What do AMD GPUs do better than Nvidia GPUs?

[Cromulent]

I'm curious, really. Are there any tasks that AMD GPUs really help with when compared to an Nvidia GPU? I'm thinking of getting the 6900XT and was wondering if there was anything that would help me make the decision? I use Linux on my computers.

 

[Cromulent]

What are you wanting/Planing to do would be my first question. If you require anything that needs Cuda you are going to have to go NV.

The AMD cards are literally plug n play on any distro due to their OSS drivers. Also every kernel update don't break the NV driver thus have no GUI on reboot. (OK not every update but an awful lot of them)

KDE/Gnome ect have less issues like tearing and other glitches with AMD.

Wayland is also far better supported on AMD than NV at the moment.

I will say though that a rolling distro is better for AMD in general.

Also it's a waist of time asking @LtMatt as he's as clueless with Linux as I with Windows

I want to do machine learning along with gaming on the system. It is my understanding that OpenCL is the open specification to use instead of relying on CUDA.

 

[Cromulent]

Thank you all for the information.

I didn't realise there was such a drop in computing power with the newer GPU architecture. I have quite a healthy budget for this computer, so I could look at some of the professional cards if needed. My only concern with that would be gaming performance on the weekend or when not working.

 

[Cromulent]

Its fairly significant for example here is throughput on Radeon Pro VII:



And the same stats for W6800 (pro version of Navi 6800)



and for reference an MI100 - CDNA based Arcturus



So yes AMD's navi is fast for gaming but from a compute standpoint... not so much. Most sort of proper number crunching is double precision.

So pro VII on its 1:2 divider (normal 7 is 1:4) is still much faster at fp64 than the best Navi but doesn't get close to MI100. For some perspective radeon 7 has 6 times the fp64 throughput of a 2080ti. In say scientific double workloads that does this:



But you know... nowdays you either have a gaming card or a compute card not both but this is the reason I still run my 7. AMD have done exactly what NV did to improve gaming performance and that was cut out all the silicon reserved for compute out of GCN when designing NAVI which means more room for that sweet, sweet gaming performance.

I'm not saying AMD > NV but what I am saying is that you can pick the right card for your workload.

Thank you for the useful information. I may have to do rent a dedicated GPU instance from a cloud provider in the short term. My main desktop is completely broken but I don't want to buy a computer now as we are mid-cycle and I want a Zen 3 Threadripper / Threadripper Pro.

On a side note I wish companies would make it easier to research their products. I know they want you to buy from them but more detailed information would go a long way (at least for me) in terms of trust.

 

[Cromulent]

That's exactly what I'm upgrading to now, I'm going from the 1950x to the 3960x, I wanted to wait until the new TR but it looks like now is the time so for me the 3960x is probably the sweet spot. My rig will be 3960x, 64gb 3466 (8x8), 6800xt and the second rig which I use for some opencl workloads is the wifes rig with the 7 in it which I used to have in mine, thats a ryzen 5 3600x, 16gb 3200, Radon VII.

Day 1 I noticed the bandwidth difference between the cards, it is getting better with drivers (I think they are improving that infinity cache) but there is only so much a 256bit bus can do. When you compare bandwidth the 7 has double the bandwidth (at stock, overclocked the VII would pull ahead even more) than a 6800xt has, when the card is under load (read being absolutely hammered) that extra bandwidth on the 7 makes for a still silky smooth desktop experience whereas the same cannot be said for the 6800xt under the exact same load. The 7 might be the very last all round card we see in a long time, its the only gaming card I know of that can even use the pro drivers, after all it is for all intents and purposes an Instinct MI50.

Agree with you on the research point. Not many people really cared that VII was a compute monster because 99% of people just wanted a gaming card, that's what AMD were touting it as until they said it was for content creation and started allowing the use of pro drivers, although they did disable a few features to differentiate it from the pro VII which is identical silicon with 1:2 divider on pf64 rather than 1:2.

Thank you again.

So I guess the choice (if I'm sticking to consumer cards) is the 6900XT and the 3090. Is crossfire even still a thing on the AMD side? I know the 3090 is the only consumer card in the current range to support SLI. Plus having access to both CUDA and OpenCL would have its pros even if most of the work I would do would be in OpenCL. I just really want to get away from the Nvidia driver situation on Linux which is why I like the idea of an AMD card. Maybe a professional level AMD card would be the way to go?