Big Swing in Market Share From AMD to NVIDIA: JPR

[Gerard]

There is only one person on this forum that doesn't have any preference/loyalty to either brand and that is kaapstad.

Pish, i couldn't give a crap what's in my pc either.

 

[mmj_uk]

Marketing only really affects consumer spending and I would argue that AMD are better at that the way court forums with reps, court the media with pro-AMD/anti-competitor articles and have armies of fanboys acting like 24/7 marketing mouthpieces.

NVidia have a huge foothold in the business/corporate/education/industrial/scientific world, are those types of customers going to buy products based upon marketing fluff? nope... they will buy multiple products and perform internal testing as to which product is the best to fulfil their requirements.

AMD are constantly banging the 'open source' drum yet they have always had one of the worst OpenGL drivers in the industry.

The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality

What most devs use because this vendor has the most capable GL devs in the industry and the best testing process. It's the "standard" driver, it's pretty fast, and when given the choice this vendor's driver devs choose sanity (to make things work) vs. absolute GL spec purity. Devs playing at home use this driver because it has the sexiest, most fun to play with extensions and GL support. Most of what you hear about the amazing things GL will be able to do in order to compete against D3D12/Mantle are by devs playing with this driver. Unfortunately, we can't just target this driver or we miss out on large amounts of market share.

Even so, until Source1 was ported to Linux and Valve devs totally held the hands of this driver's devs they couldn't even update a buffer (via a Map or BufferSubData) the D3D9/11-style way without it constantly stalling the pipeline. We're talking "driver perf 101" stuff here, so it's not without its historical faults. Also, when you hit a bug in this driver it tends to just fall flat on its face and either crash the GPU or (on Windows) TDR your system. Still, it's a very reliable/solid driver.

Vendor A supports a zillion extensions (some of them quite state of the art) that more or less work, but as soon as you start to use some of the most important ones you're off the driver's safe path and in a no man's land of crashing systems or TDR'ing at the slightest hickup.

This vendor's tools historically completely suck, or only work for some period of time and then stop working, or only work if you beg the tools team for direct assistance. They have enormous, perhaps Dilbert-esque tools teams that do who knows what. Of course, these tools only work (when they do work) on their driver.

This vendor is extremely savvy and strategic about embedding its devs directly into key game teams to make things happen. This is a double edged sword, because these devs will refuse to debug issues on other vendor's drivers, and they view GL only through the lens of how it's implemented by their driver. These embedded devs will purposely do things that they know are performant on their driver, with no idea how these things impact other drivers.

Historically, this vendor will do things like internally replace entire shaders for key titles to make them perform better (sometimes much better). Most drivers probably do stuff like this occasionally, but this vendor will stop at nothing for performance. What does this mean to the PC game industry or graphics devs? It means you, as "Joe Graphics Developer", have little chance of achieving the same technical feats in your title (even if you use the exact same algorithms!) because you don't have an embedded vendor driver engineer working specifically on your title making sure the driver does exactly the right thing (using low-level optimized shaders) when your specific game or engine is running. It also means that, historically, some of the PC graphics legends you know about aren't quite as smart or capable as history paints them to be, because they had a lot of help.

Vendor A is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business.

A complete hodgepodge, inconsistent performance, very buggy, inconsistent regression testing, dysfunctional driver threading that is completely outside of the dev's official control. Unfortunately this vendor's GPU is pretty much standard and is quite capable hardware wise, so you can't ignore these guys even though as an organization they are idiots with software. Basic stuff like glTexStorage() crashes (on a shipped title) for months on end with this driver. B's driver devs try to follow the spec more closely than Vendor A, but in the end this tends to do them no good because most devs just use Vendor A's driver for development and when things don't work on Vendor B they blame the vendor, not the state of GL itself.

Vendor B driver's key extensions just don't work. They are play or paper extensions, put in there to pad resumes and show progress to managers. Major GL developers never use these extensions because they don't work. But they sound good on paper and show progress. Vendor B's extensions are a perfect demonstration of why GL extensions suck in practice.

This vendor can't get key stuff like queries or syncs to work reliably. So any extension that relies on syncs for CPU/GPU synchronization aren't workable. The driver devs remaining at this vendor pine to work at Vendor A.

Vendor B can't update its driver without breaking something. They will send you updates or hotfixes that fix one thing but break two other things. If you single step into one of this driver's entrypoints you'll notice layers upon layers of cruft tacked on over the years by devs who are no longer at the company. Nobody remaining at vendor B understands these barnacle-like software layers enough to safely change them.

