AMD weighs in on HD versus 4K

Recently, Frank Azor -one of the bigwigs at AMD- pointed out that the
vast bulk of PC gamers (and even more with consoles) still play in HD
resolutions rather than $K or higher. Close to 60% of gamers on Steam
still have 1080p monitors. Many of the most-played games don't even
use the added RAM necessary for HD. As such, Azor says, AMD's primary
focus won't be on catering to the UHD/4K gamer, but to the larger
market where 4-8GB VRAM are sufficient.

Now, to some degree, this sounds a bit like sour grapes. While you
might argue that AMD's high-end cards are as good (or better) than
Nvidia, unarguably it is Nvidia that controls that market. Azor's
proclamation sounds less like a chosen strategy than a "well, we
weren't REALLY competing there anyway, so there!" acknowledgement of
that fact. AMD isn't repositioning by choice; they're where they are
because Nvidia thrashed them in that market (even if Nvidia arguably
has the worse product. You don't hear about AMD cards melting their
power cables every other month).

Still, I think Azor has a point. Gamers largely have spoken (through
their wallets) on the issue, and what they've said is that, "HD is
more than good enough". We've come to the point where video games
visuals are more than satisfactory already, and the added cost of
upgrading to higher-end hardware --be it video-cards, monitors or
whatever-- just isn't worth the price. In fact, with the popularity of
handhelds like the Nintendo Switch and Valve's SteamDeck,
HD-resolutions got a second lease on life; the small screen size of
those devices make the pixel density of 1080p more than sufficient.

So AMD is probably right to bet on lower-powered, less-expensive cards
that only sport 4-8GB RAM. Nvidia might be all the rage in the news
with their 12/16/24/32GB monstrosities (complete with 600W power
requirements... I think my toaster uses less!) but outside of
gamer-super-enthusiasts (and crypto/AI-bros) there's not really much
call for that sort of performance.

I'm sure the developers will be pissed though. For too long they've
been riding on the wave of ever-more powerful machines looming on the
horizon to excuse their sloppy code. Maybe now we'll get some
optimization in.