A good group can catch up significantly in 2 years. They will still be behind, but if they are cheaper (or just you can buy them) that would still go a long way.

I think even with the trashy api and drivers if they release graphic cards with 4x the memory of the nvidia equivalents the community would put the effort to make them work.

Honestly if they got some high tier talent in, did a deep audit of existing talent and cut where there were any doubt then worked on their drivers in the open and shipped cards with 48GB+ VRAM then Nvidia would be in a difficult situation in 2 years.

Gotta open the drivers fully though because if you make the hardware totally outspec'd where it matters (VRAM) and the drivers are open then talent within the biggest orgs will go out of their way to help make your tech work in their farms, it's the only way to not be forever playing catchup.

I think that it is really hard to be cheaper in the ways that really matter. Performance per watt matters a lot here, and NVidia is excellent at this. It doesn't seem like anyone else will be able to compete within at least the next couple of years.

"good group" is carrying a lot of weight here. You can't buy that. You can buy good small groups, but AMD needs a good large group, and that can't be bought.