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AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples: automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game streaming serv

AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples: automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game streaming services. Also, AMD's driver support on Linux platforms has historically been pretty weak and often broken, further limiting any consideration of uses outside of gaming.

Zarath 9y ago
Can confirm. Dealing with AMD drivers made me switch to Windows.
- phkahler 9y ago
  They've recently been trying to share a lot of code between windows and linux drivers. That should help them stay closer to parity.
AndrewDavis 9y ago
Inside of gaming, AMD's open source AMDGPU driver+MESA outperforms similar priced Nvidia cards with their closed stack. I find it odd that AMD can get the drivers right for gaming but that's about it.
- datawarrior 9y ago
  Citation? All the comparisons I've seen still have nVidia way ahead
  - joshumax 9y ago
    I think he's basing it on a price-performance ratio. Phoronix tests show that NVIDIA's closed OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are still ahead of AMD/Mesa's open graphics stack. -- On the bright side the "relative" transparency of AMD with their graphics development does make maintaining the FOSS drivers easier as a kernel maintainer (although I rarely send patches to the graphics subsystem I have friends who do).
  - m45t3r 9y ago
    AMD open-source drivers (new GPUs: amdgpu; old GPUs: radeon) is way better than NVIDIA open-source drivers (nouveau) and is competitive with their own closed-source drivers (new GPUs: amggpupro; old GPUs: catalyst), while losing to the NVIDIA close drivers [1]. If you want good performance using open-source drivers, AMD is the way to go with Linux [2]. [1]: A old comparison (Jan/2017): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-pro60-nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-.... Nowadays the performance is even better. [2]: Open-source drivers is important not only because FSF and all, but because the open-source drivers follows the advancements in Linux graphics stack much closer. Things like KMS and Wayland works much better with open-source drivers than NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Even things simple like Xrandr is ramdomly broken in NVIDIA drivers.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      Comparing amdgpu+radeonsi to nouveau isn't really fair. Nouveau can't use proper reclocking most of the time because Nvidia are being jerks.
      - jfoutz 9y ago
        Nvidia can play the game however they want. But they were not pushed into that situation. Their choice, they get to own it. I think it’s a fair comparison.
        shmerl 9y ago
        Nvidia isn't involved in nouveau, it's developed completely by the community. Since it can't use hardware in full, there is no point to compare it to radeonsi performance wise.
        jfoutz 9y ago
        Not intended as a slight against nouveau. I’ll spare you a political rant.
        fulafel 9y ago
  - shmerl 9y ago
    In The Witcher 3 in Wine, AMD with Mesa beats Nvidia blob by a huge margin. Nvidia usually tries to optimize individual titles by cheating and substituting shaders and etc. In conformant OpenGL tests, AMD / Mesa is already close if not better. Mesa developers did a great job in the past year, and they are still working on improving performance.
shmerl 9y ago
AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant to believe it.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    With OpenCL being replaced with Vulkan, things will get in shape.
  - m-p-3 9y ago
    Their new drivers (AMDGPU) are being slowly integrated in the Linux kernel, no closed-source binaries.
    - nhaehnle 9y ago
      Small correction: the amdgpu driver has been integrated and working in the upstream Linux kernel for many years now. The one chink recently was the new display code, which was a requirement for Vega (but not for earlier generations), and which was a genuine open sourcing of an existing, Windows-focused code base. That process took longer than one might hope for, but we're clearly over the hump now with it going upstream.
  - danieldk 9y ago
    The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that. I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-Device-Memory-API https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...
unsigner 9y ago
"game streaming services" is a non-market, sorry. Maybe in an investor's checklist of "potentially interesting futuristic-sounding stuff", but nothing that compares to, say, having a chip in every Xbox One and PS4, and dominating game development mindshare for the next years.
- aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
  Depends on the margin. Nvidia pulled out of gaming consoles due to the margin MS and Sony dictated. AMD was fine with fulfilling demand at almost any margin.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    The long-term effects are worth much more than the margin on each sold console.
    - jmanderley 9y ago
      What are these "long-term effects"?
      - jhasse 9y ago
        Getting game developers familar with AMD hardware. And in the Xbox One X's case: Getting TV manufactors to support FreeSync.

