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nVidia's lead is likely to get chipped away from all sides. Apple is untouchable.

by rapsey 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago
By whom? Nobody even competes with Nvidia on the hardware side: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone. It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor. I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago
  >It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones. You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    I agree. DirectX still makes a very strong case for itself with ease-of-use, extra features and strong performance. That's the big reason I mention it's not fully replaced, because frankly it's not (and I say this as an ENORMOUS DXVK apologist). That being said, DirectX doesn't feel like the titan of the industry it once was. If you're shipping a multiplat title and intend to hit PC, PS5 and Xbox in one fell swoop, targeting Vulkan makes it a cinch. It wouldn't be as "native" as a DirectX-first title, but it does offer SPIR-V cross-compilation and a huge degree of control over how you present your program. It is not neccesarily easier to use, but I feel like I'm seeing it more now that game engines are supporting it. If Nintendo continues to develop their Vulkan drivers from what they were on the Switch, it's very likely that we will see a write-once-port-anywhere GPU API. Oh, and there's Metal too. Sorry pal, nothing nice to say about you. Go home, tell dad to let Vulkan play with you in the GPU sandbox.

nVidia's lead is likely to get chipped away from all sides. Apple is untouchable.

by rapsey 3y ago

nVidia's lead is likely to get chipped away from all sides. Apple is untouchable.

By whom? Nobody even competes with Nvidia on the hardware side: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone. It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor. I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.

ohgodplsno 3y ago
>It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones. You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  I agree. DirectX still makes a very strong case for itself with ease-of-use, extra features and strong performance. That's the big reason I mention it's not fully replaced, because frankly it's not (and I say this as an ENORMOUS DXVK apologist). That being said, DirectX doesn't feel like the titan of the industry it once was. If you're shipping a multiplat title and intend to hit PC, PS5 and Xbox in one fell swoop, targeting Vulkan makes it a cinch. It wouldn't be as "native" as a DirectX-first title, but it does offer SPIR-V cross-compilation and a huge degree of control over how you present your program. It is not neccesarily easier to use, but I feel like I'm seeing it more now that game engines are supporting it. If Nintendo continues to develop their Vulkan drivers from what they were on the Switch, it's very likely that we will see a write-once-port-anywhere GPU API. Oh, and there's Metal too. Sorry pal, nothing nice to say about you. Go home, tell dad to let Vulkan play with you in the GPU sandbox.