Soldato
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Carmack says 'All my recent games were flops so give me cash and I'll say what you want'
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John Carmack says NVidia drivers are 'consistently superior'
- Thread starter mmj_uk
- Start date
Bandwagons he has recently hopped on:
-consoles
-calling PC gamers "entitled" and "irrelevant" (despite not knowing what those words mean)
-indie gaming
-tumblr social justice buffoonery / gay agenda
With each one he ironically faded faster into obscurity. Like you say, what was his name again...?
If he wanted some attention dropping some mention of new doom or quake IP would get a million times more interest than some obscure mention of amd v nvidia - you did realise he has over 90 thousand followers and a very active twitter stream (in terms of interaction) before making that comment right?
It also pays to look at the comments in context:
PlugPulled: You praise everything except Nvidia and Windows. And yet you use Windows os and Nvidia hardware only
ID_AA_Carmack: you are right. I cheer progress everywhere, but Visual Studio, Nvidia GPUs, and Intel CPUs are my weapons of choice.
kelebekkafa: What about AMD's GCN?
ID_AA_Carmack: on a hardware level, AMD is often as good as or better than Nvidia, but Nvidia drivers are consistently superior.
The guy is far from an attention seeker but is highly opinionated and can usually back it up so if he made an apparent AMD v nVidia comment it wasn't something he pulled out of thin air.
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At a technical and academic level he is and no one said that is not qualified to talk, but when it comes to a consumers experience on the PC that's another because they are not all built to the same spec, it only takes one component or a piece of software, a setting to spoil an experience and users are quite capable of making a mess of the best setups.
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I've often found AMD (in my case ATi) hardware more robust than Nvidia. Where Carmack mentions that "on a hardware level, AMD is often as good as or better than Nvidia", maybe he's referring to a number of things but also along the lines eg. durability?
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It'll be mostly about the suitability for advanced programming things like sub-system latency, etc.
The key thing to take into account is that the comment was a reflection based on GCN - hes basically saying two things one specific to GCN and the other including GCN but also more all encompassing of his experience programming for both.
The key thing to take into account is that the comment was a reflection based on GCN - hes basically saying two things one specific to GCN and the other including GCN but also more all encompassing of his experience programming for both.
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AMD still have not brought out the MTR driver yet.
Yes, I'm sure you're right there. I just wondered about the longevity of the hardware, but as you say, I'm sure he was referring to things on a far deeper level.
Out of interest, does anyone know what 'clock cycles' are, and is it the case that traditionally AMD / ATi were built on more complicated / involved architectures?
Simplified a clock cycle is how fast a processor ticks over per second, the logic its processing will advance a step (or in some cases more) every clock cycle.
The architectures are different you can't really say one is more complicated than the other as an overall thing.
The architectures are different you can't really say one is more complicated than the other as an overall thing.
The MTR drivers are mostly optimising the software pipeline, the stuff I'm referring to with regards to latency is much lower hardware level functionality as a very crude example there might be a part of the GPU that when you push data at it takes just aslong to process 10 batches of data as it does to process 2 batches of data but one vendor's GPU might let you re-program it when you know the data context so that it can process 2 batches faster at the expensive of the time it would take to process 10 batches whereas the other vendor's GPU might not have implemented such a function.
Indeed but my point is that there are plenty of things that users have been asking for because they have seen the benefits and MTR is one of them.
To try and simplify it even further, I've always thought of it like a flowchart that instructions go through. Each box in the chart being an area of silicon. 1 clock cycle then being the journey of instructions through the flowchart.
This, you have to remember the last game he released was RAGE which had major problems on ATi hardware due to shoddy driver support for the latest effects. That doesn't mean that AMD's current drivers are not great or that Nvidia's 320.18's were perfrect, just that from his perspective ATi/AMD drivers have had more issues with his engines/games than Nvidia's have, that's all.
It had major problems on both brands period.
And what latest effects are you on about its the first i have heard of it.
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Baffles me why anyone is buying Nvidia they charge more for less or the same performance because they think they are superior it's just silly.
Why on earth anyone would say pay £200 for performance they can get for £150 on ATi is beyond me.
I think it's just ignorance and from what I have seen online over the years Americans definitely think ati is inferior to nvidia.
Why on earth anyone would say pay £200 for performance they can get for £150 on ATi is beyond me.
I think it's just ignorance and from what I have seen online over the years Americans definitely think ati is inferior to nvidia.
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