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Most of Nvidia's architectural changes have moved it closer to GCN (eg, adding async compute in Pascal). In other areas like multiple compute engines (A reason
by hajile 9y ago
Most of Nvidia's architectural changes have moved it closer to GCN (eg, adding async compute in Pascal). In other areas like multiple compute engines (A reason GCN generally has better VR latency numbers), Nvidia still lags behind (not sure if Volta changes that). AMD generally does quite well on compute tasks compared to Nvidia and is still generally much faster for anything using Vulkan.
http://ext3h.makegames.de/DX12_Compute.html http://ext3h.makegames.de/DX12_Compute.html
The big issue with AMD is software and money. Even with the most talented engineers it takes loads of man hours to build up an ecosystem. AMD's is currently valued at 8.3B. Nvidia currently has 7.1B cash on hand. With that kind of money, Nvidia will do things like loan AAA gamemakers some devs to re-write large parts of the game to optimize them for Nvidia graphics cards or build up the CUDA ecosystem.
- ahartmetz 9y agoIt seems like AMD has hardware bottlenecks (or missing optimizations relative to Nvidia) in the fixed-function geometry processing parts of GCN. The compute benchmarks are always better than the graphics benchmarks. If it was only optimizations in games, there would be outliers in less popular games (Doom is a bit of an outlier but popular). And in any case, Xbox and PS4 consoles use AMD GPUs so game devs have reason to optimize for AMD. Also, AMD has been improving its Windows drivers in the last 2-3 years according to reports. I use AMD GPUs on Linux where the driver codebase is different - the improvements there are huge. So much so that it may make sense for AMD to switch to that stack on Windows in the future.