AMD GPUs seems to have an advantage over the equivalent GeForce models in the BF5 alpha

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's great and all, but i don't see how it relates to what I said.  you are talking about ways to fix an issue, I was merely talking about the motive of said issue and the personality of certain people who weight in on such topics.

Well I started with why people complain, I will always also talk about ways to resolve something as well if I can think of them.

 

You want to know why people accuse Nvidia of bad ethics then just look at the history of GameWorks, the tessellation override in AMD drivers exists for a reason. Intentional or not that is why it comes up and won't go away until the perception changes. People will always be very weary of companies with such significant market dominance or control, it's the human condition to fear things with more power than yourself or others, it's generally how/why conspiracy theories exist. One mans irrational fear is another mans rational fear.

 

More on topic I'm not at all worried about GameWorks having undue adverse performance effects on AMD or Nvidia hardware, DICE have a good reputation and I'm sure they will deliver a quality well made game like normal. If a GPU doesn't perform well it'll likely be because it's just not powerful enough and nothing can be done other than turning the quality or resolution settings down.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well I started with why people complain, I will always also talk about ways to resolve something as well if I can think of them.

 

You want to know why people accuse Nvidia of bad ethics then just look at the history of GameWorks, the tessellation override in AMD drivers exists for a reason. Intentional or not that is why it comes up and won't go away until the perception changes. People will always be very weary of companies with such significant market dominance or control, it's the human condition to fear things with more power than yourself or others, it's generally how/why conspiracy theories exist. One mans irrational fear is another mans rational fear.

 

More on topic I'm not at all worried about GameWorks having undue adverse performance effects on AMD or Nvidia hardware, DICE have a good reputation and I'm sure they will deliver a quality well made game like normal. If a GPU doesn't perform well it'll likely because it's just no powerful enough and nothing can be done other than turning the quality or resolution settings down.

I have an AMD card, I have yet to encounter a game that did not work well enough for what I paid.  I have encountered games from certain developers whom I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, however that has nothing to do with the GPU.

[Jito463]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

when was the last time we called ford unethical because their alternator mounting design was not compatible with toyota? I am sure they don't go out of the way to make it incompatible, they just don't put effort into making it compatible.

I would say that it's more akin to Ford sponsoring the development of a street, and that afterwards only Fords drive reasonably well on that street, while all other vehicles struggle to maintain the speed limit.  The interior guts of a vehicle (or video card) mean little to me, it's whether it unreasonably (this being the key word) affects the competition that concerns me.

 

I'm not saying Nvidia has to go out of their way to make their stuff compatible with AMD, but it seems all too often that they do the inverse of that, and go out of their way to make things incompatible with all but their own hardware.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

I have an AMD card, I have yet to encounter a game that did not work well enough for what I paid.

And you probably have the AMD driver development team to thank for that.

Re:

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

the tessellation override in AMD drivers exists for a reason.

I wasn't aware of that, but it definitely makes sense.

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I would say that it's more akin to Ford sponsoring the development of a street, and that afterwards only Fords drive reasonably well on that street, while all other vehicles struggle to maintain the speed limit.  The interior guts of a vehicle (or video card) mean little to me, it's whether it unreasonably (this being the key word) affects the competition that concerns me.

A game is not a street for everyone, it is a single product like a car.

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I'm not saying Nvidia has to go out of their way to make their stuff compatible with AMD, but it seems all too often that they do the inverse of that, and go out of their way to make things incompatible with all but their own hardware.

And that is exactly what i am saying we have no proof of and that it comes down to personal perspective.

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

And you probably have the AMD driver development team to thank for that.

Re:

I wasn't aware of that, but it definitely makes sense.

 

Definitely.  No doubt about that.  Though I wouldn't completely ignore game devs, they aren't exactly going to ignore 30% of their prospective market regardless of what sponsorship they have.

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

A game is not a street for everyone, it is a single product like a car.

You do understand what an analogy is, right?  And if you really want to take this analogy further, one can easily argue that not every street must be driven upon by everyone.  There are many alternate routes to take.

 

On an unrelated note, anyone else getting host errors from CloudFlare?

 

*EDIT*

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

And that is exactly what i am saying we have no proof of and that it comes down to personal perspective.

And that's why I said "it seems like", rather than stating it as fact.

Edited July 7, 2018 by Jito463

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, Jito463 said:

You do understand what an analogy is, right?  And if you really want to take this analogy further, one can easily argue that not every street must be driven upon by everyone.  There are many alternate routes to take.

 

On an unrelated note, anyone else getting host errors from CloudFlare?

