has dropped to a mere 5%. Gamers continue to favor Team Green overwhelmingly, but what exactly are the reasons behind it?
12 years ago, I left AMD for NVIDIA, and AMD has never given me a reason to come back
NVIDIA's ecosystem became about much more than silicon, years ago.
The Nvidia mindshare dominance is real
It's the default choice for most gamers
Whatever your opinions about Nvidia, you can't deny that the company enjoys much greater top-of-the-mind recall than AMD when it comes to gaming GPUs. This dominant mindshare has been built over decades of superiority in terms of performance, features, and reliability. Nvidia is a juggernaut, and has access to greater resources, higher marketing budgets, and tighter integration with game developers (GameWorks). It can afford large-scale marketing campaigns, sponsor many more titles, and throw its weight around the industry in general. And it's not just marketing that's behind Team Green's leadership in the GPU space, whether consumer or enterprise.
Between the two GPU brands, Nvidia was the first mover, at least on the 3D graphics scene. From launching the "world's first GPU" and the CUDA architecture for parallel programming to the iconic Pascal lineup, and bringing real-time ray tracing to games with the Turing GPUs, Nvidia has been at the cutting edge of GPU computing. ATI, and later AMD, have always been chasing Nvidia, except occasionally in the 2000s when its GPUs surpassed those of Nvidia's in performance. Due to Nvidia's image as being the needle mover in the GPU industry, its landmark campaigns like #RTXOn, and long periods of little competition, it has managed to make itself synonymous with GPUs.
The enthusiast crowd may pore over performance-per-dollar charts for days, but the average consumer makes their decision based on what they already know. Nvidia is the default option for the majority of customers. They will even go out of their way to buy an inferior card just because the box says "Nvidia" instead of "AMD." Nvidia's massive success in the data center market has also helped its image in the consumer market, convincing gamers that it is indeed "the way it's meant to be played".
3 things AMD GPUs do better that Nvidia fans don’t talk about
AMD isn't as far behind as Nvidia fans make it seem
The legacy bias against AMD's drivers and thermals continues to hurt it
Reputation has a habit of lingering
There was a time, specifically during the Vega and the RX 5000 era, when AMD's driver stability lagged way behind that of Nvidia. Many users faced black screens, crashes, and limited performance on their AMD GPUs that were directly linked to unstable drivers. Then, there were the infamous complaints about AMD's overheating GPUs with the Radeon R9 and Vega series. Thermal efficiency officially left the chat, as these GPUs frequently hovered near 100℃ during load. All of this used to happen a decade ago, but AMD's reputation as the producer of unreliable "room heaters" proved hard to shake, even after the company all but resolved both issues with its modern graphics cards.
This reputation keeps a huge section of gamers from returning to AMD after experiencing these issues first-hand. Others rely on word-of-mouth from friends and fellow users online who warn them against buying AMD GPUs. Despite claims of unstable drivers being a thing of the past, wrong advice repeated over and over keeps new users from choosing AMD over Nvidia. To be fair, AMD's more recent reputation of "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" is somewhat valid. The company has repeatedly failed to capitalize on market gaps and favorable conditions, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It hasn't priced its recent offerings well enough for gamers to switch, and has inexplicably launched key competitive features. These recent fumbles make it harder for the average gamer to ignore even the outdated claims against AMD's GPUs, pushing them to the relative safety of Nvidia cards.
The best AMD GPU for Local AI performs as well as the RTX 3090 and costs far less
AMD already has a worthy candidate for local AI, but most people don't know it
DLSS is still ahead of FSR
It's tough to recommend FSR over DLSS in its existing avatar
Nvidia debuted its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology alongside its RTX 2000 series graphics cards in 2018. What was initially an upscaling technique to compensate for the performance penalty on the first-gen RTX cards, evolved to encompass a host of other techniques like frame generation, ray reconstruction, and anti-aliasing (DLAA). AMD took three more years to come up with its own upscaler in the form of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in 2021, which, for the longest time, remained firmly behind DLSS in terms of image quality and performance. Even with the launch of FSR 3 in late 2023, which brought frame generation into the mix, AMD's software stack was universally panned for being a generation behind that of Nvidia's.
FSR 3.1 in mid-2024 was the first major update from AMD that looked truly promising. It massively improved temporal stability and reduced artifacts like shimmering and flickering that plagued FSR 3 and previous versions. It also decoupled frame generation from upscaling, allowing gamers to use the two techniques independently. However, DLSS 3 remained superior in image quality and performance. Even when FSR 4 all but closed the gap with DLSS 4, Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 pulled ahead once again, especially in ray-traced scenarios. The newest addition to AMD's upscaler, i.e., FSR Redstone, is a great leap forward, matching DLSS 4.5 in image quality. However, its ray regeneration performance still feels a generation behind that of Nvidia's.
Nvidia's first-mover advantage, consistent development of new features, and universal game adoption have ensured DLSS keeps the lead against AMD's FSR technology. AMD has finally integrated ML-powered frame generation, ray regeneration, and radiance caching with FSR Redstone, but it's too soon to say whether this version will finally beat DLSS. AMD's reluctance to support older-generation GPUs and the lack of game support right now are major blockers to the broad adoption of its FSR suite.
AMD's answer to DLSS arrived half-baked, and now nobody's using FSR Redstone
FSR Redstone's second showing has been... unimpressive
Nvidia all but owns the entire GPU market, but it doesn't have to be this way
There was a time when AMD and Nvidia shared the GPU market evenly, and Team Red held around a 30% market share for many years after that. However, since 2020, AMD has been on a steady decline, as Nvidia GPUs continue to rule the charts. Today, 95% of all GPU sales belong to Nvidia, and AMD struggles to communicate its value proposition to old and new PC gamers alike. That said, AMD can absolutely make a comeback if it gets its act together. The industry needs more competition, not less, and AMD is key to that future.