I can appreciate more affordable video cards but this is a bit much. Besides fronting like they’re some force for justice they’re also stoking the whole NVIDIA & AMD fanboys arguing about their hardware thing.
It’s reminiscent of the Pepsi ordeal except here there’s an actual cause and the cause is supporting their products?
I definitely don’t want to engage with brands in this way.
It’s certainly an original take on “oh God, our main competition control most of the market and have the majority of their enthusiast product stack above the performance level of our top current card”. I think that a crucial factor is that inside the world of patent-locked R&D** that both Intel and nVidia must be pushed by a viable AMD. That is the only way those companies won’t shamelessly offer slowly worsening deals that only marginally improve upon the value of their own previous offerings (while maximising their profitability on each unit sold & R&D cost). If we can’t have proper open competition then we at least must have some limited competition and AMD is really the only player in town who can do that for either of these dominant players in the large chip design markets.
The Pepsi ad was terrible, as is the Heineken one. This seems… maybe I’m more charitable to AMD because I find it laughable when AMD advertise like this. But I certainly also think there is a meaningful difference between “be a rebel, buy a medium-priced GPU” (which is an old a muck ad staple) and the Pepsi ad’s co-opting of current protests and imagery while stripping it of any politics (and even promoting the opposite message). As I’m writing that, I’m questioning why I find it so easy to say #RadeonRebels is far less dangerous, less capable of poisoning the target market with a depoliticised message. I think I’m saying I don’t expect an ad for $200 GPUs to play to many people who are actually involved in full-scale revolution and maybe I need to think more on that to decide if I’m being overly dismissive. But that’s my first take on why I found AMD’s ads laughable rather than dangerous.
** note that Imagination Technology recently said they do no believe Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, could make a GPU without infringing their IP and so avoid paying any royalties, one of the reasons is because the GPU market is a patent minefield.