 

*EDIT*

And that's why I said "it seems like", rather than stating it as fact.

yes i understand what an analogy is.

[veli2501]

16 hours ago, mr moose said:

your whole post relies on your assumption that nvidia are intentionally evil and that other people can;t be rational about things and form different opinions. 

It also ignores the fact that maybe AMD could work on getting better performance in more than 4x tessellation.

[Zodiark1593]

9 hours ago, Jito463 said:

 

 

On an unrelated note, anyone else getting host errors from CloudFlare?

 

 

Just a DDOS going on. Nothing to see there...

 

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well I started with why people complain, I will always also talk about ways to resolve something as well if I can think of them.

 

You want to know why people accuse Nvidia of bad ethics then just look at the history of GameWorks, the tessellation override in AMD drivers exists for a reason. Intentional or not that is why it comes up and won't go away until the perception changes. People will always be very weary of companies with such significant market dominance or control, it's the human condition to fear things with more power than yourself or others, it's generally how/why conspiracy theories exist. One mans irrational fear is another mans rational fear.

 

More on topic I'm not at all worried about GameWorks having undue adverse performance effects on AMD or Nvidia hardware, DICE have a good reputation and I'm sure they will deliver a quality well made game like normal. If a GPU doesn't perform well it'll likely be because it's just not powerful enough and nothing can be done other than turning the quality or resolution settings down.

If tesselation was at the heart of the issue for AMD cards running Hairworks, wouldn't a dramatic improvement in tessellation performance resolve that? It seems to me that AMD has put a lot of focus on compute performance and extracting the most from it (which DX12 and Vulkan benefit a lot from, especially with Async added in) while neglecting their fixed function portions (like the tesselator) somewhat, while Nvidia has a bit more of a balanced approach here in continuing to improve their fixed function stuff as well as compute.

 

I'm not a gpu architect, so I could just be completely off the mark here...

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

If tesselation was at the heart of the issue for AMD cards running Hairworks, wouldn't a dramatic improvement in tessellation performance resolve that? It seems to me that AMD has put a lot of focus on compute performance and extracting the most from it (which DX12 and Vulkan benefit a lot from, especially with Async added in) while neglecting their fixed function portions (like the tesselator) somewhat, while Nvidia has a bit more of a balanced approach here in continuing to improve their fixed function stuff as well as compute.

 

I'm not a gpu architect, so I could just be completely off the mark here...

Not sure exactly how the GPU handles it on the hardware level but GCN is the current hardware tesselator for AMD. Whats rather interesting is it was actually AMD that pioneered and pushed for tessellation and was a sticking point because early Nvidia GPUs lacked it, AMD (ATI) had it way back in the 8500 called TruForm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_TruForm. Though it wasn't until HD5000 series that it was a fully featured thing with general API support. AMD/ATI managed to convince Microsoft it was such an important thing it was made mandatory in DX11.

 

Nvidia may or may not have a more balanced GPU design but when it comes to their toolset it's definitely not balanced in it's usage, the degree and also where it's used. Some of that can just be put down to early technology that just needs refining.

 

You could almost say AMD shot themselves in the foot when it comes to tessellation, if you want it at least be good at it.

[PrinnyExplodes]

Wait AMD cards do more than just mine crypto now?

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Not sure exactly how the GPU handles it on the hardware level but GCN is the current hardware tessellator for AMD. Whats rather interesting is it was actually AMD that pioneered and pushed for tessellation and was a sticking point because early Nvidia GPUs lacked it, AMD (ATI) had it way back in the 8500 called TruForm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_TruForm. Though it wasn't until HD5000 series that it was a fully featured thing with general API support. AMD/ATI managed to convince Microsoft it was such an important thing it was made mandatory in DX11.

 

Nvidia may or may not have a more balanced GPU design but when it comes to their toolset it's definitely not balanced in it's usage, the degree and also where it's used. Some of that can just be put down to early technology that just need refining.

 

You could almost say AMD shot themselves in the foot when it comes to tessellation, if you want it at least be good at it.

For console use, I would say AMD has a very strong architecture. By providing lots of compute power, and the means to utilize it, the developers have a great deal of flexibility.

 

Tessellation can be really good at providing LoD to preserve performance with otherwise highly detailed structures, and is quite frugal on memory consumption and bandwidth (as the additional polygons are generated on the fly vs a stored mesh in memory), something that Nvidia cards tend to be weaker at than their AMD counterparts. Though from what I've read, usage of effects like Hairworks is so demanding that their (Nvidia cards) performance takes a hit too. I wonder if the shaders (geometry, compute or vertex) are the bottleneck?