I've occasionally seen bizarre things happen on Vendor B's driver when replaying GL call streams of shipped titles into this driver using voglreplay. The game itself will work fine, but when the GL callstream is replayed we'll see massive framebuffer corruption (that goes away if we flush the GL pipeline after every draw). My guess: this driver is probably using app profiles to just turn off entire features that are just too buggy.

Interestingly, Vendor B has a tiny tools team that actually makes some pretty useful debugging tools that actually work much of the time - as long as you are using vendor B's GPU. Without Vendor B's tools togl and Source1 Linux would have taken much longer to ship.

This could be a temporary development, but Vendor B's driver seems to be on a downward trend on the reliability axis. (Yes, it can get worse!)

On the bright side, and believe it or not, Vendor B knows the OpenGL spec inside and out - to the syllable. If you can get them to assist you, their advice is more or less reasonable about plain GL matters (not extensions).

It's hard to ever genuinely get angry at Vendor C. They don't really want to do graphics, it's really just a distraction from their historically core business, but the trend is to integrate everything onto one die and they have plenty of die space to spare. They are masters at hardware, but at software they aren't all that interested really. They are the leaders in the open source graphics driver space, and their hardware specs are almost completely public. These folks actually have so much money and their org charts are so deep and wide they can afford two entirely different driver teams! (That's right - for this vendor, on one platform you get GL driver #1, and another you get GL driver #2, and they are completely different codebases and teams.)

Anyhow, this vendor's HR team is smart: it directly hires open source wiz kids to keep driver #1 plodding forward. This driver is the least advanced of the major drivers, but it more or less works as long as you don't understand or care what "FPS" means. If it doesn't work and you're really motivated you can git your hands dirty and try to fix it and submit a patch. If you're really good at fixing this driver and submitting patches then you may get a job offer from this vendor.

Anyhow, driver #1 is unfortunately pretty far behind on the GL standard, but maybe in 1-2 years they'll catch up and implement the spec as of last year. But you can't ignore this driver because they have a significant and strategically growing market share. So as a developer who wants to reach this market, you can't afford to use those fancy extensions or the latest trendy "modern" GL supported by vendors A and B. You must do a min() operation across all the drivers and in many cases this driver gates what you can do.

Vendor C has no GL tools at all for either platform. Sorry - want to debug that graphics problem you're having? Welcome to 1999.

Gamers obviously aren't as affected by poor driver quality as developers are but it speaks volumes of the company without being blinded by marketing.

 

[bru]

There is only one person on this forum that doesn't have any preference/loyalty to either brand and that is kaapstad.

If you really believe that then your living in LALA land.

There are loads of people on these forums that really don't care which brand they use.

And no before anyone comments, No I would not consider myself one of them. I certainly have a preference for Nvidia.

 

[nitram100]

I miss ATI

 

[Orangey]

That's just 1 guy's opinion mmj and it was anonymized, you have claimed which is which without any actual knowledge of your own as supporting evidence. You're just repeating fanboy rubbish, which is what AMD have suffered with for 15 years now. Nvidia rely on that.

 

[Final8y]

That's just 1 guy's opinion mmj and it was anonymized, you have claimed which is which without any actual knowledge of your own as supporting evidence. You're just repeating fanboy rubbish, which is what AMD have suffered with for 15 years now. Nvidia rely on that.

+1
Indeed.

 

[tommybhoy]

Snippet from the conclusion of that comparison just so where all on the same page.

Which coincided with the beginning of the [H]-Galaxy sponsorship deal, just so we're all on the same page.

It was a simple pointer that the 7970/680 were on an even par from the very start when both were clocked up and not one on static clocks with the other boosting clocks-which was a fantastic move from Nvidia I may add.

 

[Boomstick777]

You sound mad bro

Once again, you don't seem to be able to understand "simple" things... Rather than repeating myself "again", I suggest you re-read the posts Plenty of other people on here understand + agree with what I am saying....

And only one thing worse than than brand fanboys and that is post-purchase rationalisation, in case you don't understand that term... it means fanboy of whatever you own at the time, you're welcome.

There is only one person on this forum that doesn't have any preference/loyalty to either brand and that is kaapstad.

What a douche

Look how up himself and arrogant this lil man is, my favorite part is this "you don't seem to be able to understand "simple" things". Yeah alrighty then buddy.

You sir are a true keyboard warrior, I realize now that my mistake was engaging with your posts, and becoming a target for your neurosis..

