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AMD is even on performance and significantly more affordable for consumers. but people wont stop buying nvidia's ripoff products like the 4060. really frustrati

AMD is even on performance and significantly more affordable for consumers. but people wont stop buying nvidia's ripoff products like the 4060. really frustrating

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Even more frustrating is on the Linux side. We've had a couple of threads about how bad Wayland is, when most of the problems are due to Nvidia binary drivers. It's been 11 years since Linus gave Nvidia the finger. Nobody who is thinking of possibly running Linux should ever buy an Nvidia product. Yet Nvidia is still very commonly spec'd into Linux builds even today.
- shmerl 3y ago
  On Linux people are clearly leaning to AMD for a while already, especially when gaming is concerned: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends#GPUVendor-top https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... In the Windows land it's indeed mostly Nvidia.
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    Ironically, ARM drivers for Nvidia are available for Linux, but not for Windows
- Filligree 3y ago
  AMD cards are _very bad_ at running CUDA. If you're running linux on a desktop, there's a decent chance you're the type who wants to play with ML as well...
  - latchkey 3y ago
    AMD has a translation layer called HIP as part of the ROCm toolset. This doesn't get us 100% of the way there, but it is an alternative that is gaining traction as they work to improve it.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  KDE's Wayland session is fine on Nvidia, at least with my 3070. There used to be more visual artifacts, but everything I'm using works, from CUDA to Mesa to DLSS. The largest remaining bug I'm aware of has to do with how blurred windows are presented. It's pretty functionally solid, at least with newer drivers.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I am still getting a lot of visual artifacts on a 970.
- anon291 3y ago
  I've used NVIDIA on linux for decades and the support has always been great in my experience
jfim 3y ago
For ML workloads, AMD wasn't competitive due to lack of software support for PyTorch. Nvidia isn't making most of their profit from selling individual GPUs to gamers, they're making money from data center GPUs that are bought by the thousands at five figure prices each for ML training.
opportune 3y ago
I made the same argument to myself when I bought an AMD GPU for gaming 4 years ago. What doesn’t show up in a side by side comparison is that AMD’s drivers (or Windows’ treatment of them) fucking suck. Until I bought an NVIDIA replacement recently I was very frequently having to reinstall the drivers and also intermittently encountering driver crashes in games and browsers. That’s not to mention having to fiddle with the drivers/games more than I was accustomed to, which IIUC is more a consequence of having less market share and thus not being a priority for game developers to work out of the box. I can excuse that, but not crashes or reinstalling every couple months.
- tokai 3y ago
  On linux its the opposite. Its was such a relive to get an AMD card and finally have a good stable driver.
- kulahan 3y ago
  Heh, I remember this being the reputation they had back in the early 2000s. Guess they never got past it.
- gabeaweg 3y ago
  Completely agree. I bought an AMD GPU like 6 years ago. The software support fucking sucked. The drivers were bad, games weren't optimised for AMD. AMD looks great on paper in benchmarks. As a product, overall, it is bad. That's why people keep buying nvidia. I will gladly pay double for a product that works.
- fenesiistvan 3y ago
  I am using a Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU since two years and never ever had any stability problem or crash running my PC ~10 hours/day, playing a some (various, demanding) games almost every day.
dotnet00 3y ago
AMD might've gotten more traction if it wasn't schizophrenic with regards to compute support on its hardware. GCN was such a great architecture for heavy compute, yet it was mostly wasted by shit software. Crypto really only managed to use it because there was more money to be made using AMD, justifying the wrangling needed to get compute to work on it. Now they continue to waste their potential with ROCm's design choices which make its hardware support range very limited.
- latchkey 3y ago
  In my eyes, as someone who ran 150k+ AMD gpus for crypto... it really boiled down to being able to heavily tune various aspects of the GPUs. Each GPU is a snowflake and being able to tweak the knobs individually, really made a huge difference on performance. Super low level performance enhancements in code helped a lot too. I worked with some of the popular mining apps to improve things there. AMD is already backporting ROCm to "lesser" hardware [0]. I wouldn't expect them to spend too many resources on going back further than that though. I'd rather see them improve their newer stuff. The larger issue is that it is impossible to rent time on the super high end GPUs that they use to build the super computers with... nobody offers that and it is something I'm working on fixing. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-enables-rocm-and-pytorch-on-radeon-rx-7900-xtx https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-enables-rocm-and-pytor...
vinculuss 3y ago
The thing I hear a lot from people who skew towards AMD is that raytracing and DLSS and all the software solutions that nvidia has are gimmicks, or somehow actually not a big deal. They’re stuck on the concept of rasterized graphics being the ground truth in gpu value. Then they’re shocked when the wider consumer market doesn’t hold their perspective. AMD hasn’t had the big picture vision that nvidia has had. For example, with Vega AMD had a gpu architecture with exceptional async compute performance a generation before nvidia was competitive. AMD then abandoned Vega, switched to a leaner and less compute friendly rDNA architecture while nvidia went in the opposite direction, pushed compute heavy features like raytracing and dlss and AMD hasn’t had an exceptional response since then.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Raytracing being a gimmick is highly subjective. Creating reflections using rasterization requires shortcuts and sacrifices. And once you see them, you can't unsee them, and then you find them visually distracting. There are basically 3 ways to create reflections without ray-tracing: 1. Double the geometry and render it in the reflection. This is rarely the approach taken because it's incredibly resource intensive. Oddly, Duke Nukem 3D back in what, 1996? did this, but that had pretty simple graphics. Genuinely not feasible for any sort of reflect surface that is curved. 2. Screen-space reflection: Just take the rendered image, invert it, and overlay it onto the reflective surface. This is probably the most common way to do it. It's fast and looks decent. The problem is that it requires the reflected image to be visible on the screen. When it's not, there's no reflection. It creates a bizarre effect when, for example, you're looking over a body of water at something in the distance, and you see the reflection in the water, but as you move the camera down, the reflection gets cut off and eventually disappears entirely. 3. Using a static image as an environment mapped texture. Apex Legends does this for shiny surfaces. It creates a great illusion of a reflection, but taking even a second to actually look at it, you'll notice that the reflection doesn't actually show what it should unless you're standing in the exact right place. I will concede that gamers typically don't notice the issues created using methods 2 and 3, especially in a game like Apex Legends where you're moving around too much to notice. But me? I dunno. I notice and get distracted. EDIT: DLSS, on the other hand, is basically a crutch. It's not surprise that DLSS became a big thing at the same time RTX did. RTX requires more juice to run at full resolution than the GPU has, so they introduced DLSS to render at a low resolution and upscale it.
paulmd 3y ago
4060 is one of the better-value options in the stack, actually. The RX 7600 is still on 6nm and is no faster, much less efficient, and skips many of the microarchitectural improvements to rdna3 to try and keep cost down. $250-270 is fine for this type of product even today. Similarly, the 4070 is also fairly attractively priced even compared to 6800XT/6950XT or 7800XT. More efficient, better feature set, same performance tier, similar perf/$. But people still get upset about intangibles like memory bus or die size (despite this already being measured in the performance!), or just don’t want to admit that wafer costs and R&D costs are rising in the post-Moores law era. Operating margins were actually down relative to the last few gens (until AI hit), and were broadly similar to 2012 levels. This is just what it costs now, and smaller die take the worst of the cost increases because memory controllers and pcie don’t shrink anywhere near as much as logic (the gpu cores). There is a “minimum cost floor” that has been rising substantially due to this.

