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I hope AMD has something on their video chip line-up against nVidia as well. I'm curious if they knew nVidia was working on ray-tracing and plan to implement th

I hope AMD has something on their video chip line-up against nVidia as well. I'm curious if they knew nVidia was working on ray-tracing and plan to implement the same API or if they have some other tech they have up their sleeve they've been working on vendors with. I hate how nVidia has such a monopoly on the video chip market. Who knows, maybe Intel will finally get back into the gamer 3D market and we might finally have three options again.

screye 8y ago
I hate the Cuda monopoly in machine learning right now. I hope some of the mature libraries (TF, Pytorch) start officially supporting AMD GPUs. Nvidia is looting customers that want to use GPUs for Machine Learning on the cloud (like AWS, GCP)
- shmerl 8y ago
  There are some efforts to improve the situation: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-Plumbing-Compute-Stack https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-...
- nabla9 8y ago
  Nvidia is cashing in their investments for software and integration. It's AMD's job to make machine learning work in their GPU's. If they don't believe in it and spend the necessary time and effort, nobody else will. Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) has existed for years but apparently it's not good enough. ps. Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/tensorflow/ https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/tensorflow/ but is MI25 competitive? https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/instinct-mi25 https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/instin...
  - ll01 8y ago
    No clue but if consumer vega is competitive http://blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_bench_on_tf13/ http://blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_be... MI25 has a chance of being
  - ndesaulniers 8y ago
    > Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. Why is it a separate repo rather than being contributed upstream to TF?
    - nabla9 8y ago
      AMD is planning to upstream their work and some is already there, but are still behind in versions they support.
    - singhrac 8y ago
      PyTorch has AMD support in the main repo: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/tree/master/tools/amd_build https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/tree/master/tools/amd_bui...
- esistgut 8y ago
  Isn't ROCm a viable alternative?
  - singhrac 8y ago
    Not really, at least not yet. It doesn't exactly provide the same API capabilities as CUDA yet (there are some unsupported functions) and no one has realistic comparisons of benchmarks but the consensus is that there's some performance gap between similar chips from Nvidia and AMD. Both are being actively worked on, and I expect to see this gap shrink in the next few months to a year.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Khronos is to blame by focusing too much on C, without convient tooling. CUDA had C, C++ and Fortran support since the early days, followed by the PTX bytecode format for any compiler vendor that wanted to support CUDA on their languages. It was necessary to loose the race for them to focus on C++ and come up with SPIR and SYSCL. And tools still seem not to be on par with what NVidia offers.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Khronos is a standards group. It's their job to make standards, not tooling. Individual vendors that are part of Khronos can make tooling.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Then they made a bad standard to start with. Also regarding tooling, that isn't quite true, as they have engaged with LunarG for Vulkan, because they have learned from lack of OpenGL adoption, that the large majority of games developers wouldn't even bother without a proper SDK.
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        > Then they made a bad standard to start with. Nonsense. You'll be hard-pressed to find a platform that doesn't support C or a competent system design or even graphics design engineer who isn't confortable with C. If their goal is to establish standards, they build upon standards.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        Developers jumping on CUDA due to lack of C++ and Fortran support on OpenCL proves how good that decision was. Likewise for game consoles, Windows and now Apple graphics APIs. Defining standards does not mean they must provide a lowest denominator single implementation. They can be defined in an IDL kind of way, like e.g. WebIDL, abstractly e.g. Internet RFCs, or define mappings to all major languages in the GPGPU field, namely C, C++ and Fortran.
lozaning 8y ago
IF you hadn't heard Intel actual has thrown its hat into the GPU ring again. Set to launch in 2020.
beerlord 8y ago
By all accounts RTX delivers negligible visual improvement for games, for a huge performance hit. The technology is a lot more interesting in professional 3D modelling where light baking and rendering can be done much faster.
- twtw 8y ago
  Can't help but think of this: > The only real performance advantages the GeForce3 currently offers exist in three situations: 1) very high-resolutions, 2) with AA enabled or 3) in DX8 specific benchmarks. You should honestly not concern yourself with the latter, simply because you buy a video card to play games, not to run 3DMark. > The GeForce3 is consistently a couple of frames slower than the older GeForce2 cards > Between now and the release of the GeForce3's successor, it is doubtful that there will be many games that absolutely require the programmable pixel and vertex shaders of the GeForce3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    "between now and the release of the successor" being about a year, so that sounds pretty accurate. It would help if there was more explanation of what the RTX units are actually good at. Not every GPU innovation actually ends up widely used. It would be amusing if they lost out by being not programmable enough...
  - llampx 8y ago
    Nobody is arguing that ray tracing is not going to be good, or that its not eventually going to be supported by more games. I think most people are just saying that the push will come from developers when the fps hit isn't so bad, and when more console hardware supports ray tracing.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and cheats as rasterization for the same quality. Mind you that you are seeing the early generation of hardware based real time raytracing now and it already can beat the quality of rasterization. There is still a ton of room for improvements. One or two hardware generations from now we may finally see realtime generated images for which the term photorealistic is not just a silly marketing hype. They could truly fool you.
kllrnohj 8y ago
AMD almost certainly knew about it as it's in DirectX. This standard, called DirectX Raytracing (or DXR for short) is actually what the very first game to ship with real-time raytracing uses. This is what Battlefield V is using. Not Nvidia's proprietary extensions. Since nobody pushes to add a fancy new thing to DirectX unless they plan to ship hardware specifically to do that new thing, AMD would have to have been blind & deaf to not know Nvidia was going to ship RTX this year.
Tuna-Fish 8y ago
I find it unlikely that AMD would be able to release a proper peer competitor to nVidia's best any time soon. Prior to the Ryzen launch, AMD lived through some really lean years. They saved wherever they could, and their GPU department saw very little investment on development for a long period. Since then, they have recapitalized the department, and are probably designing a proper next gen GPU architecture to replace GCN. However, it takes ~4-5 years to get a completely new arch on the market, and they only got to start a few years ago. Vega and Navi are both still shoestring budget designs.

