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AMD is hostile in a much more meaningful way - APIs are junk, drivers are buggy, hardware doesn't work. Useless for AI. You will get nothing done. Save your mon
by renewiltord 3y ago
AMD is hostile in a much more meaningful way - APIs are junk, drivers are buggy, hardware doesn't work. Useless for AI. You will get nothing done. Save your money. Better to get working hardware for more than non-working hardware for less. (Tokens/s)/dollar is 0 on AMD.
You will waste time.
- Havoc 3y ago> Tokens/s)/dollar is 0 on AMD. You do realise llama.cpp works on some and cards right?
- consp 3y agoMaybe also blame Nvidia for making a closed source API in your rant.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoThat’s not hostility, that’s just suckage. Suckage can be solved with time, if years of it on occasion. Hostility can only be solved by the customer base jumping ship.
- izacus 3y agoSomeone asking you to pay money for quality isn't hostility.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoBut them asking for as much money as (they think) you can bear because you’ve got nowhere else to go is. And on a market with a single real choice the difference between the two is of quantity, not of quality. I’d say Nvidia is leaning towards the hostility side these days, although my absolute revulsion for software locks may be colouring my perspective. To be clear, “hostility” is not the word I would’ve chosen, as it attributes emotions to entities that don’t really experience them. Perhaps it’s more useful to talk about whether the company cares if the customers feel exploited or not; and I don’t think Nvidia does (think this will hurt their sales).
- mccrory 3y agoI agree it isn’t hostility it is monopoly
- smoldesu 3y agoOnly if you consider software a commodity. Which... sorry to inject my personal opinion here, but it's not. Software is a finite intellectual product designed by motivated human laborers. The hardware can be a commodity, and the design can be a competitive advantage, but software layer is specifically what people consider "monopolized". Nvidia is not the only company designing GPGPU hardware, and they're not the only company capable of affording commodity silicon from TSMC. The only high-demand thing they entirely control seems to be CUDA, a software feature other companies are too lazy to reproduce. Maybe it's the rest of the market that's being anticompetitive?
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- fortran77 3y agoI love Nvidia. Sure it's "closed" in that there's no alternative that uses the same API. But they have wonderful developer support, solid APIs, and are primarily responsible for the rapid rise in GPGPU computing. And the costs aren't _that_ bad. I've been around a long time. The amount of computing power in a 4090 consumer GPU is mind blowing.
- ilyt 3y agoDriver side sucked on AMD since the cards were still ATI tho
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- OtomotO 3y agoI am hearing the same claims repeated over and over again. On linux they are simply not true. So are we talking about Windows? Are we talking games?
- blihp 3y agoFor GPU compute drivers on the majority of their consumer cards on Linux the claims are most certainly true.
- bavell 3y agoHuh? Not sure if I'm misunderstanding but I'm on Arch and I've been running my 6750XT with SD since like February. Got SDXL running a few months ago and have played with oobabooga a bit. Also compiled whisper.cpp with HIPblas the other day. I also play a few dozen hours of games a month, some new, some old, some AAA, some indie. All through Steam's Proton with no driver issues whatsoever.
- 7speter 3y agoYou may be running sdxl but according to benchmarks I’ve seen, nowhere near the speed of say, a 3070, or a 3080 12gb (if you want a nvidia product with comparable vram)
- renewiltord 3y agoHas been a decade+. If you build company on their GPUs you will fail. Just adding implementation complexity for no reason. Unfixable software. But all I'm doing is warning. The consensus viewpoint is not this so you can listen to HN consensus or you can listen to me.
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- smoldesu 3y ago> The consensus viewpoint is not this so you can listen to HN consensus or you can listen to me. Can you corroborate your points? None of it really aligns with my experience. Nvidia hardware seems quite popular and effective for raster solutions, accelerated RT, dedicated AI and even low-power handheld gaming. I'm typing this out on a Linux box with an Nvidia GPU right now :P It's worth noting that Nvidia isn't a saint, sure. They play for keeps, and CUDA is limited to paying customers only. CUDA doesn't have open source alternatives, though. Some things do part of what CUDA does really well (or better), but nobody is making a full-stack replacement. Apple is investing in the Accelerate framework which has almost no industry/datacenter application; AMD is doubling down on OpenBLAS and community support. Intel is half-assing some proprietary frameworks and pushing it into demos for a good look. It would be great if these incumbent companies would pool their vast resource advantage to write, deliver, test and maintain a cross-platform GPGPU library. But that's a lot to ask, and it's easier to just disrupt the entire market with a single integrated package.
