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Addressing the price difference between RTX 3090 and 6900 XT: 3090 is priced at $1500 for its 24GB RAM which enables ML & Rendering use cases (Nvidia is segmen
by tomerico 6y ago
Addressing the price difference between RTX 3090 and 6900 XT:
3090 is priced at $1500 for its 24GB RAM which enables ML & Rendering use cases (Nvidia is segmenting the market by RAM capacity).
AMD's 6900XT has the same 16GB of RAM as 6800XT, with less support on the ML side. Their target market is gamers enthusiasts who wanted the absolute fastest GPU.
- athorax 6y agoAgreed, the 3090 is definitely meant for ML, but my guess is people are largely buying it for gaming purposes.
- llampx 6y agoWouldn't the Titan series be more meant for ML?
- colejohnson66 6y agoI thought Quadros were meant for non-gaming workloads and the Titans were just more powerful than the top-tier mainstream/gaming card? Or have things changed?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- andoriyu 6y agoYes, Quadro was for non-gaming workloads. Titan meant a different thing with every new iteration. Some were explicitly "non-gaming card that you can play games on" other were "got tier gaming card". RTX Titan for example was not as good in FP64 calculation compared to RTX Quadro. While first Titan was good at both. Nvidia kept changing what Titan means in order to extract most amount of money without hurting Quadro sales. Even at its peak certain things were software limited for Titan, but not for Quadro. Nvidia has tons of artificial limitations for each of their graphics card once you go beyond gaming.
- Macha 6y agoThere's no titan this time around and nvidia have been talking about simplifying their lineup and implying the 3090 is to fill the titan shaped hole in the lineup, but also leaving them room to release a RTX Titan Ti or whatever if they change their mind. Also I imagine to head off consumers who would otherwise be like "Maybe I'll wait for a 3080 Ti". I also expect been a kind of struggle between their consumer side who need some other reason to sell their top end GPUs beyond just the whales when game developers aren't really that interested in pushing out features that will require it given the niche ownership, while the datacenter people want to protect their Quadro margins. This to me seems their most likely reason for the on-again/off-again relationship with pushing their high end cards for compute usage vs gaming usage.
- whynotminot 6y agoLet's be real, the only reason the 3090 isn't a Titan card is because Nvidia saw this coming and didn't want AMD to be able to top their "untouchable" Titan brand.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere is no reason AMD wouldn't pull their own "Titan"-class GPU. A 6900XT with 32GB of HBM would destroy anything NVidia could muster.
- whynotminot 6y agoI mean they kinda already did put out a Titan class card. My point was that the 3090 is a Titan in all but name, and AMD unveiled their very capable response today. I'm saying the only reason Nvidia didn't call it a Titan was because they knew it wasn't going to have an unassailable advantage over AMD.
- sudosysgen 6y agoAMD Titan-class cards tend to have HBM. I'm saying that AMD can very probably still do even better.
- snvzz 6y agoAMD has a CDNA in their pipeline which they haven't talked about in a while. That's their compute oriented architecture, whereas RDNA is graphics-oriented.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIndeed. I still think it might be possible to see an RDNA2 HBM card.
- llampx 6y agoThere's no Titan-"class" A Nvidia card is Titan if it has the name and the drivers, and not if it doesn't.
- nightski 6y agoHow can the 3090 be meant for ML when it has intentionally gimped ML functionality?
- riku_iki 6y ago> gimped ML functionality curious what is that?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paulgerhardt 6y agoThe 3090 supports but doesn't let you enable the titan driver paths, SR-IOV, NGX, and critically, is capped to half-rate tensor operations with FP32 accumulate. An official firmware release could change this but they're likely saving it for the Titan cards down the road.
- moyix 6y agoWhere do you see that this is artificial (i.e. in software/firmware) rather than just missing some hardware that's present on the Titan/Quadro cards?