Take it easy, love Boomstick.

PS your definition of fanboy is wrong, plz see below, see if anything resonates with yourself:

Fanboy

Someone far beyond a simple fan.
No, not the tye of fan which keeps people cool.

An arrogant person who goes into an outburst every time something he likes is questioned. Fanboys usually acuse others of being fanboys. Usually use 1337 and swarm MMORPGs. Fanboys caused a lot of fallouts between people when they started arguing about consoles. If you insult something that a fanboy likes, he will spam your computer up and try to insult something that you like. Most words a fanboy uses are in 1337 or end with 'X0RZ' and they spell the work 'the' as 'teh' because they think that it is 'teh ro><0|2Z!!!'
e.g. Counterstrike is teh rockxorz!

I went wrong by trying to debate with you, as described in this fanboy definition below:

Known for a complete lack of objectivity in relation to their preferred focus. Usually argue with circular logic that they refuse to acknowledge. Arguments or debates with such are usually futile. Every flaw is spun into semi-virtues and everything else, blown to comedic, complimentary proportions.

 

[Nexus18]

What a douche

Look how up himself this lil man is, my favorite part is this "you don't seem to be able to understand "simple" things". Yeah alrighty then buddy.

You sir are a true keyboard warrior, I realize now that my mistake was engaging with your posts, and becoming a target for your neurosis..

Take it easy, love Boomstick.

PS your definition of fanboy is wrong, plz see below, see if anything resonates with yourself:

Fanboy

The truth sure does hurt

Can't come up with a good argument so you have to result to name calling etc. bahahahahaha


PS. Cheers for the laughs boomy, you are one class comedian, you should look into doing it professionally!

 

[Orangey]

Man I haven't seen anyone speak l33t or use x0rz unironically in a long time.

 

[Rroff]

Gamers obviously aren't as affected by poor driver quality as developers are but it speaks volumes of the company without being blinded by marketing.

It sums up well why I've always said Intel's mentality/approach to a product is just completely wrong for them ever to be able to compete in the enthusiast GPU sector - short of sticking to the hardware side of it and hiring someone else to do the software and being completely hands off on the software design.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

 

[Boomstick777]

*SNIP* Irrelevant Comments *SNIP*

You started with the condensing comments aimed at me, so I responded in kind. Fair enough, lets drop that a sec.

I don't understand what your original point was?

If you're calling me a fanboy, how can I be when I use AMD and Nvidia, a fanboy by definition sticks with one particular brand and defends it as if it was a family member.

I guess you could call me a technology fanboy as I like all the latest stuff . I buy what I want without worrying whether it's green or red.

Nvidia are ahead with advertising as you said yourself, also with products (Performance/ Power use etc) and obviously sales. I said AMD need to come out strong with their next line of GPU's and make better products with better advertising to get more sales.. What was your point?

 

[humbug]

IMO Boom is not an Nvidia Fanboy, i think his respect for both is genuine.

But i feel he does have a 'be cruel to be kind' approach to AMD in some sort of 'Willing AMD on' agenda, the way he chooses to do that at times can be a little crass and hit a nerve, including mine.

 

[Boomstick777]

IMO Boom is not an Nvidia Fanboy, i think his respect for both is genuine.

But i feel he does have a 'be cruel to be kind' approach to AMD in some sort of 'Willing AMD on' agenda, the way he chooses to do that at times can be a little crass and hit a nerve, including mine.

Ha you got me there mate

I like AMD, they do make some great products but always seem to stumble at their execution. That frustration may come out in posts sometimes, maybe seen as preference to Nvidia but like you say it's wanting AMD to do better.

I'm always rooting for the underdog though.

 

[Tonester0011]

Bug talk

What's your opinion on me? Green or Red?

 

[Nexus18]

- I have never said you were a fanboy of a particular brand, just a fanboy of whatever you own at said time i.e. whatever you own is the absolute best and nothing comes close, a bit like what rusty said about almighty the other day and how he is when he moves from one brand/gpu to the other, has the 290's = bashes nvidia and his cards can't be beat then moves to 970's = bashes AMD and his cards can't be beat

At least that is how it comes across to me. So others feel free to disagree.

- my point about marketing/advertising has got nothing to do with AMD VS nvidia, my point was "purely" about your wording "good products and good advertising sell well", it isn't as simple as you make out for various reasons (I have already gone over these points so no point repeating them)

 

[Gregster]

Lmao

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What's your opinion on me? Green or Red?

Yellow.

 

[Bonjour]

Beige.