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"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

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Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#161
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is by far the best out of the box experience under linux. I have 3 cards. I will get one of the new battlmage cards for my gaming pc. Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though

What does a "pretty bad" h265 implementation look like? Buggy? Inefficient or what?

Video encoders can vary widely in quality. There are lots of parameters that allow for a wide range of "correct" encodings of the same source video file. Realtime hardware encoders in general have lower visual quality for the same bitrate than software encoders that may be slower but more thoroughly search through different options for encoding each group of frames.

Decoding is much more deterministic, so speed and power efficiency are the main ways hardware decoders can differ.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#163
post #53

It's interesting how we the people (broadly) accept this practice in software and even some hardware, but not in other areas. Note how frustrated people are when you hear about "unlocking" sensors and services available on cars. If a product is made, and the cost to provide that product is the same one way or the other but you cripple it to create segmentation, then that is greed. Period. Objectively. And if you're o…

People have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.

How is this modern world? LOL

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#164
There is competition, but the competition isn't winning 1st, 2nd or 3rd.

There was a day in which Intel was top dog and for a long time, now AMD are competing in 1st place.

AMD and/or other competitors will have their day, but today its Nvidia.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#165

This is why Nvidia needs competition. I love the performance of their hardware and the quality of their drivers, but I don't love being their customer. They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this. Back in the day it was "workstation" graphics for CAD programs that they would nerf for consumer cards by downgrading various features of OpenGL. Different markets, same techniques. It'…

>They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this.

Had AI and Crypto not been a thing. These so called price discrimination was what kept the company afloat and continue to spend stupid money ( according to many ) on CUDA rather than making gaming better.

And when often people say "X" needs competition. What they really want is just cheaper price for the same thing. Would it be great if Nvidia had more competition? Absolutely, but is Nvidia not making progress and milking everything they have? Absolutely not. They invested even more in CUDA, Large Die Size Correction Tooling, Assisted EDA Design and many more to their arsenal to built their moat.

I also often found when a successful founder is still working at a company, that company is often pushed far harder by its founder than whatever market force is driving them. So we need competition for Intel 2009 - 2021, Microsoft in 2000, Any company who just sit there and no longer improves or failed to execute.

Nvidia? They are doing fine if not better than I could imagine. ( I just wished they spend a little more money to compete in the Mobile and Desktop Consumer SoC space. I guess that is coming soon. )

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#166
post #52

NVIDIA is obviously not above market segmentation via dubious means (see: driver limitations for consumer GPUs), but I think binning due to silicon defects is a more likely explanation in this case. Some 4090s have this extra fp16 -> fp32 ALU disabled because it's defective on that chip. Other 4090s have it disabled because it failed as an Ada 6000 for some other reason, but NVIDIA didn't want to make a 4095 SKU to s…

There must be a whole layer of reroute if defective plumbing in drivers.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#167
post #165

This is why Nvidia needs competition. I love the performance of their hardware and the quality of their drivers, but I don't love being their customer. They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this. Back in the day it was "workstation" graphics for CAD programs that they would nerf for consumer cards by downgrading various features of OpenGL. Different markets, same techniques. It'…

>They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this. Had AI and Crypto not been a thing. These so called price discrimination was what kept the company afloat and continue to spend stupid money ( according to many ) on CUDA rather than making gaming better. And when often people say "X" needs competition. What they really want is just cheaper price for the same thing. Would it be great…

> What they really want is just cheaper price for the same thing

They'd probably be happy with competitive market pricing, which is unlikely to happen without a competitive market.

Nvidia's gross margins are extraordinary vs. AMD or intel margins (or even "overpriced" Apple.)

There is competition of a sort - for example at the low end with intel ARC and at the high end with AMD Instinct based supercomputers. However, competitors don't seem to be able to match the CUDA software platform, particularly for AI/ML. The deepening CUDA moat is hard for competitors to cross and for customers to escape.

In the cloud space it seems that Nvidia may face more competition with platforms like GCP/Cloud TPU and AWS/Trainium.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#169
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is by far the best out of the box experience under linux. I have 3 cards. I will get one of the new battlmage cards for my gaming pc. Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though

What does a "pretty bad" h265 implementation look like? Buggy? Inefficient or what?

The h265 quality is just not up to par. The av1 encoder does a nice enough job, so does the h264 one.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#170
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go from the eFuse mentioned at the beginning to the conclusion in the screenshot at the end, not the other way around.

Am I missing something then? Is there some context to the linked tweet and screen shot that didn't come up?

Perhaps this part isn't appearing above the image for you?

"NVIDIA is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed.

There's an eFuse blown on the AD102 die to halve the perf of FP16 with FP32 accumulate. RTX 6000 Ada is the same die w/o the blown fuse.

This is not binning, it's segmentation. Wish there was competition."

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