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Nvidia won, we all lost

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Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#351

Post by xiphias2 »

Kon5ole wrote: post #317

TSMC can only make about as many Nvidia chips as OpenAI and the other AI guys wants to buy. Nvidia releases gpus made from basically the shaving leftovers from the OpenAI products, which makes them limited in supply and expensive. So gamers have to pay much more and wait much longer than before, which they resent. Some youtubers make content that profit from the resentment so they play fast and loose with the fundame…

This is one reason, and another is that both Dennard scaling has stopped and GPUs hit a memory wall for DRAM. The only reason AI hardware gets the significant improvements is that they are using big matmuls and a lot of research has been in getting lower precision (now 4bit) training working (numerical precision stability was always a huge problem with backprop).

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#352

Post by liendolucas »

I haven't read the whole article but a few things to remark:

* The prices for Nvidia GPUs are insane. For that money you can have an extremely good PC with a good non Nvidia GPU.

* The physical GPU sizes are massive, even letting the card rest on a horizontal motherboard looks like scary.

* Nvidia has still issues with melting cables? I've heard about those some years ago and thought it was a solved problem.

* Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time.

Looks as if Nvidia at the moment is only looking at the AI market (which as a personal belief has to burst at some point) and simply does not care the non GPU AI market at all.

I remember many many years ago when I was a teenager and 3dfx was the dominant graphics card manufacturer that John Carmack profethically in a gaming computer magazine (the article was about Quake I) predicted that the future wasn't going to be 3dfx and Glide. Some years passed by and effectively 3dfx was gone.

Perhaps is just the beginning of the same story that happened with 3dfx. I think AMD and Intel have a huge opportunity to balance the market and bring Nvidia down, both in the AI and gaming space.

I have only heard excellent things about Intel's ARC GPUs in other HNs threads and if I need to build a new desktop PC from scratch there's no way to pay for the prices that Nvidia is pushing to the market, I'll definitely look at Intel or AMD.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#353

Post by flohofwoe »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games

...and even if you're all in on video games, there's a massive amount of really brilliant indie games on Steam that run just fine on a 1070 or 2070 (I still have my 2070 and haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade yet).

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#354

Post by ThatPlayer »

bob1029 wrote: post #89
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games My favorite part about being a reformed gaming addict is the fact that my MacBook now covers ~100% of my computer use cases. The desktop is nice for Visual Studio but that's about it. I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely zero desire to upgrade.

Put Linux on it, and you can even run software raytracing on it for games like Indiana Jones! It'll do something like ~70 fps medium 1080p IIRC.

No mesh shader supports though. I bet more games will start using that soon

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#355

Post by mcdeltat »

philistine wrote: post #257
mcdeltat wrote: post #251

Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it. It's staggering that w…

Your disillusionment is warranted, but I'll say that on the Mac side the grass has never been greener. The M chips are screamers year after year, the GPUs are getting ok, the ML cores are incredible and actually useful.

Good point, we should commend genuinely novel efforts towards making baseline computation more efficient, like Apple has done as you say. Particularly in light of recent x86 development which seems to be "shove as many cores as possible on a die and heat your apartment while your power supply combusts" (meanwhile the software gets less efficient by the day, but that's another thing altogether...). ANY DAY of the week I will take a compute platform that's no-bs no-bells-and-whistles simply more efficient without the manufacturer trying to blow smoke up our asses.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#356

Post by msgodel »

y-curious wrote: post #146
rightbyte wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's Wine thing works quite well. And yes you need to fiddle and do work arounds including giving up getting some games to work.

It's Linux, what software doesn't need fiddling to work?

Other than maybe iOS what OSes in general don't need fiddling these days to be usable?

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#357

Post by npteljes »

eden-u4 wrote: post #340
npteljes wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I experienced is that AI is a nightmare on AMD in Linux. There is a myriad of custom things that one needs to do, and even that just breaks after a while. Happened so much on my current setup (6600 XT) that I don't bother with local AI anymore, because the time investment is just not worth it. It's not that I can't live like this, I still have the same card, but if I were looking to do anything AI locally with a…

I don't have much experience with ROCm for large trainings, but NVIDIA is still shit with driver+cuda version+other things. The only simplification is due to ubuntu and other distros that already do the heavy lift by installing all required components, without much configuration.

Oh I'm sure. The thing is that with AMD I have the same luxury, and the wretched thing still doesn't work, or has regressions.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#358

Post by delusional »

duckmysick wrote: post #345
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. I'd really love to try AMD as a daily driver. For me CUDA is the showstopper. There's really nothing comparable in the AMD camp.

ROCM is, to some degree and in some areas, a pretty decent alternative. Developing with it is often times a horrible experience, but once something works, it works fine.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#359

Post by xg15 »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy.

I'm with you - in principle. Capital-G "Gamers" who turned gaming into an identity and see themselves as the real discriminated group have fully earned the ridicule.

But I think where the criticism is valid is how NVIDIA's behavior is part of the wider enshittification trend in tech. Lock-in and overpricing in entertainment software might be annoying but acceptable, but it gets problematic when we have the exact same trends in actually critical tech like phones and cars.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#360

Post by reissbaker »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #49

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooo…

I want to love AMD, but they're just... mediocre. Worse for gaming, and much worse for ML. They're better-integrated into Linux, but given that the entire AI industry runs on:

1. Nvidia cards

2. Hooked up to Linux boxes

It turns out that Nvidia tends to work pretty well on Linux too, despite the binary blob drivers.

Other than gaming and ML, I'm not sure what the value of spending much on a GPU is... AMD is just in a tough spot.

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