Zarath 9y ago

Can confirm. Dealing with AMD drivers made me switch to Windows.

phkahler 9y ago
They've recently been trying to share a lot of code between windows and linux drivers. That should help them stay closer to parity.

AndrewDavis 9y ago

Inside of gaming, AMD's open source AMDGPU driver+MESA outperforms similar priced Nvidia cards with their closed stack. I find it odd that AMD can get the drivers right for gaming but that's about it.

datawarrior 9y ago
Citation? All the comparisons I've seen still have nVidia way ahead
- joshumax 9y ago
  I think he's basing it on a price-performance ratio. Phoronix tests show that NVIDIA's closed OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are still ahead of AMD/Mesa's open graphics stack. -- On the bright side the "relative" transparency of AMD with their graphics development does make maintaining the FOSS drivers easier as a kernel maintainer (although I rarely send patches to the graphics subsystem I have friends who do).
- m45t3r 9y ago
  AMD open-source drivers (new GPUs: amdgpu; old GPUs: radeon) is way better than NVIDIA open-source drivers (nouveau) and is competitive with their own closed-source drivers (new GPUs: amggpupro; old GPUs: catalyst), while losing to the NVIDIA close drivers [1]. If you want good performance using open-source drivers, AMD is the way to go with Linux [2]. [1]: A old comparison (Jan/2017): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-pro60-nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-.... Nowadays the performance is even better. [2]: Open-source drivers is important not only because FSF and all, but because the open-source drivers follows the advancements in Linux graphics stack much closer. Things like KMS and Wayland works much better with open-source drivers than NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Even things simple like Xrandr is ramdomly broken in NVIDIA drivers.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Comparing amdgpu+radeonsi to nouveau isn't really fair. Nouveau can't use proper reclocking most of the time because Nvidia are being jerks.
    - jfoutz 9y ago
      Nvidia can play the game however they want. But they were not pushed into that situation. Their choice, they get to own it. I think it’s a fair comparison.
      - shmerl 9y ago
        Nvidia isn't involved in nouveau, it's developed completely by the community. Since it can't use hardware in full, there is no point to compare it to radeonsi performance wise.
        jfoutz 9y ago
        Not intended as a slight against nouveau. I’ll spare you a political rant.
        fulafel 9y ago
- shmerl 9y ago
  In The Witcher 3 in Wine, AMD with Mesa beats Nvidia blob by a huge margin. Nvidia usually tries to optimize individual titles by cheating and substituting shaders and etc. In conformant OpenGL tests, AMD / Mesa is already close if not better. Mesa developers did a great job in the past year, and they are still working on improving performance.

shmerl 9y ago

AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.

wyldfire 9y ago
I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant to believe it.
- shmerl 9y ago
  With OpenCL being replaced with Vulkan, things will get in shape.
- m-p-3 9y ago
  Their new drivers (AMDGPU) are being slowly integrated in the Linux kernel, no closed-source binaries.
  - nhaehnle 9y ago
    Small correction: the amdgpu driver has been integrated and working in the upstream Linux kernel for many years now. The one chink recently was the new display code, which was a requirement for Vega (but not for earlier generations), and which was a genuine open sourcing of an existing, Windows-focused code base. That process took longer than one might hope for, but we're clearly over the hump now with it going upstream.
- danieldk 9y ago
  The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that. I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-Device-Memory-API https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...

unsigner 9y ago

"game streaming services" is a non-market, sorry. Maybe in an investor's checklist of "potentially interesting futuristic-sounding stuff", but nothing that compares to, say, having a chip in every Xbox One and PS4, and dominating game development mindshare for the next years.

aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
Depends on the margin. Nvidia pulled out of gaming consoles due to the margin MS and Sony dictated. AMD was fine with fulfilling demand at almost any margin.
- jhasse 9y ago
  The long-term effects are worth much more than the margin on each sold console.
  - jmanderley 9y ago
    What are these "long-term effects"?
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Getting game developers familar with AMD hardware. And in the Xbox One X's case: Getting TV manufactors to support FreeSync.