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Comment by alimbada | Hacker News Reader

FreeSync (open standard), Mantle (open standard), open source drivers. AMD doing all the right things.

G-Sync (closed source software and hardware), crippling PhysX for multi-GPU setups, misrepresenting VRAM (GTX 970 controversy), etc. Stay classy, NVidia.

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AMD is only doing it because they're at the rock bottom. They had no problems trying to push proprietary standards when they had (or thought to have) the market dominance to get away with it – Nvidia's proprietary CUDA was only the response to AMD's (failed) proprietary "Close To Metal" API, there was the failed HydraVision, the TruForm tessellation API, ATi manipulated the Shader Model 2 specification process in their favour to intentionally cripple Nvidia, … and so on.

Of course, that all happened more than two years ago, so nobody remembers any more.

(See also how they're suddenly public darlings for their cheap CPUs… now that their CPU aren't competitive. AMD had no problems charging $1000 or more for FX CPUs back when they could actually beat Intel.)

If you live your life holding grudges for business decisions, you'll miss out on a lot of great stuff. I see no reason to care if they are making good decisions due to market pressure or good will. They are still good decisions.

> If you live your life holding grudges for business decisions, you'll miss out on a lot of great stuff.

If by "great" you mean "same crap with a different label on it", sure.

If by different label you mean open standards and open source, sure. I'd still consider that a win.

Don't forget the drivers that are coded to break if run inside of KVM, Xen or Hyper-V for non-Quadro/Tesla cards

I got bit by this when trying to set up ESXi. The nVidia card refused to work with passthrough. I could have hacked the card ID to one that did support virtualization by soldering resistors but it just wasn't worth it.

Not to mention that Nvidia Gamesworks games deliberately doesn’t play nice with AMD cards. Out the box, Fallout 4 does not run nearly as fast on AMD cards due to trivial graphics effects. Nvidia basically bribes companies to make games run better on their products.

Nice conclusions, have you even had a look at the source for gameworks? I can't find anything that will make it run slow on AMD.

Not to mention that a huge amount of games are using Gameworks PhysX.

Unreal Engine, Unity etc also use PhysX.

Nothing inherent to gameworks, rather when devs implement gameworks nvidia is prone to asking them to turn up features that will hurt AMD and older nvidia cards without any increase in performance. With the fallout 4 example the ray lighting, in other games it's unnecessary tessellation. Nvidia has even asked devs to disable features that don't negatively impact nvidia, but positively impact AMD like async compute.

It's easy for nvidia users to see these practices as okay because they are only hurting other people, but given a new generation of cards these measures will be leveled against them too until they upgrade. Nvidia has no qualms about fucking over their own customers so long as it fucks over amd customers more.

Whats going on with the next graphics API?

I was under the impression Mantle work stopped to fold efforts into Vulkan and MS making DX12 more low level to make sure their lunch is not eaten.

Indeed they've stopped working on Mantle in favour of Vulkan and DX12. However, Mantle seemed to be the trigger or at least a driving force for getting the other vendors to modernise their APIs.

Vulkan is largely "Mantle made an open standard". There's some differences, but supposedly not too many.

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