> Their desktop and server CPUs are crushing the market.

Seeing plenty of people choose 13th gen over Zen 4, the platform pricing for Zen 4 just wasn't very attractive. AMD [had to] significantly cut prices across the lineup by 20-30 %.

Let’s not forget that 12th and 13th gen are actually good chips

Also worth remembering that for the vast majority of people, any performance differences between Intel and AMD are utterly and absolutely insignificant as to be completely meaningless.

Nobody needs two-digit core core counts and 5~6GHz clock speeds to do their emails, communicate on Skype/Discord/Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever, browse Facebook and Twitter, watch Youtube, and even play some vidja gaemz. An i3 or even a god damn Celeron is perfectly fine.

So at that point, Intel's superior stability (read: less jank) wins out by a hair and otherwise nobody really cares because there's no practical difference. The vast majority of people will just buy whatever's cheaper or just happens to be on the display table that day.

I keep having similar thoughts, but the software industry has shown a remarkable capacity to squander available hardware resources.

One big reason that demand is low is that the current generation of GPUs are way too expensive, with top-end GPUs about twice what they used to cost a few years ago, very poor improvements in performance-per-$, and anythign below the top end offering even more dubious value for money especially on the AMD side. Originally those high prices were a result of high demand compared to supply, but the companies seem to have gotten greedy and decided they can permanently keep prices high and just throttle back supply to keep them there.

One big reson why the demand is low is because 1080ti or rx580 can still service 95% of gaming needs so what's the point of upgrading?

I’m consistently surprised just how good the RX580 really is. It can handle most games on medium at 1440p, but I tend to just chill on ultra at 1080p. Plus I play on TV, so the smaller resolution is actually better from where I’m sitting

RDNA2 (particularly, the narrower range from 6600 to 6800), is a huge step up in performance per watt. The lowest end one in there, 6600, is faster than a vega64 (which is much faster than rx580), yet uses less than half the power.

RDNA3's lower end chips, once they hit the market, are expected to further improve on this.

Most gamers won't upgrade to the current RDNA3 chips, because the current RDNA3 chips are top of the line, expensive, ~300w monsters.

Amen to that. The need for gamers to be on the hardware treadmill is no longer relevant. Five+ year old hardware can still run basically anything, albeit at reduced fidelity.

I keep eyeing a new build, but realistically, I know it’s just a vanity project because so few games will take full advantage of the better hardware. My favorite games in the past years could have run on ten year old hardware.

I think "service" is the key word here: I have an RX 580, and while it's kind of an incredible card in its longevity, it's really creaky at 1440p even with older games.

Performance per watt has really come a long way since GCN.