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AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

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Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#91

Post by QuixoticQuibit »

alkonaut wrote: post #60
_bxg1 wrote: post #49

AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a serious push for the top.

I’d like a card that is a 2080 but instead used all the extra transistors compared to a 1080 for traditional rendering, not raytracing. Raytracing might be a thing in the future but now it’s just a gimmick that uses silicon that could have churned out more frames instead.

The RT hardware takes up a small fraction of die area based on some articles I read a year ago. Furthermore, RT isn’t a gimmick: it’s literally the holy grail of graphics. Ask yourself why AMD, Intel, and consoles are all moving to it this year.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#92

Post by dep_b »

As a MacBook user having equally performing GPU’s from AMD is really great. Though raytracing demo’s impress me, in-game it’s often not so impressive.

So if AMD’s there in two years or so the software caught up at roughly the same time.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#93

Post by pjmlp »

winter_blue wrote: post #22
perceptronas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)

Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia on Linux ??? I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had a truly horrible experience on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a St…

Υes they are, I am still waiting for the day that the Brazos APU will be properly supported in the open source driver, while fxglr was doing just fine.

Problem is, takes to non-existing driver ABI newer kernels don't take fxglr anymore, and proper Brazos support is most likely on no one's agenda.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#94

Post by pjmlp »

shaklee3 wrote: post #26
pixelpoet wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCL is all you need, and for the sake of a healthy (read: non-monopoly) GPU computing ecosystem you must insist on good OpenCL support! Having an additional CUDA backend is fine if you want, but AMD GPUs are often really strong in a level playing field, which is exactly what you want as a consumer. Basically no consumer ever benefitted from a monopoly, and GPU computing is very important. I've developed (as lead G…

It's not, though. The blas and fft libraries are not only much slower (less efficient for the claimed peak of the cards), but they're missing features. For example, gemms don't work on complex half precision in any opencl library I've seen. Batched modes are missing for some types, etc. For basic operations, they're sufficient. But it's hard to get behind libraries that AMD doesn't really control. The ship has sailed…

OpenCL was never that portable to mobile devices anyway, even though they are at the other end of the high-end GPU spectrum.

iOS never went beyond OpenCL 1.0, and eventually Apple moved into Metal.

Android never supported OpenCL, as Google preferred to push their C99 based dialect, Renderscript.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#95

Post by kouteiheika »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #85
pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

> Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive. nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. Presumably this is a conscious decision - they'd rather invest in CUDA. I have no idea what AMD is up to regarding OpenCL. Have they just quietly dropped all support? [0][1] Intel seem to be doing better, with support for OpenCL 2.1, with support…

> nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1.

This hasn't been true for quite some time now. They support 1.2.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#96

Post by bayindirh »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #89
bamboozled wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?

> Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux...

Unless you want to do some cutting edge stuff with it. We're begging nVidia to fix their DPMS implementation over DisplayPort for years now.

Oh, I forgot that nVidia drivers do not make enabling VSync easy for video/compositing overlays for ~6 years? I have to disable all optimizations and lose 50% performance to enable VSync in a compositing or video layer.

Yes, most of it works but some annoying parts do not work, and nVidia doesn't make anything easier.

This is on a GTX680 card. It was king of the hill when I first bought it.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#97

Post by alkonaut »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #91
alkonaut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like a card that is a 2080 but instead used all the extra transistors compared to a 1080 for traditional rendering, not raytracing. Raytracing might be a thing in the future but now it’s just a gimmick that uses silicon that could have churned out more frames instead.

The RT hardware takes up a small fraction of die area based on some articles I read a year ago. Furthermore, RT isn’t a gimmick: it’s literally the holy grail of graphics. Ask yourself why AMD, Intel, and consoles are all moving to it this year.

It is the holy grail, but in current games it’s mostly a high cost effect that offers very little. In many games you pay a huge fps penalty for something you basically need circled in screenshots to notice.

I don’t doubt it will be fantastic once it’s actually usable in the sense that people will choose to enable it. I fear next gen consoles, like current top end PCs, will have settings where you choose 4K/60fps/raytracing and you can enable two of them, or possibly just one. In priority order, raytracing is a distant third of those.

I think they are all moving to it because they know they need to get there eventually, and they need consumers to pay for it all the way.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#98

Post by Nullabillity »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #89
bamboozled wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?

Nvidia used to be the less bad option, but AMD's transition to AMDGPU leapfrogged that a long time ago.

They're still focused on their proprietary drivers, and naturally that means that they're way behind on supporting modern kernels. That's an issue if you have other hardware that only had support added recently. Their integration with X11's autoconfig also tends to have.. problems.

Nouveau basically doesn't work for their modern GPUs. My work laptop has a 1660Ti, and X11/Nouveau still can't render anything with it. Wayland/Gnome/Nouveau kinda sorta works, but I'd rather not have to use Wayland if I can avoid it.

Nvidia's support for PRIME is lacking. Their official stance was that you should restart your X11 session every time you wanted to swap. Bumblebee kind of worked, but was very slow and unstable. It looks like they finally implemented support for dynamic PRIME now, but of course they had to name their trigger environment variable something else, so that existing scripts for AMD PRIME wouldn't work.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#99

Post by yxhuvud »

jdc wrote: post #18
perceptronas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)

How long ago did you try it? It was definitely bad in the fglrx days!

This is definitely a problem still. The latest Ubuntu won't even boot with a 5700 XT card without first upgrading the Linux firmware.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#100

Post by MaxBarraclough »

kouteiheika wrote: post #95
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive. nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. Presumably this is a conscious decision - they'd rather invest in CUDA. I have no idea what AMD is up to regarding OpenCL. Have they just quietly dropped all support? [0][1] Intel seem to be doing better, with support for OpenCL 2.1, with support…

> nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1. This hasn't been true for quite some time now. They support 1.2.

Interesting - their website says 1.1 [0] but they apparently released a driver in 2015 which supported 1.2 on certain chipsets [1].

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/29607373/

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