And the question for most that remains once AMD catches up: will the duopoly result in lower prices to a reasonable level for hobbyists or bootstrapped startups, or will AMD just gouge like NVidia?
PyTorch is already walking down this path and while CUDA-based performance is significantly better, that is changing and of course an area of continued focus.
It's not that people don't like Nvidia, rather it's just that there is a lot of hardware out there that can technically perform competitively, but the work needs to be done to bring it into the circle.
You can also actually buy them as opposed to the nVidia offerings which you are going to have to fight for.
I sure hope I'm wrong.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/oligopoly.asp
With that few competitors pricing would not change much.
If you're AMD and NVIDIA and lowering the price would double the number of customers, you might very well want to do that, unless you're supply constrained -- which has been the issue because they're both bidding against everyone else for limited fab capacity. But that should be temporary.
This is also a market with a network effect. If all your GPUs are $1000 and nobody can afford them then nobody is going to write code for them, and then who wants them? So the winning strategy is actually to make sure that there are kind of okay GPUs available for less than $300 and make sure lots of people have them, then sell very expensive ones that use the same architecture but are faster.
That has been the traditional model, but the lack of production capacity meant that they've only been making the overpriced ones recently. Which isn't actually in their interests once the supply of fab capacity loosens up.
Game "AI" is meant to be fun to play (and win) against, they're not meant to be smart; that's why zombie games are so successful. Most "game AI" are finite state machines, throwing a neural network at the issue would be absurd overkill.
I'm sure there will be some AI applications in games (like procedural world generation or such, perhaps) but it's not the obvious connection that most people think.
> This is also a market with a network effect
That is what the demand curve describes. In your hypothetical that would mean the demand curve is more vertical in slope.
Higher prices are more likely due to several items. Participants willing to pay more (crypto and ai). But also less companies making the things than 15 years ago so less supply and oligopoly style pricing. Plus one company being the hinge pin on building the chips and another company consuming large portions of its supply. The supply curve shifted left and up. While the demand curve is going the up and right. There is no 'one thing' that causes it. But oligopoly pricing is very much in effect. With 3 companies making the things.
> Which isn't actually in their interests once the supply of fab capacity loosens up
Which would change the supply curve and they would re-evaluate which way to move the price. That could mean bad things or nothing happens other than possible lower prices (eventually).
Ryzen 9 7950X — $799 on release Intel 13900K - $589.
In the gaming market for GPUs, Nvidia has no competition except in some niche areas. Overall, their lead in upscaling software is too commanding so they can price how they want. Customers are paying 15-20% premiums for the same raw hardware performance, all to access Nvidia's DLSS, because there's no good competition.