- paulgerhardt 6y agoThe same thing happened with the 2080 / Titan and looks to be confirmed for the 3000 series by AnandTech. https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1301996479448457216 https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1301996479448457216 The Reddit AMA implies the Ampere architecture supports this configuration but is software limited under the FP32 section: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/ilhao8/nvidia_rtx_30series_you_asked_we_answered/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/ilhao8/nvidia_rtx_3... To epistemologically correct, I don't believe one will ever see a statement from NVIDIA confirming that this is a software limitation. I believe it's just inferred. edit: This is close to confirmation: https://imgur.com/a/RH8vyz9 https://imgur.com/a/RH8vyz9 -though I may suspect there are non reversible hardware fuses at play too.
- jmt_ 6y agoSteve from GamersNexus has a good video about this. His argument is similar to yours -- nVidia is marketing this card as a god-tier gaming card (and is of course very powerful for this purpose) but practically it's better suited for people who need high VRAM + strong compute on ML/productivity tasks. His argument being that, in terms of price to value of 3080 vs 3090 for regular ol' gaming, the 3080 is a better choice, and really access if you actually need something as intense as a 3090.
- kllrnohj 6y agoExcept the 3090 doesn't get the Titan driver, so the 3090 is still artificially slow at a variety of productivity workloads (see Linus Tech Tips review where they checked a few of these). Aka, it's a more expensive 2080 Ti, not a cheaper RTX Titan.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- taurath 6y agoGood point - I wonder what the market split is there. Even so, wouldn’t it be far more economical to stack a bunch of 6800xts for ML, or is the ML support that far behind on AMD?
- lumost 6y agoML on AMD is currently impractical, the mainstream tools have hard deps on CUDA and the AMD projects are so far half-baked.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoI used to think so but recent testing with ROCM has shown the tables are starting to turn.
- __alexs 6y agoThe 3090 is priced at $1500 because it is designed for whales who want the best regardless of price.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 6y agoExcept it isn't the best. AMD performance is on par or slightly higher. Power efficiency is much higher. And costs $500 less. A slower card that uses way more power and costs $500 more is really hard to sell, even with NVIDIA marketing team being as strong as it is. At those prices, few people are going to automatically buy the product without exploring their options.
- jl6 6y ago> AMD performance is on par or slightly higher. Power efficiency is much higher. Are there benchmarks showing this?
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoTheir benchmarks dont show settings. I want to know if they were using Ray Tracing and other high end effects. The FPS by itself is meaningless
- snvzz 6y agoI've watched their presentation, and they do show which Presets (ultra, extreme, whatever) they used. And they've obviously used the same preset for both their cards and the competitors'. There's some more details in the press kit, but I do agree with the principle that decisions should be withheld until NDAs expire and third party benchmarks are available. What's clear is that, with the information in hand, buying NVIDIA Ampere cards is simply not sensible. Waiting for RDNA2 reviews is.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
- colejohnson66 6y agoBut is 8 GB of GDDR whatever worth almost $1000? If AMD can put 16 in at about $500, paying another $1000 for an extra 8 is IMHO outrageous. Nvidia is charging that much because many gamers hold to the “Intel & Nvidia are the best” even if benchmarks say otherwise.
- malkia 6y agoIt's worth. There are really serious cases where extra GPU RAM is worth every penny. Not games, but say game development (or similar).
- ST2084 6y agoResolve and other creative apps
- pkulak 6y agoNvidia is also using much more expensive (and power-hungry) ram.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoWhich makes it more expensive, but it only makes it better if the expense actually translates into performance.
- snvzz 6y ago>if it translates into performance. Which it doesn't. Thanks to AMD having some new, large "Infinity Cache" feature which they adapted from their Zen CPU architecture.
- nightski 6y agoTo be fair to Nvidia it's not the same. AMD card is GDDR6 and 3090 is GDDR6X (which may be causing Nvidia's supply issues).