 

Modern smartphones have been capable of tesselation for a couple years now as well. Given the tight memory bandwidth in mobile devices, tesselation could do wonders for LoD, or even figure out some way to adjust it to maintain stable performance, if only developers would utilize it.

Edited July 8, 2018 by Zodiark1593
Spelling fail

[D13H4RD]

Been looking at other forums and I'm seeing people angry about this? 

 

I think one guy said the 1060 "should smash the 580" as it apparently did in PUBG, Fortnite and similar titles 

 

I own a 1060 and I've been familiar with the 580 and quite honestly, they trade blows. One doesn't necessarily "smash" the other and when they do perform better, it's not like it's a huge amount minus outliers. Said outliers include Fortnite, where the 1060 apparently had a similar difference delta but in its favor. But looking at PUBG and some others, the difference is smaller to the point where they're almost identical when averaged with one performing slightly better at times 

[Jito463]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

yes i understand what an analogy is.

Re-reading my post, I realize it may have come across as more insulting than I intended at the time.  My apologies for that.  My point was simply that all analogies are ultimately inferior, I was just trying to connect the scenario to the analogy in the best way that I perceived it.

 

I see the game as the street (since multiple people will play the game, just as multiple people would drive on a street), while the video card would be the "vehicle" to traverse the "road".

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Re-reading my post, I realize it may have come across as more insulting than I intended at the time.  My apologies for that.  My point was simply that all analogies are ultimately inferior, I was just trying to connect the scenario to the analogy in the best way that I perceived it.

 

I see the game as the street (since multiple people will play the game, just as multiple people would drive on a street), while the video card would be the "vehicle" to traverse the "road".

Thank you. 

 

I would say in that scenario, everyone gets to use the street, some have a slightly better experience than others.  Which for me is a normal part of competing business. However lets take this to an extreme:  If EA wants to sign a deal with nvidia that essentially  makes the game unacceptable for me as an AMD user, then that is their loss because I won't buy it.  There are plenty of games that run just fine on my 380 without spending money on shit I won't enjoy.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I would say in that scenario, everyone gets to use the street, some have a slightly better experience than others.  Which for me is a normal part of competing business. However lets take this to an extreme:  If EA wants to sign a deal with nvidia that essentially  makes the game unacceptable for me as an AMD user, then that is their loss because I won't buy it.  There are plenty of games that run just fine on my 380 without spending money on shit I won't enjoy.

Which is all well and good except until the majority of games are all made with the tool that make your, and others, experience poor that it directly limits the options you have or forces you to only have a single realistic option when buying a graphics card.

 

There is a limit to freedom of business, as well as freedom of choice. That is and always has been the essence of the issue. More games are starting to use Nvidia tools in their development so that there ends the let Nvidia do what they want is best for them. In my view they either fix their tools to not hamper performance or be forced to, fixing it will not hurt them or their customers.

[Arika]

44 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Which is all well and good except until the majority of games are all made with the tool that make your, and others, experience poor that it directly limits the options you have or forces you to only have a single realistic option when buying a graphics card.

 

There is a limit to freedom of business, as well as freedom of choice. That is and always has been the essence of the issue. More games are starting to use Nvidia tools in their development so that there ends the let Nvidia do what they want is best for them. In my view they either fix their tools to not hamper performance or be forced to, fixing it will not hurt them or their customers.

i think @mr moose 's main point in all this, is why is it up to NVidia to ensure that AMD GPUs are optimized for gameworks? So far everything in this thread has been hearsay that NVidia are intentionally using tools that will lower AMD's performance.

 

In the same vein we should all be mad at Apple for their OS not running on what ever hardware people want. Apple made software that works well on their hardware, sure it CAN work on non Apple hardware, but it's much more difficult and is not a guarantee that it will work correctly, if at all.

 

 

[leadeater]

Just now, Sierra Fox said:

i think @mr moose 's main point in all this, is why is it up to NVidia to ensure that AMD GPUs are optimized for gameworks? So far everything in this thread has been hearsay that NVidia are intentionally using tools that will lower AMD's performance.

 

In the same vein we should all be mad at Apple for their OS not running on what ever hardware people want. Apple made software that works well on their hardware, sure it CAN work on non Apple hardware, but it's much more difficult and is not a guarantee that it will work correctly, if at all.

They don't have to optimize for AMD, there is a difference when talking about optimization in the context of getting the best performance (the normal usage) and making sure your tool doesn't specifically inhibit another, intentional or not.