screye 8y ago

I hate the Cuda monopoly in machine learning right now. I hope some of the mature libraries (TF, Pytorch) start officially supporting AMD GPUs. Nvidia is looting customers that want to use GPUs for Machine Learning on the cloud (like AWS, GCP)

shmerl 8y ago
There are some efforts to improve the situation: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-Plumbing-Compute-Stack https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-...
nabla9 8y ago
Nvidia is cashing in their investments for software and integration. It's AMD's job to make machine learning work in their GPU's. If they don't believe in it and spend the necessary time and effort, nobody else will. Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) has existed for years but apparently it's not good enough. ps. Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/tensorflow/ https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/tensorflow/ but is MI25 competitive? https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/instinct-mi25 https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/instin...
- ll01 8y ago
  No clue but if consumer vega is competitive http://blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_bench_on_tf13/ http://blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_be... MI25 has a chance of being
- ndesaulniers 8y ago
  > Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. Why is it a separate repo rather than being contributed upstream to TF?
  - nabla9 8y ago
    AMD is planning to upstream their work and some is already there, but are still behind in versions they support.
  - singhrac 8y ago
    PyTorch has AMD support in the main repo: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/tree/master/tools/amd_build https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/tree/master/tools/amd_bui...
esistgut 8y ago
Isn't ROCm a viable alternative?
- singhrac 8y ago
  Not really, at least not yet. It doesn't exactly provide the same API capabilities as CUDA yet (there are some unsupported functions) and no one has realistic comparisons of benchmarks but the consensus is that there's some performance gap between similar chips from Nvidia and AMD. Both are being actively worked on, and I expect to see this gap shrink in the next few months to a year.
pjmlp 8y ago
Khronos is to blame by focusing too much on C, without convient tooling. CUDA had C, C++ and Fortran support since the early days, followed by the PTX bytecode format for any compiler vendor that wanted to support CUDA on their languages. It was necessary to loose the race for them to focus on C++ and come up with SPIR and SYSCL. And tools still seem not to be on par with what NVidia offers.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Khronos is a standards group. It's their job to make standards, not tooling. Individual vendors that are part of Khronos can make tooling.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Then they made a bad standard to start with. Also regarding tooling, that isn't quite true, as they have engaged with LunarG for Vulkan, because they have learned from lack of OpenGL adoption, that the large majority of games developers wouldn't even bother without a proper SDK.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > Then they made a bad standard to start with. Nonsense. You'll be hard-pressed to find a platform that doesn't support C or a competent system design or even graphics design engineer who isn't confortable with C. If their goal is to establish standards, they build upon standards.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Developers jumping on CUDA due to lack of C++ and Fortran support on OpenCL proves how good that decision was. Likewise for game consoles, Windows and now Apple graphics APIs. Defining standards does not mean they must provide a lowest denominator single implementation. They can be defined in an IDL kind of way, like e.g. WebIDL, abstractly e.g. Internet RFCs, or define mappings to all major languages in the GPGPU field, namely C, C++ and Fortran.

