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Nvidia won, we all lost

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Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#91

Post by snackbroken »

frollogaston wrote: post #61
__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…

Also playing PC video games doesn't even require a Nvidia GPU. It does sorta require Windows. I don't want to use that, so guess I lost the ability to waste tons of time playing boring games, oh no.

Out of the 11 games I've bought through Steam this year, I've had to refund one (1) because it wouldn't run under Proton, two (2) had minor graphical glitches that didn't meaningfully affect my enjoyment of them, and two (2) had native Linux builds. Proton has gotten good enough that I've switched from spending time researching if I can play a game to just assuming that I can. Presumably ymmv depending on your taste in games of course, but I'm not interested in competitive multiplayer games with invasive anticheat which appears to be the biggest remaining pain point.

My experience with running non-game windows-only programs has been similar over the past ~5 years. It really is finally the Year of the Linux Desktop, only few people seem to have noticed.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#92

Post by alganet »

rightbyte wrote: post #81
alganet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More a sequence of potential events than a timeframe. High-end GPUs are already useless for gaming (a low-end GPU is enough), their traditional source of demand. They're floating on artificial demand for a while now. There are two markets that currently could use them: LLMs and Augmented Reality. Both of these are currently useless, and getting more useless by the day. CPUs are just piggybacking on all of this. So, l…

I don't see how GPU factories could be running in the event of war "in such a scale to drive silicon prices up". Unless you mean that supply will be low and people scavanging TI calculators for processors to make boxes playing Tetris and Space Invaders.

Why not?

This is the exact model in which WWII operated. Car and plane supply chains were practically nationalized to support the military industry.

If drones, surveillance, satellites become the main war tech, they'll all use silicon, and things will be fully nationalized.

We already have all sorts of hints of this. Doesn't need a genius to predict that it could be what happens to these industries.

The balance with food and fuel is more delicate though. A war with drones, satellites and surveillance is not like WWII, there's a commercial aspect to it. If you put it on paper, food and fuel project more power and thus, can move more money. Any public crisis can make people forget about GPUs and jeopardize the process of nationalization that is currently being implemented, which still depends on relatively peaceful international trade.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#93

Post by rcxdude »

ionwake wrote: post #85
dwattttt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on control systems a long time ago, that's a 'nothing' statement: the whole job of the control system is to keep the robot stable/ambulating, regardless of whatever disturbances occur. It's meant to reject the forces induced due to waving exactly as much as bumping into something unexpected. It's easier to stabilise from an operator initiated wave, really; it knows it's happening before it does the wave…

I tried to understand the point of your reply but Im not sure what your point was - I only seemed to glean "its easier to balance if the operator is moving it". Please elaborate unless Im being thick. EDIT > I upvoted your comment in any case as Im sure its helping

'control system' in this case is not implying remote control, it's referring to the feedback system that adjust the actuators in response to the sensed information. If the motion is controlled automatically, then the control loop can in principle anticipate the motion in a way that it could not if it was remote controlled: i.e. the opposite, it's easier to control the motions (in terms of maintaining balance and avoiding overstressing the actuators) if the operator is not live puppeteering it.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#94

Post by dwattttt »

ionwake wrote: post #85
dwattttt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on control systems a long time ago, that's a 'nothing' statement: the whole job of the control system is to keep the robot stable/ambulating, regardless of whatever disturbances occur. It's meant to reject the forces induced due to waving exactly as much as bumping into something unexpected. It's easier to stabilise from an operator initiated wave, really; it knows it's happening before it does the wave…

I tried to understand the point of your reply but Im not sure what your point was - I only seemed to glean "its easier to balance if the operator is moving it". Please elaborate unless Im being thick. EDIT > I upvoted your comment in any case as Im sure its helping

It's that there's nothing special about blending "operator initiated animation commands" with the RL balancing system. The balance system has to balance anyway; if there was no connection between an operator's wave command and balance, it would have exactly the same job to do.

At best the advantage of connecting those systems is that the operator command can inform the balance system, but there's nothing novel about that.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#95

Post by dwattttt »

rcxdude wrote: post #93
ionwake wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to understand the point of your reply but Im not sure what your point was - I only seemed to glean "its easier to balance if the operator is moving it". Please elaborate unless Im being thick. EDIT > I upvoted your comment in any case as Im sure its helping

'control system' in this case is not implying remote control, it's referring to the feedback system that adjust the actuators in response to the sensed information. If the motion is controlled automatically, then the control loop can in principle anticipate the motion in a way that it could not if it was remote controlled: i.e. the opposite, it's easier to control the motions (in terms of maintaining balance and avoi…

Apologies, yes, "control system" is somewhat niche jargon. "Balance system" is probably more appropriate.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#96

Post by alganet »

bigyabai wrote: post #87
alganet wrote: post #24

Right now, all silicon talk is bullshit. It has been for a while. It became obvious when old e-waste Xeons were turned into viable, usable machines, years ago. Something is obviously wrong with this entire industry, and I cannot wait for it to pop. THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for.

