3 ms·

Nividia is using "the end of Moore's Law" as an excuse to provide zero price/performance improvement. It would be pretty anti-consumer if that became the indust

by wmf 3y ago

Nividia is using "the end of Moore's Law" as an excuse to provide zero price/performance improvement. It would be pretty anti-consumer if that became the industry standard.

dolni 3y ago
I'm sure AMD would LOVE to eat Nvidia's lunch.
- wmf 3y ago
  Yet they're not. They're selling very few GPUs at high prices.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Is that because they have bad hardware or because of the CUDA monopoly?
    - wmf 3y ago
      Neither?
    - gymbeaux 3y ago
      More the latter than the former these days, but at a macro level, like last 20 years, it’s more the former than the latter. Basically AMD has caught up (arguable, but let’s say they have) to Nvidia with respect to driver quality and hardware performance/power consumption, just in time for the world to become more concerned with how a GPU handles AI stuff than how it handles video games.
      - causality0 3y ago
        I think the claim AMD has caught up with Nvidia drivers is untrue. Sure, they don't cause constant crashing in mainstream games anymore like they used to but that's where the improvement ends. AMD drivers are still broken enough you run into issues whenever you step outside the box. Emulation is universally worse on AMD, and that's when it's not completely broken. VR is the same way, and AMD is now six months late for their "we promise AI won't be busted on RDNA3" promise.
        gymbeaux 3y ago
        I've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard, especially when you consider "FineWine" (the common occurrence of AMD GPUs gaining performance over time through driver updates, while that seldom occurs on the Nvidia side). I've not experienced, at any point, from the Radeon 9550 to the Radeon HD 5750 to the RX 480/580 driver issues that prevented me from playing a game or anything like that. Also, NVidia on Linux has pretty much always been a nightmare. They're still working out Nvidia-specific issues with Wayland over there in Linux world. If you are on Linux, AMD is and has always been the way to go for your GPU if you wanted the best UX.
        causality0 3y ago
        I've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard Why do you say in that regard but then not bring up any examples of that regard? I said AMD is terrible at emulation, VR, and AI. As far as I know everything else might be great. AMD has problems on Xenia, problems on RPCS3, glitches and degraded performance on CEMU, Yuzu, and Ryujinx. The 7000-series has so many problems running regular VR games there's a performance disclaimer on AMD's own site. I say this as someone who really, really would like to buy a 7900XTX but can't because everything I'd actually want to use it for over my current Nvidia card is hamstrung.
        gymbeaux 3y ago
        Well “in that regard” meaning the notion that you posed about the drivers having “caught up”. I can’t speak to the VR situation. So maybe the drivers haven’t caught up in every sense. I will say I recently threw away an RX 580 because it couldn’t stay under 100C. I repasted it, and tried setting the fans to 100%, which was quite loud. It was an XFX model too… usually they’re on top of QC. It’s worth like $75 if I found the screws for the fan shroud (took off to try to get better temps via water cooling) but it’s easier to just throw it in the trash can. eBay takes around 12% and then I have to pack and ship the thing. Not worth it. I just bought an RTX 3090 with a broken power connector notch because it was the only GPU I could find for under $1000 that had more than 20GB of VRAM (for future proofing/model training). It’s just a shit time to need a GPU.
dotnet00 3y ago
Wasn't the 4090 roughly twice the performance of a 3090 at a similar cost?
- BeefWellington 3y ago
  The 3090 and the 4090 are on different process nodes (8/10nm vs 4nm), so you'd expect the 4090 to be more efficient. Pumping the same (or in this case more) power through a more efficient node should result in improvements in performance. Hardware Unboxed covers this pretty well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s You can see that compared to the 3090Ti or the 6950XT* it's sipping power when it's performance limited. I think what many gamers see though, is that the performance difference is about all you'd expect going to 4nm from 8nm, based on performance gains we've seen in the past from other chips. Anyway, the rough idea is: If I built a 3090 on a 4nm node it would perform the same. Plus, NVidia has a track record of how they behave when the competition isn't up to snuff. Now, this is silly because using a more leading edge manufacturing process takes a ton of work and is an improvement overall. [*]: The 6950XT is manufactured on a 7nm node from TSMC. Note that there is weirdness in how each company measures their process node, which I won't go into here but just be aware that a TSMC N7 process might not be 7nm sized parts for all parts, and a lot of it has to do with how well they can layer things.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    The person I replied to said price/performance, not efficiency. With the high end chips I think they're simply of the opinion that performance is more important than efficiency (and I don't really pay attention to the lower range too much these days), and thus like most other high end desktop parts, they're all clocked as high as the chip and cooling can handle, even if dialing it back a little would drastically improve efficiency.

