As we get halfway through the year 2024, we approach the launch season for the next generation of graphics cards. As we get the RTX 50 series release date rumors for the last quarter of the year, we’re slowly approaching the time when we might be hearing more about them. But as the current gen slowly leaves the news, it’s hard to see much change coming in the market with the next series.
With now three companies battling for your choice to buy, it’s a hard battle to win people over and innovate something better and grander. But that’s not even the struggle as when the hype and power are behind one company is there, then it’s hard to fight back. So we look forward to what we might expect from the likes of Intel and AMD as well as trying to fight back against Nvidia at the top of the market.
Nvidia’s lead and dominance
It’s no secret and quite the wide knowledge now of Nvidia’s rise in power, as its stock prices rise and the market cap climbs the ranks. Although it peaked at number one, it now mingles in the top three alongside Microsoft and Apple. That’s thanks to its endeavor into AI chips, with all the hype and build-up of models and massive computers, Nvidia is not shying away from selling computing power in that sector.
John Peddie Research shows the lead in add-in board sales that Nvidia has over the competition, as in Q1 24 it has 88% compared to 12% of AMD and 0% from Intel. That’s even less to say on the enterprise section where the even bigger cards lay, with Nvidia growing more and more with a whole range of cards available from them. That’s especially true at the top as there’s nothing that matches up to the RTX 4090 for the gamers out there.
Even if we might be feeling a bit left behind, it kind of feels like we might be at the back of the mind now. As the lower end with the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB and how it might feel a bit lacking in this day and age. Especially as the prices keep rising and making it a bit less affordable which gives the competition a bit of an opportunity to get something out of it.
The fight for second
With so much lead the rest of the pack kind of has to fight for the scraps. Even looking at the Steam hardware survey, Nvidia’s discrete GPUs lead ahead of any Intel or AMD cards, without integrated graphics counting. So it’s more like these two having to fight for whatever is left but that comes with some struggles. Both have been known for driver issues so they might not be the easiest convert to.
They are also expecting to release new GPUs to come at a similar time to Nvidia. Intel’s Battlemage release and AMD’s Radeon RX 8000 release should bring some improvements alongside them but we don’t expect anything too grand. All the AI hype of Nvidia that it also integrates into its cards makes it a lot more appealing and innovative. Whilst AMD and Intels kind of fall flat mostly, and are unlikely to cause a massive shift in impressions with their next generation.
Although Intel has a lot of improvement available to it, as the drivers have matured we’d like to imagine its next release being a lot easier to do. Whilst RDNA 4 might have just performance improvements, especially when it comes to ray tracing, that is something that could come better and closer to Nvidia. They both should be able to come with better prices, as Nvidia increases them, AMD and Intel can come for a lower price and make it harder to not choose a good value option. Even still there is a lot of love and commitment to the company which will be hard to cut down.