A lot of those Xeon e-waste machines were downright awful, especially for the "cheap gaming PC" niche they were popular in. Low single-core clock speeds, low memory bandwidth for desktop-style configurations and super expensive motherboards that ran at a higher wattage than the consumer alternatives. > THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for. Or TSMC could become geopolitically jeopardized somehow, drasti…

They were awful compared to newer models, but for the price of nothing, pretty good deal.

If no good use is found for high-end GPUs, secondhand models will be like AOL CDs.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#97

Post by ionwake »

timschmidt wrote: post #82
AtariATMHacker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

It seems to me like both cases raised by OP - the Disney droids and Optimus - are cases of people making assumptions and then getting upset that their assumptions were wrong and making accusations. Neither company was very forthcoming about the robots being piloted, but neither seems to be denying it either. And both seem to use RL / ML techniques to maintain balance, locomotion, etc. Not unlike Boston Dynamics' bots…

If you look at the video he says " this is real time simulation .. can you believe it" basically : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jD5y1eQ3Y_o

Yet he lists all the RL stuff that we know is used in the robot, he isnt being silent and saying " this robot is aided by AI" , or better yet, not commenting on the specifics, ( which would have been totally ok ), instead he is saying " This is real life simulation", which it isnt.

EDIT > apparently I am wrong - thank you for the correction everyone!

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#98

Post by user____name »

kbolino wrote: post #22
bigyabai wrote: post #6

> Pretty much all upscalers force TAA for anti-aliasing and it makes the entire image on the screen look blurry as fuck the lower the resolution is. I feel like this is a misunderstanding, though I admit I'm splitting hairs here. DLSS is a form of TAA, and so is FSR and most other modern upscalers. You generally don't need an extra antialiasing pipeline if you're getting an artificially supersampled image. We've seen…

Every kind of TAA that I've seen creates artifacts around fast-moving objects. This may sound like a niche problem only found in fast-twitch games but it's cropped up in turn-based RPGs and factory/city builders. I personally turn it off as soon as I notice it. Unfortunately, some games have removed traditional MSAA as an option, and some are even making it difficult to turn off AA when TAA and FXAA are the only opti…

The sad truth is that with rasterization every renderer needs to be designed around a specific set of antialiasing solutions. Antialiasing is like a big wall in your rendering pipeline, there's the stuff you can do before resolving and the stuff you can do afterwards. The problem with MSAA is that it is pretty much tightly coupled with all your architectural rendering decisions. To that end, TAA is simply the easiest to implement and it kills a lot of proverbial birds with one stone. And it can all be implemented as essentially a post processing effect, it has much less of the tight coupling.

MSAA only helps with geometric edges, shader aliasing can be combatted with prefiltering but even then it's difficult to get rid of it completely. MSAA also needs beefy multisample intermediate buffers, this makes it pretty much a non-starter on heavily deferred rendering pipelines, which throw away coverage information to fit their framebuffer budget. On top of that the industry moved to stochastic effects for rendering all kinds of things that were too expensive before, the latest being actual realtime path tracing. I know people moan about TAA and DLSS but to do realtime path tracing at 4k is sort of nuts really. I still consider it a bit of a miracle we can do it at all.

Personally, I wish there was more research by big players into things like texture space lighting, which makes shading aliasing mostly go away, plays nice with alpha blending and would make MSAA viable again. The issue there is with shading only the stuff you see and not wasting texels.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#99

Post by qualeed »

Spivak wrote: post #70
ragequittah wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497989-amd-caught-cheating-... The forum post you linked was an april fools joke.

It's sort of funny, because the second comment is:

"Kinda rather not do april 1st jokes like this as it does get cached and passed around after the fact without it being clear."

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#100

Post by ravetcofx »

bigyabai wrote: post #15
yunyu wrote: post #13

If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important customer.

A revelation on-par with Mac users waking up to learn their computer was made by a phone company.

Barely even a phone company, more like a app store and microtransactions services company
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