by wmf 3y ago

Nividia is using "the end of Moore's Law" as an excuse to provide zero price/performance improvement. It would be pretty anti-consumer if that became the industry standard.

dolni 3y ago

I'm sure AMD would LOVE to eat Nvidia's lunch.

wmf 3y ago
Yet they're not. They're selling very few GPUs at high prices.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Is that because they have bad hardware or because of the CUDA monopoly?
  - wmf 3y ago
    Neither?
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    More the latter than the former these days, but at a macro level, like last 20 years, it’s more the former than the latter. Basically AMD has caught up (arguable, but let’s say they have) to Nvidia with respect to driver quality and hardware performance/power consumption, just in time for the world to become more concerned with how a GPU handles AI stuff than how it handles video games.
    - causality0 3y ago
      I think the claim AMD has caught up with Nvidia drivers is untrue. Sure, they don't cause constant crashing in mainstream games anymore like they used to but that's where the improvement ends. AMD drivers are still broken enough you run into issues whenever you step outside the box. Emulation is universally worse on AMD, and that's when it's not completely broken. VR is the same way, and AMD is now six months late for their "we promise AI won't be busted on RDNA3" promise.
      - gymbeaux 3y ago
        I've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard, especially when you consider "FineWine" (the common occurrence of AMD GPUs gaining performance over time through driver updates, while that seldom occurs on the Nvidia side). I've not experienced, at any point, from the Radeon 9550 to the Radeon HD 5750 to the RX 480/580 driver issues that prevented me from playing a game or anything like that. Also, NVidia on Linux has pretty much always been a nightmare. They're still working out Nvidia-specific issues with Wayland over there in Linux world. If you are on Linux, AMD is and has always been the way to go for your GPU if you wanted the best UX.
        causality0 3y ago
        I've read about/had enough issues with NVidia drivers in the last couple of years I am willing to say AMD has effectively caught up in that regard Why do you say in that regard but then not bring up any examples of that regard? I said AMD is terrible at emulation, VR, and AI. As far as I know everything else might be great. AMD has problems on Xenia, problems on RPCS3, glitches and degraded performance on CEMU, Yuzu, and Ryujinx. The 7000-series has so many problems running regular VR games there's a performance disclaimer on AMD's own site. I say this as someone who really, really would like to buy a 7900XTX but can't because everything I'd actually want to use it for over my current Nvidia card is hamstrung.
        gymbeaux 3y ago
        Well “in that regard” meaning the notion that you posed about the drivers having “caught up”. I can’t speak to the VR situation. So maybe the drivers haven’t caught up in every sense. I will say I recently threw away an RX 580 because it couldn’t stay under 100C. I repasted it, and tried setting the fans to 100%, which was quite loud. It was an XFX model too… usually they’re on top of QC. It’s worth like $75 if I found the screws for the fan shroud (took off to try to get better temps via water cooling) but it’s easier to just throw it in the trash can. eBay takes around 12% and then I have to pack and ship the thing. Not worth it. I just bought an RTX 3090 with a broken power connector notch because it was the only GPU I could find for under $1000 that had more than 20GB of VRAM (for future proofing/model training). It’s just a shit time to need a GPU.

dotnet00 3y ago

Wasn't the 4090 roughly twice the performance of a 3090 at a similar cost?

BeefWellington 3y ago
The 3090 and the 4090 are on different process nodes (8/10nm vs 4nm), so you'd expect the 4090 to be more efficient. Pumping the same (or in this case more) power through a more efficient node should result in improvements in performance. Hardware Unboxed covers this pretty well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQklDR8nv8U&t=1365s You can see that compared to the 3090Ti or the 6950XT* it's sipping power when it's performance limited. I think what many gamers see though, is that the performance difference is about all you'd expect going to 4nm from 8nm, based on performance gains we've seen in the past from other chips. Anyway, the rough idea is: If I built a 3090 on a 4nm node it would perform the same. Plus, NVidia has a track record of how they behave when the competition isn't up to snuff. Now, this is silly because using a more leading edge manufacturing process takes a ton of work and is an improvement overall. [*]: The 6950XT is manufactured on a 7nm node from TSMC. Note that there is weirdness in how each company measures their process node, which I won't go into here but just be aware that a TSMC N7 process might not be 7nm sized parts for all parts, and a lot of it has to do with how well they can layer things.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  The person I replied to said price/performance, not efficiency. With the high end chips I think they're simply of the opinion that performance is more important than efficiency (and I don't really pay attention to the lower range too much these days), and thus like most other high end desktop parts, they're all clocked as high as the chip and cooling can handle, even if dialing it back a little would drastically improve efficiency.