AMD and Intel might only be competing in the entry-to-midrange market sector but my needs aren’t likely to exceed what RX 8000 or next-gen Intel cards are capable of anyway.
And this goes down to consumer drivers too. I've sworn to myself that I'm not buying AMD for my next laptop, after endless instability issues with the graphics driver. I don't care how great and cheap and performant and whatever it is when I'm afraid to open Google Maps because it might kernel panic my machine.
AMD is definitely not perfect but I don't think it's fair to say they decided not to invest in software. Better late than never, and I'm hoping AMD learned their lesson.
The years it took them to get their Linux drivers into a usable shape are another issue.
Given that the issue (or variants thereof, because there were at least 10 different workarounds to try) was somewhat widely reported, the time it took to get this fixed far exceeded anything I would consider tolerable.
Perhaps they were distracted by dismantling Intel's CPU hegemony? I wouldn't fault them for that, fighting 2 Goliaths simultaneously isn't a sound strategy.
The hardware is a bit finnicky, but honestly I prefer a thing to just be broken and tricky as opposed to nvidia intentionally making my life hard.
Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though
Decoding is much more deterministic, so speed and power efficiency are the main ways hardware decoders can differ.
The drivers are unreliable, Adrenalin is buggy, slow, and bloated; AMD's cards have poor raytracing, and AMD's compute is a dumpster fire, especially on Windows; ROCm is a joke.
None of the LLM or Stability Matrix stuff works on AMD GPUs under Windwos without substantial tweaking and even then it's unreliable garbage, whereas the NVIDIA stuff Just Works.
If you don't care about any of that and just want "better than integrated graphics", especially if you're on Linux where you don't need to worry about the shitshow that is AMD Windows drivers - then sure, go for AMD - especially the cards that have been put on sale (don't pay MSRP for any AMD GPU, ever. They almost always rapidly discount.)
AMD simply does not have the care to compete with NVIDIA for the desktop market. They have barely a few percent of the desktop GPU market; they're interested in stuff like gaming consoles.
Intel are the only ones who will push AMD - and it will push them to either compete or let their product line stagnate and milk as much profit out of the AMD fanboys as they can.