9 ms·

Actually, techwise AMD has outperformed Nvidia. Nvidia was only able to keep up because they used Samsung 8nm which is extremely cheap. AMD silicon is doing mu

Actually, techwise AMD has outperformed Nvidia. Nvidia was only able to keep up because they used Samsung 8nm which is extremely cheap. AMD silicon is doing much better when it comes to perf/area, Nvidia chips are massive, also Nvidia uses high end expensive GDDR6X memory and still can't completely win the throne. Nvidia strength is in their software eco-system, things like CUDA and ML frameworks as well as it's popularity among gamers. Intel is still far behind TSMC when it comes to manufacturing and retook the crown against an old year old architecture from AMD. * to be clear, I'm not saying AMD is completely dominating Intel, I actually think things today are quite tight. close competition. And once you start looking at players like Apple or Qualcomm, things are looking very competitive.

brian_herman 5y ago
Unforunately, the drivers of AMD for their consumer products havent kept up with NVIDIA's consumer drivers. For example, when I goto microcenter all of the AMD consumer GPUS are there and are available to order online. Nvidia GPUs have just recently been in stock.
- neogodless 5y ago
  If you're talking about the software and stability/performance for gaming, anecdotally I've been using Radeon GPUs for the past two years and they've been awesome. I still agree that Nvidia is ahead with their software ecosystem in general, though. And AMD GPUs being in stock while Nvidia's are out of stock does not prove the quality of drivers. I suspect AMD is just doing better with their supply chain the past few months (and Nvidia has retained an edge on brand preference). On pure rasterization performance, the Radeons are currently a better value, but Geforce GPUs have some feature advantages.
- jonkoops 5y ago
  Hmmmm... I don't share this experience, the AMD drivers have been rock solid for me. And on Linux there is simply no argumentation, AMD drivers are a million times better than NVIDIA there.
  - Symmetry 5y ago
    The AMD vs. NVidia driver situation on Linux is the opposite of what it is on Windows.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      This is 100% true. I don't know why AMDGPU (the Linux driver) is somehow better than the Windows drivers, but for some reason AMD should focus on Windows driver development (or even a rewrite) since yesterday. Windows NVIDIA drivers may have a bad release every blue moon but for AMD's you need to test out if the update is worthwhile - or just curse when it's a security fix but it crashes on your favourite game.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        > I don't know why AMDGPU (the Linux driver) is somehow better than the Windows drivers Open source Linux drivers are developed by another team inside AMD. They can't talk with the other driver team either. When you remove the incentive to add game specific hacks, multi platform support and other stuff, and add community support at the back, you get a straightforward and superior driver at the end. Also, the driver wasn't forked or derived from FGLRX or any driver for that matter. It's just written from scratch. I remember OpenSuSE had a dedicated AMDGPU driver team too. This is why.
        zppln 5y ago
        Out of curiosity, are there any writeups on how the game specific hacks work? Like, how do they detect the game being run and what kind of optimization are they doing?
        mjevans 5y ago
        At least on the AMDGPU side, I've seen mentions on Phoronix of various game (detected based on binary name usually) specific compatibility hacks that force on/off various behaviors and other minor tweaks. Given the size of the "driver" files on Windows these days, my GUESS is that they might ship literal patches that replace portions of the GPU code in some (popular) games. There's also the issue of games developed with explicit support for the architecture of a given GPU (usually Nvidia), where algorithmic approaches bias towards the strengths of one type of product.
- dunefox 5y ago
  I have almost never had problems with AMD drivers.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    on windows their Opengl performance is horrible compared to Nvidia but on Linux their open source drivers are way better.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I'm guessing that's true for Windows, but I've had the opposite experience on Linux (for graphics, not computation). On Linux, I'm sometimes bitten by the fact that nVidia's closed-source drivers might not work well with a certain kernel version. And IIUC their closed-source nature has also slowed down nVidia-Wayland compatibility. On the other hand, I fear that now that HDMI specs are closed, AMD's open-source drivers might never be capable of 4k@120Hz via HDMI. (IIUC, that is.)
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    > now that HDMI specs are closed I hadn't heard of this, looks like you're right. [0] Surprised not to find any Hacker News thread on the topic. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HDMI-Closed-Spec-Hurts-Open https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HDMI-Clo...
    - CoastalCoder 5y ago
      I'm still fuzzy regarding whether or not USB4's support for Display Port is a way around this problem. My understanding is that DP 2.0 can do 4k@120Hz. But I don't know if it has its own issues with Linux open-source.
- dangus 5y ago
  This observation could easily be explained by brand loyalty and other market forces. Why did Intel sell more of its objectively inferior 10th and 11th gen chips than AMD Zen 2? Because they have more brand loyalty, partnerships, sales channels, etc. Sales volume != product quality On top of that, it's easy to imagine two different cards from fabricated by two different factories having much different levels of supply constraints. If Tesla runs out of chips but Toyota doesn't, the lack of Teslas can't on its own imply that Toyota is a making an inferior product.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Their coding for AGESA doesn't seem to be any better. My Ryzen 5000 series CPU was repeatedly faulting when the system was under load until recently I updated to a beta BIOS whose only change was a newer AGESA version. (I actually thought it was my NVIDIA GPU for a while because it only happened when the GPU was being driven hard). Intel CPUs (at stock clock speeds/multipliers) never gave me stability issues.
causi 5y ago
Frankly I think a measurable chunk of Nvidia's success is that their GPU model names take much less effort to decipher than AMD's.
my123 5y ago
> Actually, techwise AMD has outperformed Nvidia. Pretty much false. Having the worst GPU compute stack in the whole industry is not "outperforming", and that's very much part of the tech aspect. > Nvidia was only able to keep up because they used Samsung 8nm which is extremely cheap. They got cheaper to produce chips at pretty much a perf/W parity with the competition's GPUs. NVIDIA were able to avoid using the latest nodes because of their architecture advantages, keeping their 7nm allocation where it's needed the most: high-margin datacenter products.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Melio 5y ago
I'm very curious how good Nvidia is in research against amd. I'm aware of plenty of Nvidia research topics. I'm not aware of anything breathtaking from amd. Dlss is also the feature why I want an Nvidia card.

