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What do AMD GPUs do better than Nvidia GPUs?

Wrinkly said:
Point is that you shouldn't limit one's self to OpenCL. With Nvidia you can use both CUDA and OpenCL.
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OpenCL is open source though so the future and it's gaining more traction in academic circles.
 
Cromulent said:
I use Linux on my computers.
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AMD [do] linux drivers better than nvidia, because they build them into the kernel.

Does this matter? It does if you use a rolling distribution like Arch or Opensuse Tumbleweed, and you don't fancy losing all GUI support everytime the kernel ABI changes.
 
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An NV benefits thread would say exactly the same stuff, just how it goes. People's like what they like :)

My perspective.....they both make very pretty pictures and make me happy lol. I just have a red one ;)
 
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.
 
The question isn't what do they do better, it should be what do they do worse. For the vast majority of cases stack for stack the answer is nothing other than RT/DLSS which is important to many. If RT/DLSS is not important then I would say the current AMD cards offer more than Nvidia.

I'm not counting the joke 3080Ti/3090 or 6900XT
 
I have a 6800xt (thanks to OCUK), overclocked it can do above 20k graphics score in Timespy. If you don't need the RTX stuff then AMD have some very nice cards.
 
Cromulent said:
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.
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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.
 
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Vince said:
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.
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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 said:
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.
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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.
 
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Vince said:
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.
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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?
 
Vince said:
90% of replies :) There are plenty of deep learning frameworks that support opencl, matlabs has opencl frameworks, pluggins, wrappers and toolboxes for all kinds of deep learning projects. I guess the real questions OP needs to aks is what kind of ML projects? What are you trying to achieve? Whats the right technology for the job?

You dont buy first and decide later. What you do is outline the work, tools used etc and then buy to fit the kind of projects you want to do. @op opencl is basically the open source equivalent of cuda on NV so is where you would be looking. Mind you if you are serious then 6800xt (approx 1.2tflop fp64) radeon 7 (3.3tflop fp64)... where amd used to smash it with a one architecture does it all is no longer really true really what you want is a radeon 7 (mi50)... a true compute card cut down for the masses.
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Good points, ML is something I've not messed with to be frank, Ironically I did keep my VII as the compute is still up there with the new stuff :D

Wish I had the time to mess with computers like I used to.
 
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