I kid you not, but the software side of ATI’s reviews and incentives were literally QA got rewarded for finding bugs and then the software engineers were then rewarded for fixing them. You can imagine what happened next. The bitch of it is that it was overall just a symptom of the problem that the company as a whole didn’t prioritize software. NVIDIA knew that the drivers and software efficiency of using the hardware was just as if not more important than the hardware (the stories in the 1990s of how John Carmack used various hacks with hardware is a good example of that).
Though now Nvidia are outselling them in dGPUs by nearly 10x, so it's pretty easy for them to do "both".
Sure, if those things are relevant to you, it was a killer card, but most consumers judge GPUs first and foremost by their gaming performance, in which the VII was a total dud. The 5700 XT was nearly as fast in those with far less hardware because getting proper utilization on GCN/CDNA is a pain compared to RDNA.
RDNA2 completed the gaming oriented flip with Infinity Cache (which is also useful outside of games, but still has limited application in GPGPU) which allowed them to offer competitive gaming performance to Nvidia with far less hardware, a big difference from the Vega era.
Whether or not the Radeon VII was a "fantastic card" is relatively unimportant, it would have been another GPU. OP's main point was that AMD had a years-long policy of not officially supporting any of their consumer-grade GPUs for computing applications, as a result AMD had lost critical opportunities during this time period - even a small market share is better than none. OP mentioned Radeon VII because it was the only exception, and it only happened because there was strong support from some groups within AMD - which didn't last long. After RDNA was released, computing support on consumer GPUs was put on pause again until several months ago. There's a big difference between "not optimally designed for computing" and "no official support of computing at all".
The outcome is that it created a great barrier of entry for developers and power users with desktop GPUs. You have to figure out everything by yourself, which is not supposed to be particularly difficult as it's the norm in the FOSS world. The problem is that, in a community-driven project, you would have received help or at least a hint from your peers or project maintainers who's familiar with the system. Not so for AMD. if something doesn't work, no AMD developers will provide any help or even hints - and by not providing support, the "community" is never really established. The ROCm GitHub Issues page was (is?) basically post-apocalypse world abandoned by AMD, full of user self-help threads with no input from developers. Almost nothing works and nobody known why.
> Sure, if those things are relevant to you, it was a killer card
Disclosure: I use the Radeon VII for bandwidth-heavy simulations so I have a pro-Radeon VII bias. But I don't think my bias affected my judgement here.
They're fundamentally a hardware company (as per Lisa Su's CV) which didn't cotton on to the fact that Cuda was the killer. I remember how @Bridgman kept playing a rearguard action on Phoronix, his job being to keep devs on board. Losing battle.
I kinda understand it because [80/90]s era hardware people intrinsically think hardware is the top dog in the stack, and that's where all AMD management come from including Su.
Kodura understood that Nvidia was killing AMD because the consumer cards could run CUDA. So he pushed through, against Lisa Su, the Radeon VII, which until very recently, and for many years, was the only consumer card that ROCm supported. He was basically fired shortly thereafter, and the RVII, which was a fantastic card, was shutdown sharpish. Then they brought in Wang who crystallised the consumer/pro segmentation.
Now they're furiously trying to backpedal, and it's too late. There are multiple attempting competitors, but basically the only one worth talking about is AAPL and Metal.
AMD lost the window.