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Nvidia really has the GPU market under their thumb. It would be one thing if their pitch was "We're not as good as AMD for games, but we've got CUDA for profess
by Uehreka 7y ago
Nvidia really has the GPU market under their thumb. It would be one thing if their pitch was "We're not as good as AMD for games, but we've got CUDA for professionals and researchers!". At least that way there could be some sort of segmentation and I could tell people shopping for GPUs to "get the right one for what you want to do!"
But that's not the world we live in. Nvidia's pitch is "We make the only hardware that runs the framework used by almost all deep learning research and media creation software, and we're also the only folks operating at our level when it comes to high-end video game graphics, and if our high-end cards are too expensive for you, we have cheaper ones. And when our competitors start to think they can catch up, we'll drop RTX and Tensor Cores on their face."
AMD seems stuck on "We have great value middle-to-high-tier video game graphics cards" at best. I have no idea how they can get out from under that rock. They've been turning the CPU market upside down and smashing Intel's once proud "near monopoly" status. Nvidia seems like exactly the kind of prideful company that would be poised to fall, but I have no idea how AMD could make it happen.
- mantoto 7y agoNvidia is still better for games then AMD. Haven't seen the GPU which beats them.
- mrweasel 7y agoIsn’t that only if you ignore price? If you only have a limited budget, then AMD will get you better performance. For absolute maximum performance at any cost AMD has nothing that can beat Nvidia though.
- LegitShady 7y agoso all the high margin business goes to nvidia you're saying...
- 8draco8 7y agoHe's saying that performance gain may not be worth huge price tag. It's similar to Backblaze which decided to use consumer grade hard drives for their storage solution rather than pro grade drives because cost increase was not worth it.
- throw0101a 7y ago> ... rather than pro grade drives because cost increase was not worth it. Or that it was cheaper to get reliability at another layer of the stack (rather than hardware).
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoIt depends on your electricity cost however.
- jay_kyburz 7y agoMeh, just buy AMD because Nvidia sux. For gaming, the price to framerate comparison is so close anyhow.
- arvinsim 7y agoThe worst thing is that MacOS will not likely have Nvidia drivers anytime soon. Lose-lose for customers.
- tracker1 7y agoI'd guess that within 2 years AMD will be competitive to Nvidia at the high end. Their strategy is a bit different, they're delivering good value at 2/3 the way up the performance graph... not as big a markup as a $1200 RTX 2080 Ti, but the RX 5700 XT is decent, especially for the price. Most people aren't spending over $500 on a GPU, so they get the volume sales. The better aftermarket cards have been selling out pretty consistently. And the longer term strategies are similar to how they approached Ryzen. So, I'd think that Navi can definitely succeed in that light. The real lock in for NVidia, is all the existing CUDA development. Intel and AMD will have a lot of work, One API may help there, so long as Intel and AMD can work together, without Intel's often and weird lock in attempts.
- atemerev 7y agoYes, because nobody replicated the pragmatism and power of CUDA. OpenCL is much uglier and lower level. So AMD decided to do something about that... and invented ROCm, which is somehow even uglier and more low-level! A reference FFT implementation in CUDA is about 150 lines of code... and it is almost 10 times more in ROCm. It was always about software. Granted, CUDA is not the best and most elegant platform in the world... but AMD seems not to be able to reach even that level.
- lliamander 7y agoThis will probably only get more difficult as a bunch of AMD GPU engineers defected to Intel. I'd still likely only go AMD GPUs in the near future, just because I don't have particularly demanding GPU requirements and they have better Linux drivers.