 

Intentions have nothing to do with needing to fix a problem, Nvidia releasing a tool that unwittingly hurts AMD performance disproportionately still needs fixing and they can be forced to, or at least fully inform people of the impact of using their tool and specifically acknowledge the performance impact on the competitor product. Ask Intel how that goes re: Intel compiler FTC ruling.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Which is all well and good except until the majority of games are all made with the tool that make your, and others, experience poor that it directly limits the options you have or forces you to only have a single realistic option when buying a graphics card.

That is not my experience yet, and given there are many with AMD cards who still buy said games I dare say that experience isn't as bad as many make out (that includes the forecast that people will buy Nvidia because games won't run on AMD).

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

There is a limit to freedom of business, as well as freedom of choice. That is and always has been the essence of the issue. More games are starting to use Nvidia tools in their development so that there ends the let Nvidia do what they want is best for them. In my view they either fix their tools to not hamper performance or be forced to, fixing it will not hurt them or their customers.

That limit is with anti trust and monopolies.  We have neither in this situation.  It's not nvidia's job to fix limitations in other companies products. And until we have proof otherwise that is all it is.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

They don't have to optimize for AMD, there is a difference when talking about optimization in the context of getting the best performance (the normal usage) and making sure your tool doesn't specifically inhibit another, intentional or not.

They don't have to make sure their tools don't hamper the opposition either.  That is not their obligation.

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Intentions have nothing to do with needing to fix a problem, Nvidia releasing a tool that unwittingly hurts AMD performance disproportionately still needs fixing and they can be forced to, or at least fully inform people of the impact of using their tool and specifically acknowledge the performance impact on the competitor product. Ask Intel how that goes re: Intel compiler FTC ruling.

 

The issue here is you are talking about Nvidia needing to fix the problem as if nvidia is the intentional cause of the problem and obligated to fix it accordingly.  Intel intentionally coded the compiler to fuck with AMD processors, that is something they did intentionally, it was not an unintentional side effect of optimizing for their CPU's, but actually gimping AMD. We have noo evidence Nvidia is doing that, its just the perception of a a few people.

[leadeater]

On 7/8/2018 at 4:23 AM, mr moose said:

That limit is with anti trust and monopolies.  We have neither in this situation.  It's not nvidia's job to fix limitations in other companies products. And until we have proof otherwise that is all it is.

It will start to apply if the number of games are made with GameWorks such that it would apply.

 

On 7/8/2018 at 4:23 AM, mr moose said:

The issue here is you are talking about Nvidia needing to fix the problem as if nvidia is the intentional cause of the problem and obligated to fix it accordingly.  Intel intentionally coded the compiler to fuck with AMD processors, that is something they did intentionally, it was not an unintentional side effect of optimizing for their CPU's, but actually gimping AMD. We have noo evidence Nvidia is doing that, its just the perception of a a few people.

Intel's compiler was changed to not do that well before the ruling. The ruling that enforced changes were in regards to Intel misrepresenting their performance, the impact on AMD CPUs and as well as actually saying it was optimized for AMD CPUs. That ruling required Intel to disclose optimizations for their CPUs in their compiler. It was all more around awareness of what was actually going on rather than by that time the Intel compiler not using things like SSE2 for AMD CPUs.

 

Whether a business likes it or not when they get a certain market share they then become obligated to do things they would not otherwise have to do, in the interest of the consumer and market competition. Natural monopolies are a thing but unfortunately for them there is no distinction between natural and unnatural on a lot of things.

 

So in the hypothetical if 90% of PC games were made using Nvidia GameWorks they would be obligated to ensure their tool does not adversely effect performance of AMD GPUs due to the techniques implemented with that tool.

 

Also where does this come from?

On 7/8/2018 at 4:23 AM, mr moose said:

The issue here is you are talking about Nvidia needing to fix the problem as if nvidia is the intentional cause of the problem and obligated to fix it accordingly

 

When

On 7/8/2018 at 2:21 AM, leadeater said:

Intentions have nothing to do with needing to fix a problem, Nvidia releasing a tool that unwittingly hurts AMD performance disproportionately still needs fixing and they can be forced to, or at least fully inform people of the impact of using their tool and specifically acknowledge the performance impact on the competitor product.

 

I don't see how you got intentional from that?

[Arika]

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

they would be obligated to ensure their tool does not adversely effect performance of AMD GPUs due to the techniques implemented with that tool.

You've said this in a lot of your posts. Do you have a link that i can read about it? I'm just struggling to imagine what law or regulation one company is bound under to make sure their competitors products works with their own software just as well as their own product.

[leadeater]

Just now, Sierra Fox said:

You've said this in a lot of your posts. Do you have a link that i can read about it? I'm just struggling to imagine what law or regulation one company is bound under to make sure their competitors products works with their own software just as well as their own product.

