> Funny because AMD probably has the lowest share of the three if we include all PCs including office ones (and we should since the website says "any PC").
Steam says that users in Linux have a overwhelming majority of AMD and Intel GPUs [1]:
- number 1 GPU is AMD VANGOGH Steam Deck APU with 42.05% by itself;
- top 10 Nvidia GPUs have only 9.54%;
- top 10 "not Steam Deck APU, not Nvidia" GPUs are 26.64% of the market, so almost outnumber them 2.8-to-1;
> to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have
FYI: most people have Intel GPUs. More than both AMD and Nvidia combined (Somewhere around 70%, AMD around 13% and Nvidia around 17%). Intel and AMD are supported, ergo for most people it works just fine. It could work with Nvidia too, if Nvidia were cooperative.
> How many GPUs would NVIDIA sell in the HPC market if it wasn't for CUDA and the various support libraries around it?
We don't have to hypothesize about this. The HPC GPU market has multiple vendors, just look at how many HPC GPUs AMD or Intel are selling: AMD and Intel have ~0.8% or so market share. NVIDIA has >99%.
Pretty much every review of HPC GPUs states that AMD GPUs are both faster and cheaper.
I'm typing this on a machine with a fairly powerfull AMD GPU. The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia, everyone keeps using their special APIs. Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive crap.
Any Steam hardware survey (the most relevant for gaming PC contexts) will show Intel handily beating AMD at around 66% to 33% for CPU[1], so your claim that Intel is somehow not popular is bunk.
> How much of the market share is Nvidia? A stupid quick search's top result says 80%. So 80% of PCs can't run Wayland?
No.
Long-term Nvidia share is about ~18%, AMD ~12% and Intel ~70%. But that's for the entire market, and since Windows gamers are skewing toward Nvidia, that makes the rest to make up the percentage.
So 80% not being able to run Wayland due to being Nvidia is grossly incorrect.
> Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
Nvidia has that market share because Nvidia has a very big team doing nothing but working either directly with game developers or on pre-release versions of games (provided by the publishers) to make sure that the games work perfect on their cards from day one. No one needs to release a game that doesn't work on Nvidia cards, just not providing that access would be incredible damaging for Nvidia and Nvidia knows that.
> There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.
Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :)
Let's see the most successful games of the year:
- Battlefield 1, needs at least GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM. Will not start on Intel.
- Call of Duty: Inifinite Warfare. Same requirement.
- Overwatch, actually runs on Intel HD 4400. Needs at least 660/7950 to run well
It is sarcasm, right? Last time I checked nvidia GPUs on Linux required proprietary nonsense and could not even run Wayland.
> AMDs Linux support for anything except it’s core driver is crappy.
Fortunately, the vast majority of users want their GPUs to display graphics. If the Steam Deck is any indication, AMD GPUs on Linux are quite capable of that.
> this happens most often if you accidentally install an Nvidia GPU and use binary drivers
So, the vast majority of people wanting to play games? Let’s be real, Nvidia is currently the king of gaming GPUs. You can’t just handwave it away when talking about gaming on Linux.
What is "everything"? PC Gaming is nVidia centric because they put a lot of money behind it. AMD supplies the chips for all next gen consoles so by pure market penetration in the gaming market, I'm pretty sure they are doing quite well.
Windows is essentially just the gaming market. Gamers are fickle, only buying a card every couple years and are very price conscious. But AI, and any other datacenter uses of GPUs (mining) buy cards in bulk, are not fickle, and are not obsessed with daily price fluctuations. Those are the markets Nvidea wants to be in and they are dominated by linux. Not playing nice with linux gamers will come back to haunt Nvidea.
Also, one should not underestimate the bias that gaming generates. All those linux gamers who suffer poor drivers while gaming saturday night walk into jobs at datacenters and AI research groups each monday. They remember. I certainly do. All things being equal, I lean towards AMD whenever the boss asks my opinion on our next purchase.
> lower end GPU are playing games like League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Starcraft
None of those games you listed are available on the Steam shop and aren't included in the stats linked. The Steam stats do have tons of other games and is pretty much the most accurate consensus on PC gamer's hardware.
And GTX 970 is pretty much in the top 5% of GPU hardware, the vast majority 90%+ of PC gamers aren't even close to that.
> They have such a dominant market share because they make more compute for less dollar.
Is that really the case? I looked at getting an accelerator card for personal use. AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI25 will run me $900 - $1000. A similarly specced NVidia Tesla P100 is in the $3000 range.
and thats the consumer market, which lets say is 30% of the B2B enterprise market, which is probably even higher % nvidia
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