"Nvidia, stop being a DICK"
quad damage
Interesting video - "Nvidia, stop being a DICK"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M&time_continue=460
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M&time_continue=460 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M&time_continue=460
Replies
Also there's a lot of assumptions that Nvidia is pressuring developers to only optimize for Nvidia and to intentionally gimp AMD performance, which there has never been any evidence for. What makes more sense, is that the performance gap might be from developer incompetence/constraints or they developed the game on Nvidia hardware first.
Ideally, I'd like to see Nvidia release their for AMD and other developers to use after a timed period of exclusivity. AMD has the play the underdog, the victim, that everything they are doing is for the consumer, it's the only way they can try to get ahead.
ATI/AMD are somewhat competitive as they compete on a price / performance basis, but they never seem to have a model that ever competes with Nvidia's top end set, they're constantly stuck in catch-up.
The response on this forum is going to be a lot different than on some random gaming forum, because many of us work in the industry, or have gone to GDC.
Nvidia spends a lot of time and money on R&D, and really have no incentive to open source a lot of this stuff. Many of the technologies used in gameworks started as papers other people or even Nvidia themselves presented at a Siggraph many years ago that was put in an easy package for developers make use of. They are basically trying to find ways to have developers use new tech so people will buy newer more powerful video cards.
Their drivers tend to be more stable and when they aren't, fixes come relatively quickly.
They provide many tools and support to the development community, and in many cases make a lot of cool shit possible. ATI used to do the same sort of stuff, after AMD bought them up not so much, tressfx is the only thing I can really think of.
While one might say having these technologies optimized for AMD and Nvidia would be a good thing for the gaming community, you might have them either not developed at all, or it would fall to middleware companies to innovate and then smaller games would not be able to implement said tech due to cost.
When AMD actually does R&D on some new tech, and not just recreate all the tech in gameworks, then maybe they can have a talk about opening up APIs.
But I do agree on drivers, what takes Nvidia a day or week to update/fix, it takes AMD a week to a month.
And developers can be slow to implement new tech, Remember me (2013) on last gen consoles had capsule for ambient/reflection occlusion, and some advanced reflection/cube features, tech that aren't even implemented into Unreal Engine 4 by the end of 2015. There's still next gen games that are coming out without proper PBR.
@ZacD I forgot about Mantle and I suppose that's a big one, freesync not so much.
If they made their tech easy for devs to implement and/or made good tools for them, maybe something like TressFX would be in more than one game so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqCGaSw5Bes
And to Nvidia's credit, last I checked they've been much more helpful to the open-source driver community since.
The whole premise of this video is asinine and childish. nVidia is mean... because they support developers... and help to make their drivers work better with the dev's software/games? What should nVidia do, purposely cripple their hardware or stop giving support so it isn't so hard for AMD to compete?
If NVIDIA's doing something that's hurting their competition, well, that's just too bad. Welcome to free enterprise. That's the risk of running a corporation. This isn't some camp sitting by a fire, singing kumbaya--it's competitive business.
And AMD opening up their products as open-source doesn't make them some sort of brilliant savior for the future of technology--they're reacting out of little choice but to open up their products. They can't beat NVIDIA, so they go for the next appeal: Of being for the "open" community, and hoping big names adopt their products without barriers.
What AMD does isn't necessarily what NVIDIA *should* be doing. Is this open way working for AMD? Are they on top any more today than a decade ago? No offense to AMD--I like their being competition for NVIDIA. But just looking at NVIDIA, I say, Hey, their business model's working, right? More times than not, gamers, game developers, and graphics artists alike choose NVIDIA in our graphics-related industry, right?
NVIDIA's doing just what a company's expected to do: Make money and ensure the future of the company. They're not out to determine social values, entertain ideals over development philosophy, or abide by one's arbitrary opinion over ethics. They're there to thrive as a company and provide services that their competition can't.