AMD is even on performance and significantly more affordable for consumers. but people wont stop buying nvidia's ripoff products like the 4060. really frustrating

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Even more frustrating is on the Linux side. We've had a couple of threads about how bad Wayland is, when most of the problems are due to Nvidia binary drivers. It's been 11 years since Linus gave Nvidia the finger. Nobody who is thinking of possibly running Linux should ever buy an Nvidia product. Yet Nvidia is still very commonly spec'd into Linux builds even today.

shmerl 3y ago
On Linux people are clearly leaning to AMD for a while already, especially when gaming is concerned: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends#GPUVendor-top https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... In the Windows land it's indeed mostly Nvidia.
- robotnikman 3y ago
  Ironically, ARM drivers for Nvidia are available for Linux, but not for Windows
Filligree 3y ago
AMD cards are _very bad_ at running CUDA. If you're running linux on a desktop, there's a decent chance you're the type who wants to play with ML as well...
- latchkey 3y ago
  AMD has a translation layer called HIP as part of the ROCm toolset. This doesn't get us 100% of the way there, but it is an alternative that is gaining traction as they work to improve it.
smoldesu 3y ago
KDE's Wayland session is fine on Nvidia, at least with my 3070. There used to be more visual artifacts, but everything I'm using works, from CUDA to Mesa to DLSS. The largest remaining bug I'm aware of has to do with how blurred windows are presented. It's pretty functionally solid, at least with newer drivers.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  I am still getting a lot of visual artifacts on a 970.
anon291 3y ago
I've used NVIDIA on linux for decades and the support has always been great in my experience

jfim 3y ago

For ML workloads, AMD wasn't competitive due to lack of software support for PyTorch. Nvidia isn't making most of their profit from selling individual GPUs to gamers, they're making money from data center GPUs that are bought by the thousands at five figure prices each for ML training.

opportune 3y ago

I made the same argument to myself when I bought an AMD GPU for gaming 4 years ago. What doesn’t show up in a side by side comparison is that AMD’s drivers (or Windows’ treatment of them) fucking suck. Until I bought an NVIDIA replacement recently I was very frequently having to reinstall the drivers and also intermittently encountering driver crashes in games and browsers. That’s not to mention having to fiddle with the drivers/games more than I was accustomed to, which IIUC is more a consequence of having less market share and thus not being a priority for game developers to work out of the box. I can excuse that, but not crashes or reinstalling every couple months.