- 6y ago
- chrisjc 6y ago> which enables ML Are individuals buying graphics cards for ML? I would think that it makes more sense to provision scalable compute on a cloud-plaform on an on-demand basis than buy a graphics card with ML capabilities?
- bart_spoon 6y agoI work in machine learning and bought an Nvidia card for my PC with the intent of doing ML on some personal projects. But I bought a 2070S, and would never drop that much on a 3090 for personal use. So yeah, the huge gap ML capabilities between AMD and Nvidia are a selling point, but probably for a small enough group that it doesn't make a difference.
- wongarsu 6y agoAs a company we operate a server with consumer cards. Running your own consumer Nvidia cards is very cheap compared to buying time on servers with enterprise Nvidia cards. On the cloud you are paying a premium for being on the cloud, and on top of that the premium for having datacenter-licenced cards. Of course this calculation depends on how bursty your compute requirements are and how much you pay for electricity (datacenter cards are more power efficient)
- chrisjc 6y agoIsn't the proximity of your compute to your data a huge consideration too? I imagine that the egress data costs (cloud storage to your local GPU) could grow quite significantly if you're crunching enough data. I guess if you're rolling your own compute clusters, you've probably rolled your own storage solution too?
- Godel_unicode 6y agoYes, many people do independent research into ML and prefer to develop with local resources.
- zimpenfish 6y agoI went for the 3080 for CUDA which isn't entirely for ML but also things like Blender, video rendering (plus 4K RTX Minecraft, of course), etc. If I hadn't had to upgrade my PC the month before, I'd probably have gone for a 3090 for extra future proofing.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoNope. Half-rate accumulate ops on the 3090. Definitely not an ML card.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoNot according to the tensorflow benchmarks so far, it smokes the Titan RTX. Whether it could be faster is irrelevant, it's the fastest currently by a lot for the money.
- nightski 6y agoFP16 multiply with FP32 accumulate performance is on par if not slower than Titan RTX due to half rate which is what the parent was likely referring to. [1] https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/ampere/pdf/NVIDIA-ampere-GA102-GPU-Architecture-Whitepaper-V1.pdf https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/a... (Appendix A) BTW - Whether it "could" be faster is indeed relevant because some of us are holding out for a Titan GPU next year with this unlocked. If you have unlimited budget or are under time constraints then by all means get the 3090, it is a beast. But if one has a 2080 TI then it's an important consideration.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoI'm obviously aware of the theoretical limitations they referred to. My point that it smokes the Titan RTX in real world benchmarks stands, there's more to machine learning performance than just that one stat. Performance should be measured against real-world use cases, not whether there are lines in the whitepaper you object to. If you can wait until next year you should always wait until next year, because there will (almost) always be something better than what is currently out. That's unrelated to whether or not the 3090 is good for doing ML research; it objectively is.
- tgtweak 6y agoA100 is nvidia's ML card in this lineup - and it has a much saltier premium. The 3090 will probably stay at a premium due to a few factors - I don't think ML performance plays into this at all though: DLSS - There's a reason AMD cites "raster performance" since with DLSS enabled the 3090 has a major advantage. AMD-specific optimizations - near the end of the presentation AMD disclosed that with all the optimizations on (including their proprietary cpu->gpu optimizations, only available on the latest gen cpus)- they could pass 3090's raster performance in some games. I think for these two reasons, and the fact nvidia can't seem to get cards to vendors (and customers), there won't be a price drop on this SKU. They may however release a watered down version as a 3080ti and compete there.
- bitL 6y agoAMD can release 6950 with 32GB of RAM for the price of 3090 at some point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- freeflight 6y ago> Their target market is gamers enthusiasts who wanted the absolute fastest GPU. That's also the target market for the RTX 3090, all the Nvidia marketing material describes it as a gaming card, it's Geforce branded and Ampere based Quadro's will be a thing. There was/is also this whole thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/iz7lu2/d_rtx_3090_has_been_purposely_nerfed_by_nvidia_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/iz7lu2/d_r...