I think if NVIDIA had been going all "open-source" with their biggest products, we'd never see the level of consistency and quality we've come to expect from NVIDIA's top-of-the-line products. The reason NVIDIA's ahead of AMD is because they've secured the kind of partnership among other companies and quality in the graphics industry which no one matches.
If AMD struggles to match it, then that's not NVIDIA's problem, really. Neither is it truly the problem of average consumer, either, since the average consumer isn't the one constantly trying to keep with the bleeding-edge of NVIDIA's products like the niche enthusiasts are. It's the enthusiasts like this YouTuber who are the ones who spend the most money, at a more frequent rate, so naturally, it makes sense for NVIDIA to target them with higher prices for their bigger products--it's the cost of chasing the bleeding-edge.
NVIDIA has a wide range of products, from affordable to cutting-edge. To simply change their whole successful business approach, just to please some guy trying to save money on this endless pursuit of better graphics isn't a wise one, on NVIDIA's part.
Not that it's even apt for every product to go open-source. Yes, some things benefit from it. Some things don't. Sometimes quality's better found closed-source. You think NVIDIA's Shadowplay feature which this YouTuber raves over would've been achieved through open-sourced means? Not a chance. It came from focused, full-time, unified, dedicated development and tons of in-house testing and quality control which only closed-source development affords.
Open-source has its perks, but often times, you get something like Blender: Too many cooks in the kitchen, no real game plan, ad-hoc contributions with no real standardization, too many ideas and not enough leadership, and trying to master so many aspects that it never truly masters any of one.
Now, even Blender's a great idea in concept, and a useful tool for various purposes, but in execution, it could stand to benefit from some behind-closed-doors development. I think Blender's a prime example why open-source isn't always some dream ideal for technology. It's useful, it's inspiring, it's good for the poorer folks, but it's not leading the big industry any time soon. Similar could be said of AMD.
Since NVIDIA hasn't struggled with selling their cutting-edge products (though, funny enough, they've struggled more in selling their mobile chips, because mobile gaming so largely ignores big horsepower), they have little need to change what's working best for them. If you were a major business, chances are, you'd keep doing what works for you, too.
If it could be proven nvidia sabotages a games performance on AMD cards that'd be a good reason for buying AMD. Unless you don't care about supporting shitty business practices. But that tessellation stuff doesn't seem deeply malicious, merely petty if done solely to hurt AMD performance. But that seems unlikely given more reasonable explanations.
Crytek released Crysis 2. Gamers complained it wasn't as straining on systems as Crysis 1. The small Crytek team left to do the DX11 build had to implement something quickly that brought most computers to their knees, but still ran well on high end systems. They implemented tessellation that may or may not have being provided by Nvidia. Crytek computers probably had Nvidia GPUs, it worked well enough on their rigs, so they shipped it.
Obviously they didn't spend much time on the DX11 build of the game, because it looked like most of the displacement maps were just generated from a program like crazy bump. The AMD fanboy conspiracy theory is that Nvidia wanted their cards to run Crysis 2 DX11 benchmarks better so more people bought Nvidia cards. So Nvidia bribed Crytek to use levels of tessellation that would gimp only AMD cards.
AMD's decision to opensource a lot of their tech is admirable but it also makes business sense for a company that has low market share and can't offer the same quality of direct support for their products as Nvidia. AMD and Nvidia are both publicly traded companies with shareholders, the notion that either of them are doing anything motivated by some sort of gamer altruism strikes me as incredibly naive.
While we're at it we may as well make Nvidia release all of their patents. Patents are inherently a legally granted monopoly, just as bad if not worse than closed source development. Imagine how competitive AMD cards would be if they could just reproduce everything Nvidia did with none of the cost associated with developing or supporting it!
And there exists a strong trend to embrace open-source(Dot Net and UE4 being the two biggest examples relevant to the forum, besides possibly Android).
I get the merits of a closed and carefully currated system, but opening a system has it's own set of merits.
Yes, you have access to source code.
No, you can't redistribute it or use it as you wish.