- renewiltord 3y agoI should have said "The HN consensus viewpoint is apparently not this based on this thread"
- 7speter 3y ago> Intel is half-assing some proprietary frameworks and pushing it into demos for a good look. My understanding is the likes of oneAPI is supposed to be enable non nvidia gpus to work on CUDA workloads? Is oneAPI one of your these proprietary frameworks?
- Zardoz84 3y ago> drivers are buggy so you don't use linux
- FeepingCreature 3y agoAnything that does not live in AMD's ecosystem manages to avoid suckage. The AMD linux drivers are fine because Linus would not let them get away with the sort of shit they have to be doing in their internal repos. As geohot memorably noted, "this will generate dead loop." If their commit messages are like that in Linux, what is their code like when nobody is looking? The ROCM drivers are shit. They somehow manage to get an enormous edifice of effort 99% working, then they bungle their package repository. Repeatedly. AMD have a tremendous ability to shoot themselves in the foot five feet from the end of the race, and the thing is, at this point you have to anticipate it. They have the capability to succeed, but not the temperament.
- 7speter 3y agoROCM drivers also puzzle me because it works on an exclusive selection of gpus instead of the whole lineup of a given architecture family. I keep reading about how theres ROCM support for the 7900xtx, and I guess theres no support for the 7600?
- JonChesterfield 3y agoYou on windows by any chance?
- nullifidian 3y agoThe situation has been changing rapidly since summer. According to my research, if you combine their desktop and cuda bugginess (for 7900 XTX) they are approaching the nvidia level of bugginess on linux, which is surprisingly quite high (much much higher than what it was say 5 years ago when nvidia just worked). One just needs a glimpse at their forum https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-graphics/145 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-graphics/145 to gauge the situation. I just bought a 4090 and the desktop experience I get is much worse than what I had with the gpu embeded in the Ryzen 7950x: Wayland doesn't work, in Xorg there is tearing in mpv, alt-tab sometimes breaks in gnome. When I launch memory intensive cuda kernels the whole desktop becomes unresponsive. The drivers spews Xid errors in dmesg and breaks for certain applications, such as embergen.
- gymbeaux 3y agoI’ve stopped trying to use NVidia on Linux. I will usually have the display plugged into a Ryzen APU and have the NVidia GPU headless for compute stuff.
- nullifidian 3y agoThere are some positive movements though. For example the addition of explicit synchronization that the nvidia driver needs to function properly into DRI3 / Xwayland https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests... is active as of right now, and it seems that it will succeed. The corresponding mutter issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3300 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3300
- gymbeaux 3y agoI will say my experience with Nvidia + Wayland has been better than most it seems. It may be because I typically use Fedora which sticks to pure GNOME while Ubuntu and Pop_OS bastardize GNOME. Still, my main complaint is that moving windows around and so on is not smooth. I forget what the term for it is… the window gets jagged and it’s like parts of it are moving at different speeds.
- OtomotO 3y agoMy last nvidia card was bought in 2007. Since then I am on AMD. I game, I build games, work on GPU related stuff. I refuse to buy Nvidia until they open source their drivers. I don't care about windows, I am on linux solely and there, from my experience, AMD is doing an excellent job
- nullifidian 3y agoAMD's drivers weren't open in 2007 either and for a number of years after that.
- sspiff 3y agoFirst open source amdgpu release was 2015, so 8 years later. You could probably reasonably stretch an Nvidia 8800 GTX (the absolute top card in 2007) to 2012 if you were thrifty with the settings and resolution. But by 2015 you couldn't run most games at all I would wager.
- OtomotO 3y agoI never said they were in 2007, I said I bought my last Nvidia card in 2007. In 2011 I was using R600, without any problems. Since then the situation improved steadily, especially when Steam got native support.