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All that bothers me certainly but I have two further concerns based on the types of games I play. The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL dri

All that bothers me certainly but I have two further concerns based on the types of games I play. The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet. The second is Virtual Reality, AMD has lagged in the technology of VR and doing things smarter with support for foveated rendering and multiple pass optimisation are really important for getting hard to run games playable. Raw performance looks fine, its all the lack of news on the features and zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games that get benchmarked and they need to run well too. Not to mention all the bugs, if I buy an AMD card I can guarantee based on history something weird will happen for the life of the card, it always has for the past 20+ years, I haven't yet had a clean experience with an ATI/AMD card and I have owned a bunch of them. What I really need AMD to say and do is acknowledge how important a good customer experience is with their driver stack, how every game and API matter, that they understand that customer experience is reality and are now committing it to history for good. Then they can sell me a high priced card, until they do well its got to be a lot cheaper to be worth the risk.

snvzz 6y ago
>The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers Try that under Linux sometime. It's a different song there thanks to Mesa. >opengl Is not the most popular API, and AMD had, until recently, limited economic resources, which they mostly directed towards their CPU team and towards hardware. For their proprietary windows efforts, they needed laser focus on what's most important: The newest and most popular APIs. There's money these days, and they multiplied the size of their driver team, but money spent on OpenGL would be indeed wasted, as there's a pretty compelling solution for this API from the Mesa guys, in the form of an opengl implementation that's on top of Vulkan: Zink. I expect future GPUs and drivers (for all platforms) to absolutely not bother with opengl and simply ship Zink instead.
- my123 6y ago
  Microsoft will ship GLon12, which is being developed as a part of Mesa.
  - mastax 6y ago
    Wow, how did I miss this news‽ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-and-opengl-mapping-layers-to-directx/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...
dmayle 6y ago
I understand that Mesa (with the Zink OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation) can be compiled for Windows. If you care that much, maybe give it a shot.
TwoBit 6y ago
I'm sorry but OpenGL is dead on Windows. There are exceedingly few apps written against OpenGL and if you write such an app then don't be surprised with the result. Vulkan is the portable solution of course.
- eloop 6y ago
  Really? I think the professional 3d software community would be surprised to hear this. Huge software suites with decades of opengl development.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Many of them have added DirectX backends in the mean time, and they will eventually had to either rewrite or contend to use OpenGL on DirectX 12 work Microsoft is doing. The old ICD interfaces that OpenGL drivers rely on, might not be around forever, and so far Windows doesn't support them in sandboxed processes.
kllrnohj 6y ago
> The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet. I'm really not finding anything that supports this claim, can you substantiate it? I see scattered sub-60fps reports in Minecraft for both Nvidia & AMD. It seems to just be a "minecraft's engine is shit" thing, not an AMD thing? But I'm not seeing any actual comparisons or head-to-heads or anything showing AMD in particular is struggling with Minecraft in particular. This unknown quality benchmark is the only thing I'm finding for Minecraft: https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-5700-xt/intel-core-i7-8700k-3-70ghz/ https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-57... and it's definitely not struggling to hit 500 fps numbers at 1080p, either. And other OpenGL games & apps are not showing any severe AMD issues, although the only significant sample of those are on Linux so that also has a different OS, so there certainly doesn't appear to be anything systemically wrong with AMD's OpenGL as you're claiming. Unless for some reason they just never brought over the way better Linux OpenGL driver to Windows, which would be highly unexpected & definitely something that needs evidence to support. > zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games This is just completely false and seems to just be because your pet peeve is Minecraft in particular? Both Nvidia & AMD discuss popular games not just the latest AAA games. Usually in their latency section, since that's where it comes up as more relevant (esports games), but it's definitely not an ignored category entirely.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  The significantly better Linux OpenGL drivers are from Mesa, not AMD.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    No. Mesa's "drivers" are either a software fallback or support infrastructure for some open-source drivers. When you're using AMD or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which are way faster, then you're not using anything interesting from Mesa. EDIT: Also Mesa's open source Radeon driver came from AMD.
zamadatix 6y ago
I'm not really worried about Windows OpenGL performance, even the new Minecraft edition (which performs enormously better all around) uses DirectX. Browsers use ANGLE to convert GL to DirectX for a reason, it's a crap API all around on Windows (not that it had to be but that's how it is). The driver bugs are what I'm most worried about though. I remember when I got a 4670 in 2008 there was a cursor corruption bug (google it, it's common) and if you didn't shake the mouse enough for it to fix itself it'd crash. Then I built a new PC with a 5770 and I still had it. Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. Then 2x280X and still had it. It even occurred on Linux once. Then I went Nvidia for a few generations and it seems AMD finally fixed it. It seems fixed now (maybe because of new hardware) based on internet searches but from 2008-2015 the bug was there. And this is just one example of things. Not that Nvidia drivers have ever been perfect but I never ran into this kind of shit so often for so long on their cards. Hopefully I don't end up regretting the 6900 XT because of it.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. This cursor corruption bug was ridiculous. I ended up not playing some games (I think Dota) because I would get this bug. I went with an Nvidia card as my next one because of that as well. It's interesting how something that seems relatively minor could have such an impact on purchasing decisions.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    Is that an actual bug? Sounds like potentially a VRAM thermal issue.
    - csande17 6y ago
      This used to be a pretty common bug, I think. The cursor is often drawn using a special "hardware mouse cursor" feature specifically designed to make a tiny bitmap move around the screen as efficiently as possible. It'd be easy for a driver to mess that up and cause the cursor -- and ONLY the cursor -- to look garbled. You can see problems today like the mouse cursor not respecting Windows 10's night-shift color filter for the same reason.
officeplant 6y ago
Obviously with the range of settings and mods out there I'm not sure of everyone's Minecraft experience on AMD. But my simple 3400G based rig using the integrated Vega11 plays stock minecraft just fine @ 1440p and 20 chunk viewing distance with everything else set to max.