tokai 3y ago
On linux its the opposite. Its was such a relive to get an AMD card and finally have a good stable driver.
kulahan 3y ago
Heh, I remember this being the reputation they had back in the early 2000s. Guess they never got past it.
gabeaweg 3y ago
Completely agree. I bought an AMD GPU like 6 years ago. The software support fucking sucked. The drivers were bad, games weren't optimised for AMD. AMD looks great on paper in benchmarks. As a product, overall, it is bad. That's why people keep buying nvidia. I will gladly pay double for a product that works.
fenesiistvan 3y ago
I am using a Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU since two years and never ever had any stability problem or crash running my PC ~10 hours/day, playing a some (various, demanding) games almost every day.

dotnet00 3y ago

AMD might've gotten more traction if it wasn't schizophrenic with regards to compute support on its hardware. GCN was such a great architecture for heavy compute, yet it was mostly wasted by shit software. Crypto really only managed to use it because there was more money to be made using AMD, justifying the wrangling needed to get compute to work on it. Now they continue to waste their potential with ROCm's design choices which make its hardware support range very limited.

latchkey 3y ago
In my eyes, as someone who ran 150k+ AMD gpus for crypto... it really boiled down to being able to heavily tune various aspects of the GPUs. Each GPU is a snowflake and being able to tweak the knobs individually, really made a huge difference on performance. Super low level performance enhancements in code helped a lot too. I worked with some of the popular mining apps to improve things there. AMD is already backporting ROCm to "lesser" hardware [0]. I wouldn't expect them to spend too many resources on going back further than that though. I'd rather see them improve their newer stuff. The larger issue is that it is impossible to rent time on the super high end GPUs that they use to build the super computers with... nobody offers that and it is something I'm working on fixing. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-enables-rocm-and-pytorch-on-radeon-rx-7900-xtx https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-enables-rocm-and-pytor...

vinculuss 3y ago

The thing I hear a lot from people who skew towards AMD is that raytracing and DLSS and all the software solutions that nvidia has are gimmicks, or somehow actually not a big deal. They’re stuck on the concept of rasterized graphics being the ground truth in gpu value. Then they’re shocked when the wider consumer market doesn’t hold their perspective. AMD hasn’t had the big picture vision that nvidia has had. For example, with Vega AMD had a gpu architecture with exceptional async compute performance a generation before nvidia was competitive. AMD then abandoned Vega, switched to a leaner and less compute friendly rDNA architecture while nvidia went in the opposite direction, pushed compute heavy features like raytracing and dlss and AMD hasn’t had an exceptional response since then.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Raytracing being a gimmick is highly subjective. Creating reflections using rasterization requires shortcuts and sacrifices. And once you see them, you can't unsee them, and then you find them visually distracting. There are basically 3 ways to create reflections without ray-tracing: 1. Double the geometry and render it in the reflection. This is rarely the approach taken because it's incredibly resource intensive. Oddly, Duke Nukem 3D back in what, 1996? did this, but that had pretty simple graphics. Genuinely not feasible for any sort of reflect surface that is curved. 2. Screen-space reflection: Just take the rendered image, invert it, and overlay it onto the reflective surface. This is probably the most common way to do it. It's fast and looks decent. The problem is that it requires the reflected image to be visible on the screen. When it's not, there's no reflection. It creates a bizarre effect when, for example, you're looking over a body of water at something in the distance, and you see the reflection in the water, but as you move the camera down, the reflection gets cut off and eventually disappears entirely. 3. Using a static image as an environment mapped texture. Apex Legends does this for shiny surfaces. It creates a great illusion of a reflection, but taking even a second to actually look at it, you'll notice that the reflection doesn't actually show what it should unless you're standing in the exact right place. I will concede that gamers typically don't notice the issues created using methods 2 and 3, especially in a game like Apex Legends where you're moving around too much to notice. But me? I dunno. I notice and get distracted. EDIT: DLSS, on the other hand, is basically a crutch. It's not surprise that DLSS became a big thing at the same time RTX did. RTX requires more juice to run at full resolution than the GPU has, so they introduced DLSS to render at a low resolution and upscale it.

paulmd 3y ago

4060 is one of the better-value options in the stack, actually. The RX 7600 is still on 6nm and is no faster, much less efficient, and skips many of the microarchitectural improvements to rdna3 to try and keep cost down. $250-270 is fine for this type of product even today. Similarly, the 4070 is also fairly attractively priced even compared to 6800XT/6950XT or 7800XT. More efficient, better feature set, same performance tier, similar perf/$. But people still get upset about intangibles like memory bus or die size (despite this already being measured in the performance!), or just don’t want to admit that wafer costs and R&D costs are rising in the post-Moores law era. Operating margins were actually down relative to the last few gens (until AI hit), and were broadly similar to 2012 levels. This is just what it costs now, and smaller die take the worst of the cost increases because memory controllers and pcie don’t shrink anywhere near as much as logic (the gpu cores). There is a “minimum cost floor” that has been rising substantially due to this.