lozaning 8y ago

IF you hadn't heard Intel actual has thrown its hat into the GPU ring again. Set to launch in 2020.

beerlord 8y ago

By all accounts RTX delivers negligible visual improvement for games, for a huge performance hit. The technology is a lot more interesting in professional 3D modelling where light baking and rendering can be done much faster.

twtw 8y ago
Can't help but think of this: > The only real performance advantages the GeForce3 currently offers exist in three situations: 1) very high-resolutions, 2) with AA enabled or 3) in DX8 specific benchmarks. You should honestly not concern yourself with the latter, simply because you buy a video card to play games, not to run 3DMark. > The GeForce3 is consistently a couple of frames slower than the older GeForce2 cards > Between now and the release of the GeForce3's successor, it is doubtful that there will be many games that absolutely require the programmable pixel and vertex shaders of the GeForce3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742 https://www.anandtech.com/show/742
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  "between now and the release of the successor" being about a year, so that sounds pretty accurate. It would help if there was more explanation of what the RTX units are actually good at. Not every GPU innovation actually ends up widely used. It would be amusing if they lost out by being not programmable enough...
- llampx 8y ago
  Nobody is arguing that ray tracing is not going to be good, or that its not eventually going to be supported by more games. I think most people are just saying that the push will come from developers when the fps hit isn't so bad, and when more console hardware supports ray tracing.
gmueckl 8y ago
The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and cheats as rasterization for the same quality. Mind you that you are seeing the early generation of hardware based real time raytracing now and it already can beat the quality of rasterization. There is still a ton of room for improvements. One or two hardware generations from now we may finally see realtime generated images for which the term photorealistic is not just a silly marketing hype. They could truly fool you.

kllrnohj 8y ago

AMD almost certainly knew about it as it's in DirectX. This standard, called DirectX Raytracing (or DXR for short) is actually what the very first game to ship with real-time raytracing uses. This is what Battlefield V is using. Not Nvidia's proprietary extensions. Since nobody pushes to add a fancy new thing to DirectX unless they plan to ship hardware specifically to do that new thing, AMD would have to have been blind & deaf to not know Nvidia was going to ship RTX this year.

Tuna-Fish 8y ago

I find it unlikely that AMD would be able to release a proper peer competitor to nVidia's best any time soon. Prior to the Ryzen launch, AMD lived through some really lean years. They saved wherever they could, and their GPU department saw very little investment on development for a long period. Since then, they have recapitalized the department, and are probably designing a proper next gen GPU architecture to replace GCN. However, it takes ~4-5 years to get a completely new arch on the market, and they only got to start a few years ago. Vega and Navi are both still shoestring budget designs.