snvzz 6y ago

>The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers Try that under Linux sometime. It's a different song there thanks to Mesa. >opengl Is not the most popular API, and AMD had, until recently, limited economic resources, which they mostly directed towards their CPU team and towards hardware. For their proprietary windows efforts, they needed laser focus on what's most important: The newest and most popular APIs. There's money these days, and they multiplied the size of their driver team, but money spent on OpenGL would be indeed wasted, as there's a pretty compelling solution for this API from the Mesa guys, in the form of an opengl implementation that's on top of Vulkan: Zink. I expect future GPUs and drivers (for all platforms) to absolutely not bother with opengl and simply ship Zink instead.

my123 6y ago
Microsoft will ship GLon12, which is being developed as a part of Mesa.
- mastax 6y ago
  Wow, how did I miss this news‽ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-and-opengl-mapping-layers-to-directx/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...

dmayle 6y ago

I understand that Mesa (with the Zink OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation) can be compiled for Windows. If you care that much, maybe give it a shot.

TwoBit 6y ago

I'm sorry but OpenGL is dead on Windows. There are exceedingly few apps written against OpenGL and if you write such an app then don't be surprised with the result. Vulkan is the portable solution of course.

eloop 6y ago
Really? I think the professional 3d software community would be surprised to hear this. Huge software suites with decades of opengl development.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Many of them have added DirectX backends in the mean time, and they will eventually had to either rewrite or contend to use OpenGL on DirectX 12 work Microsoft is doing. The old ICD interfaces that OpenGL drivers rely on, might not be around forever, and so far Windows doesn't support them in sandboxed processes.

kllrnohj 6y ago

> The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet. I'm really not finding anything that supports this claim, can you substantiate it? I see scattered sub-60fps reports in Minecraft for both Nvidia & AMD. It seems to just be a "minecraft's engine is shit" thing, not an AMD thing? But I'm not seeing any actual comparisons or head-to-heads or anything showing AMD in particular is struggling with Minecraft in particular. This unknown quality benchmark is the only thing I'm finding for Minecraft: https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-5700-xt/intel-core-i7-8700k-3-70ghz/ https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-57... and it's definitely not struggling to hit 500 fps numbers at 1080p, either. And other OpenGL games & apps are not showing any severe AMD issues, although the only significant sample of those are on Linux so that also has a different OS, so there certainly doesn't appear to be anything systemically wrong with AMD's OpenGL as you're claiming. Unless for some reason they just never brought over the way better Linux OpenGL driver to Windows, which would be highly unexpected & definitely something that needs evidence to support. > zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games This is just completely false and seems to just be because your pet peeve is Minecraft in particular? Both Nvidia & AMD discuss popular games not just the latest AAA games. Usually in their latency section, since that's where it comes up as more relevant (esports games), but it's definitely not an ignored category entirely.

gpderetta 6y ago
The significantly better Linux OpenGL drivers are from Mesa, not AMD.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  No. Mesa's "drivers" are either a software fallback or support infrastructure for some open-source drivers. When you're using AMD or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which are way faster, then you're not using anything interesting from Mesa. EDIT: Also Mesa's open source Radeon driver came from AMD.

zamadatix 6y ago

I'm not really worried about Windows OpenGL performance, even the new Minecraft edition (which performs enormously better all around) uses DirectX. Browsers use ANGLE to convert GL to DirectX for a reason, it's a crap API all around on Windows (not that it had to be but that's how it is). The driver bugs are what I'm most worried about though. I remember when I got a 4670 in 2008 there was a cursor corruption bug (google it, it's common) and if you didn't shake the mouse enough for it to fix itself it'd crash. Then I built a new PC with a 5770 and I still had it. Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. Then 2x280X and still had it. It even occurred on Linux once. Then I went Nvidia for a few generations and it seems AMD finally fixed it. It seems fixed now (maybe because of new hardware) based on internet searches but from 2008-2015 the bug was there. And this is just one example of things. Not that Nvidia drivers have ever been perfect but I never ran into this kind of shit so often for so long on their cards. Hopefully I don't end up regretting the 6900 XT because of it.

Aerroon 6y ago
>Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. This cursor corruption bug was ridiculous. I ended up not playing some games (I think Dota) because I would get this bug. I went with an Nvidia card as my next one because of that as well. It's interesting how something that seems relatively minor could have such an impact on purchasing decisions.
- numpad0 6y ago
  Is that an actual bug? Sounds like potentially a VRAM thermal issue.
  - csande17 6y ago
    This used to be a pretty common bug, I think. The cursor is often drawn using a special "hardware mouse cursor" feature specifically designed to make a tiny bitmap move around the screen as efficiently as possible. It'd be easy for a driver to mess that up and cause the cursor -- and ONLY the cursor -- to look garbled. You can see problems today like the mouse cursor not respecting Windows 10's night-shift color filter for the same reason.

officeplant 6y ago

Obviously with the range of settings and mods out there I'm not sure of everyone's Minecraft experience on AMD. But my simple 3400G based rig using the integrated Vega11 plays stock minecraft just fine @ 1440p and 20 chunk viewing distance with everything else set to max.