No, it's not free to use — royalty or upfront payment needed if you sell your product.
https://www.unrealengine.com/eula
https://www.unrealengine.com/faq
That's also a pretty ridiculous claim if you remember cases where ATI hardware has been 'superior' (for a certain purpose — claiming something to be superior is kinda vague) to nvidia's, like in the early days of crossfire/SLI, or the modern "crossfire" cards with two chips on the one PCB like the 3870x2. What nvidia hardware was superior to that exactly? And I'm not looking to debate minor technical details or argue what was better at x and y, I'm just saying nvidia had no comparable hardware. The 3870x2 was a clear hardware win for ATI; I'm sure there are other examples.
And it's already been like that since the day of Quadro things. (Which is nowadays not that important for 3d content creation anymore).
So other than focusing on consumers, making Technology open-sourced. One other thing AMD should do is to have a tech for us, content creator too.
Thinking about it, the idea that anything is developed specifically for a certain brand is discouraging, that just seems anti-consumer from the beginning. Competition and choice are good for us consumers; I wouldn't want my options limited to X because it's the only thing capable of doing Y.
Like I said before in one of my earlier posts, AMD competes in terms of price and performance, not only in GPUs, but also CPUs. The top-end cards are the sole domain of Nvidia, and this is why developer workstations are almost exclusively running on Nvidia hardware (ergo, the discussion in this thread). Unfortunately for AMD, they are now also now starting to lose the mid-tier market to Nvidia, and have also completely lost the low-end market to Intel.
in the low or lower middle class, AMD is far more cost effective, their integrated CPU/GPU solutions are also far better,
thats seems kinda their market, not sure if they try so hard getting high end GPUs out.
Also not to be an ass but you can't say "never" and then add a time limit. It's either never or 'hasn't in...'. But good point, the 3870x2 was 8 years ago. It's a shame one company has dominated the top-tier for that long.
Regarding the info in my previous post and the points I was making with those benchmarks:
1) The R9 Fury X is outperformed by Nvidia's GTX780 Ti - the latter was released in 2013 where the former was released in 2015. I was pointing out that according to those benchmarks, AMDs current best offering is comparable to what Nvidia brought to the table over two years ago.
2) Nvidia's current high end offering is of course not the GTX780 Ti, it is the GTX980 Ti, which obliterated the R9 Fury X in these benchmarks. Whilst the 980 Ti is not actually close to the top end of the benchmark table (which is Nvidia all the way up) it is the best performing consumer orientated card. The R9 Fury X is AMD's top performing card, so I really don't think it's 'hyperbolic' to say nothing comes close when the differences in those scores was so drastic.
3) For price / performance the R9 Fury X is a fairly poor choice versus the GTX970, which is both cheaper and much better. It does not appear in the comparison image because Passmark only allows me to compare three cards at once.
You obviously know nothing about open source, I give you a short list of opensource programs and gems that define a standard:
OpenGL, Linux, bullet physics, Android, Firefox, Chrome, Libre Office, LSCM (most used unwrap tech), Ptex, opensubD, Allembic, Flac, etc etc
As you can see opensource doesn't mean fail idea of business, most of the time thanks to opensource code you can actually play with cool features in your expensive softwares.
cheers.
And, if I'm not mistaken, they will consider community pull requests when appropriate.
Either way, like @Shrike said, Nvidia doesn't need to make anything community developed, and open-source(see, Chrome, Red Hat, UE4, Android) is not the same thing as community developed FOSS(Chromium, CentOS, OGRE, CyanogenMod).
Opening up software/systems/process can make the difference between being a leader people want to follow vs a leader people have to follow. Epic has made that transition IMO, and it would be great more places, like Nvidia, would do the same.
Restricting game works to Nvidia gpu's slows adoption of the technologies and creates bitterness in the PC gaming community. Nvidia is slowly starting to allow certain game works tech to run on AMD hardware. I hope they continue, it would be nice for PC devs to feel confident in using Nvidia software technology without having to worry about alienating a small portion of the market.
You can read all about it here if you're interested. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.html