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Because AMD's gpgpu offerings have been egregiously buggy for at least a decade. Now that AMD has money I'm hoping they can turn this around, but Geohotz hittin

Because AMD's gpgpu offerings have been egregiously buggy for at least a decade. Now that AMD has money I'm hoping they can turn this around, but Geohotz hitting driver crashes from a loop around a demo suggests to me that things are still pretty bad.

Const-me 3y ago
You don’t need these buggy AMD-specific technologies to leverage the AMD’s GPGPU hardware. Compute shaders are used by videogames for a decade now. For example, GTA5 from 2013 already used compute shaders to render stuff. At least in my experience, the tech is very reliable regardless of GPU vendor. I haven’t tested that, but I would expect on AMD hardware Vulkan compute to be comparable by now. After all, people bought couple millions of steam decks which uses Vulkan for the native GPU API, and emulates D3D on top of that.
willis936 3y ago
That aligns closely with when AMD bought ATI. Before that ATI had a long history of egregiously buggy GPGPUs. I can't say what's gone wrong with Radeon, but I can say it's been going wrong for nearly my entire life.
pier25 3y ago
I've been very happy with an 6750X for gaming. Performa great for the price and I've had zero issues.
- EtienneK 3y ago
  Same here with my 6900XT. Honestly, I am amazed with all the complaints on here regarding AMD crashing. I have not seen this once while owning my card! All the while my friends on Discord keep complaining about their Nvidia cards while we’re playing Warzone.
ccheney 3y ago
Geohot is working w/ AMD and essentially pleading with them to fix their driver stacks - check out his interview on Latent Space
- voxadam 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure geohot gave up on his AMD plan pretty quickly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189705
  - paulmd 3y ago
    He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-tiny-corp-raised-5M.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuecomment-1574383483 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec... https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-dive-into-amds-drivers.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div... On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts". On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway". On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late. Some of what he was viewing as "the process happening in secret" was likely people doing rush patches on the latest build to accommodate him, and he comes off as berating them over it. Again, like, that stream just comes off as "mercurial manchild" not coding genius. And everyone knew the driver situation is bad, that's why there's notionally alpha for him to realize here in the first place. He's bumping into moneymakers, and getting mad about it.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
Yeah, my GPU isn't so terrible terrible lately, but that's been a big draw. Eventually, you just get fed up and start looking elsewhere. Some of these AMD cards are complete trash.

Const-me 3y ago

You don’t need these buggy AMD-specific technologies to leverage the AMD’s GPGPU hardware. Compute shaders are used by videogames for a decade now. For example, GTA5 from 2013 already used compute shaders to render stuff. At least in my experience, the tech is very reliable regardless of GPU vendor. I haven’t tested that, but I would expect on AMD hardware Vulkan compute to be comparable by now. After all, people bought couple millions of steam decks which uses Vulkan for the native GPU API, and emulates D3D on top of that.

willis936 3y ago

That aligns closely with when AMD bought ATI. Before that ATI had a long history of egregiously buggy GPGPUs. I can't say what's gone wrong with Radeon, but I can say it's been going wrong for nearly my entire life.

pier25 3y ago

I've been very happy with an 6750X for gaming. Performa great for the price and I've had zero issues.

EtienneK 3y ago
Same here with my 6900XT. Honestly, I am amazed with all the complaints on here regarding AMD crashing. I have not seen this once while owning my card! All the while my friends on Discord keep complaining about their Nvidia cards while we’re playing Warzone.

ccheney 3y ago

Geohot is working w/ AMD and essentially pleading with them to fix their driver stacks - check out his interview on Latent Space

voxadam 3y ago
I'm pretty sure geohot gave up on his AMD plan pretty quickly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189705
- paulmd 3y ago
  He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-tiny-corp-raised-5M.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuecomment-1574383483 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec... https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-dive-into-amds-drivers.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div... On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts". On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway". On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late. Some of what he was viewing as "the process happening in secret" was likely people doing rush patches on the latest build to accommodate him, and he comes off as berating them over it. Again, like, that stream just comes off as "mercurial manchild" not coding genius. And everyone knew the driver situation is bad, that's why there's notionally alpha for him to realize here in the first place. He's bumping into moneymakers, and getting mad about it.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

Yeah, my GPU isn't so terrible terrible lately, but that's been a big draw. Eventually, you just get fed up and start looking elsewhere. Some of these AMD cards are complete trash.