brian_herman 5y ago

Unforunately, the drivers of AMD for their consumer products havent kept up with NVIDIA's consumer drivers. For example, when I goto microcenter all of the AMD consumer GPUS are there and are available to order online. Nvidia GPUs have just recently been in stock.

neogodless 5y ago
If you're talking about the software and stability/performance for gaming, anecdotally I've been using Radeon GPUs for the past two years and they've been awesome. I still agree that Nvidia is ahead with their software ecosystem in general, though. And AMD GPUs being in stock while Nvidia's are out of stock does not prove the quality of drivers. I suspect AMD is just doing better with their supply chain the past few months (and Nvidia has retained an edge on brand preference). On pure rasterization performance, the Radeons are currently a better value, but Geforce GPUs have some feature advantages.
jonkoops 5y ago
Hmmmm... I don't share this experience, the AMD drivers have been rock solid for me. And on Linux there is simply no argumentation, AMD drivers are a million times better than NVIDIA there.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  The AMD vs. NVidia driver situation on Linux is the opposite of what it is on Windows.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    This is 100% true. I don't know why AMDGPU (the Linux driver) is somehow better than the Windows drivers, but for some reason AMD should focus on Windows driver development (or even a rewrite) since yesterday. Windows NVIDIA drivers may have a bad release every blue moon but for AMD's you need to test out if the update is worthwhile - or just curse when it's a security fix but it crashes on your favourite game.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      > I don't know why AMDGPU (the Linux driver) is somehow better than the Windows drivers Open source Linux drivers are developed by another team inside AMD. They can't talk with the other driver team either. When you remove the incentive to add game specific hacks, multi platform support and other stuff, and add community support at the back, you get a straightforward and superior driver at the end. Also, the driver wasn't forked or derived from FGLRX or any driver for that matter. It's just written from scratch. I remember OpenSuSE had a dedicated AMDGPU driver team too. This is why.
      - zppln 5y ago
        Out of curiosity, are there any writeups on how the game specific hacks work? Like, how do they detect the game being run and what kind of optimization are they doing?
        mjevans 5y ago
        At least on the AMDGPU side, I've seen mentions on Phoronix of various game (detected based on binary name usually) specific compatibility hacks that force on/off various behaviors and other minor tweaks. Given the size of the "driver" files on Windows these days, my GUESS is that they might ship literal patches that replace portions of the GPU code in some (popular) games. There's also the issue of games developed with explicit support for the architecture of a given GPU (usually Nvidia), where algorithmic approaches bias towards the strengths of one type of product.
dunefox 5y ago
I have almost never had problems with AMD drivers.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  on windows their Opengl performance is horrible compared to Nvidia but on Linux their open source drivers are way better.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I'm guessing that's true for Windows, but I've had the opposite experience on Linux (for graphics, not computation). On Linux, I'm sometimes bitten by the fact that nVidia's closed-source drivers might not work well with a certain kernel version. And IIUC their closed-source nature has also slowed down nVidia-Wayland compatibility. On the other hand, I fear that now that HDMI specs are closed, AMD's open-source drivers might never be capable of 4k@120Hz via HDMI. (IIUC, that is.)
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  > now that HDMI specs are closed I hadn't heard of this, looks like you're right. [0] Surprised not to find any Hacker News thread on the topic. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HDMI-Closed-Spec-Hurts-Open https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HDMI-Clo...
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    I'm still fuzzy regarding whether or not USB4's support for Display Port is a way around this problem. My understanding is that DP 2.0 can do 4k@120Hz. But I don't know if it has its own issues with Linux open-source.
dangus 5y ago
This observation could easily be explained by brand loyalty and other market forces. Why did Intel sell more of its objectively inferior 10th and 11th gen chips than AMD Zen 2? Because they have more brand loyalty, partnerships, sales channels, etc. Sales volume != product quality On top of that, it's easy to imagine two different cards from fabricated by two different factories having much different levels of supply constraints. If Tesla runs out of chips but Toyota doesn't, the lack of Teslas can't on its own imply that Toyota is a making an inferior product.
ziml77 5y ago
Their coding for AGESA doesn't seem to be any better. My Ryzen 5000 series CPU was repeatedly faulting when the system was under load until recently I updated to a beta BIOS whose only change was a newer AGESA version. (I actually thought it was my NVIDIA GPU for a while because it only happened when the GPU was being driven hard). Intel CPUs (at stock clock speeds/multipliers) never gave me stability issues.

causi 5y ago

Frankly I think a measurable chunk of Nvidia's success is that their GPU model names take much less effort to decipher than AMD's.

my123 5y ago

> Actually, techwise AMD has outperformed Nvidia. Pretty much false. Having the worst GPU compute stack in the whole industry is not "outperforming", and that's very much part of the tech aspect. > Nvidia was only able to keep up because they used Samsung 8nm which is extremely cheap. They got cheaper to produce chips at pretty much a perf/W parity with the competition's GPUs. NVIDIA were able to avoid using the latest nodes because of their architecture advantages, keeping their 7nm allocation where it's needed the most: high-margin datacenter products.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Melio 5y ago

I'm very curious how good Nvidia is in research against amd. I'm aware of plenty of Nvidia research topics. I'm not aware of anything breathtaking from amd. Dlss is also the feature why I want an Nvidia card.