I'm not saying just as well, Nvidia GameWorks can indeed have a performance benefit to their GPUs that need not apply to AMD GPUs. The issues comes with degradation of performance not the lack of gaining it compared to the Nvidia product.

 

Edit:

Like the Intel case, they were not forced to optimize the Intel compiler for AMD after the ruling they were forced to state correctly that it was not and clarify the performance claims and how their compiler is optimized for their product.

 

Quote

Intel also has to kick in $10m for a fund to help pay ISVs that want to recompile for rival processors but who were misled by Intel's compilers into believing that AMD Athlon or Opteron chips were inferior to Intel Core and Xeon products. The fund will help cover the cost of recompiling applications on AMD iron. In the future, Intel has to disclose optimizations it has made in the compilers for its own chips and make similar disclosures in its benchmark tests.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/04/ftc_settles_with_intel/

[TOMPPIX]

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimization-notice#opt-en

[mr moose]

28 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It will start to apply if the number of games are made with GameWorks such that it would apply.

 

Intel's compiler was changed to not do that well before the ruling. The ruling that enforced changes were in regards to Intel misrepresenting their performance, the impact on AMD CPUs and as well as actually saying it was optimized for AMD CPUs. That ruling required Intel to disclose optimizations for their CPUs in their compiler. It was all more around awareness of what was actually going on rather than by that time the Intel compiler not using things like SSE2 for AMD CPUs.

 

Whether a business likes it or not when they get a certain market share they then become obligated to do things they would not otherwise have to do, in the interest of the consumer and market competition. Natural monopolies are a thing but unfortunately for them there is no distinction between natural and unnatural on a lot of things.

 

So in the hypothetical if 90% of PC games were made using Nvidia GameWorks they would be obligated to ensure their tool does not adversely effect performance of AMD GPUs due to the techniques implemented with that tool.

But Intel intentionally made their compiler hurt AMD CPU's,  that's the difference between that and this.

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Also where does this come from?

 

When

 

I don't see how you got intentional from that?

Well, when you say this:

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

They don't have to optimize for AMD, there is a difference when talking about optimization in the context of getting the best performance (the normal usage) and making sure your tool doesn't specifically inhibit another, intentional or not.

 

Intentions have nothing to do with needing to fix a problem, Nvidia releasing a tool that unwittingly hurts AMD performance disproportionately still needs fixing and they can be forced to, or at least fully inform people of the impact of using their tool and specifically acknowledge the performance impact on the competitor product. Ask Intel how that goes re: Intel compiler FTC ruling.

What you are saying is that they, A. should fix it.  (not their job) and B. should inform people the effects it has on hardware they have no control over.    In order for them to be forced to do either relies on the concept that they are doing it intentionally and that they have some legal obligation to do so.  As far as I am aware that is not the case

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The issues comes with degradation of performance not the lack of gaining it compared to the Nvidia product.

Which is only an issue if it is intentional.

EDIT: the only other way this could be an issue is if gameworks somehow corned the entire market in games (creating a monopoly) that could not be avoided by any corporate game developer.  I think you can see just how far from that we are with this.

 

[leadeater]

Just now, mr moose said:

But Intel intentionally made their compiler hurt AMD CPU's,  that's the difference between that and this.

More correctly they did not make the compiler hurt performance they just did not utilize the more advanced instruction sets in the CPUs and did not disclose this fact when doing performance comparisons between Intel and AMD CPUs with software compiled with the Intel compiler.

 

Just now, mr moose said:

Which is only an issue if it is intentional.

Sort of

 

http://download.intel.com/pressroom/legal/ftc/FTC_Final_Executed_Agreement.pdf

 

Nvidia would be able to avoid being obligated to fix it if they were in this situation only by successfully showing that it was a product defect. So sure they could admit it's a defect with the product and no fix it, with all the company image that brings along with it. But at least they will have admitted that GameWorks is a defective product .

[Arika]

24 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The issues comes with degradation of performance not the lack of gaining it compared to the Nvidia product.

But you keep saying they are "obligated" to improve how it runs on the competitions hardware. it's an optional setting, it doesn't have to be turned on, with it off, the games run as intended. the fact of the matter is that Gameworks is an NVidia proprietary software, they made it to run on GeForce cards.

 

If it was intentional, sure that's fucked up, but WHY are they obligated to fix optimization issues on a competitor's product that is ultimately an optional setting? what is that that you're effective quoting stating that they have to make sure it doesn't hamper the competition unintentionally?