handymanshandle

SK Hynix isn’t generic, what the hell?

If anything, it's massively preferable to what they tried to do with the R9 Fury cards back in the day. Having a stable driver to lean on and then doing security updates is MASSIVELY preferable to releasing a driver package that's completely unified that just so happens to be broken on a small set of GPUs.

I mention the Fury cards because anyone who owned them and used them on Windows throughout 2020 will tell you that the drivers were broken for them for a good 8 months. I bet money AMD does not want a repeat of that, so might as well set a stable driver in stone and give it security updates from there.

I remember one of the primary driving factors of cost on the R9 Fury cards (Fury, Nano and Fury X, as well as stuff like the Radeon Pro Duo) being the ridiculous cost of HBM manufacturing. Given that it's, well, stacked memory with little room for manufacturing defects, it was not cheap to manufacture.

I want to say that this was also the primary reason that the RX Vega cards (Vega 56 and 64 more accurately) were cheaper than their Fury counterparts - less memory modules that were insanely expensive to make means, well, a less expensive card. I could honestly see why AMD ended up dropping HBM for consumer graphics cards, as its ridiculous memory bandwidth advantage was diminished heavily by its buy-in cost and the rise in suitable gaming performance of GDDR5/6 memory, even if it meant that the cards consumed more power.