AMD's Answer to GameWorks: Open Source Tools, Graphics FX, Libraries and SDKs
wccftech.com
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Brand loyalty is useless, because brands don't care about consumers.
It may only be their weak market share that inspires their generosity, but it's hooked me and certainly has me rooting for their continued existence.
I can only hope that Vulkan will change the game a little bit, so shader hacking won't affect perceived performance that much.
Two years ago I was working on a large GL project, and basically the only workable drivers were either intel, or nvidia. With nvidia being far better off pretty much anything, from driver quality to debugging tools.
I'm using an HD4400 on my primary laptop, mostly to have a low-end system for performance tuning. While everybody says that intel should be one of the best supported OSS drivers (if not the only), the i915 driver constantly breaks with a million of little issues which are fixed in one release of the driver and broken again on the next. In the end, all these issues pop up in the wild, where I cannot even restrict users to a single driver version (because many times issues are chipset-specific).
Despite whatever I read here, over and over again, the nvidia driver has always been rock-solid for me, with intel being at least on par, and AMD being not even remotely comparable.
I had generally harder times with intel even, due to unpredictable gpu stalls. Even when it comes to power management, the latest i915 driver fails to come back from suspend.
I really want to switch to something higher quality and OSS, so I'm hoping AMD steps up the game.
I do not need another half-assed driver like i915.
That said, the ghost of ATI still haunts AMD. To buy from them next time I'll have to get a great price or they'll have to be way ahead of Nvidia which they were in 09 with the 5870.
But I do care about general performance and driver quality, especially as a developer. I love the fact that i915 is always the first to get support for the latest kernel features, it's probably going to have the first usable vulcan driver, YET every time I find dozes of minor (and not so minor) regressions, to the point that I'm simply tired.
The catalyst drivers were _never_ an option on linux. When it comes to development I cannot afford the system to fail on me twenty times a day just because I'm playing around.
I miss the days of mach64. I hope AMD delivers.
Are there no automated unit tests for the Intel driver?
I can also confirm the GPU stalling on Intel.
Even though other chips perform ok in the benchmarks and some AAA games, when it comes to less popular 3D apps/games or writing own graphics code NVIDIA just eats its competition for breakfast. We sometimes get better GL performance out of a 2 year old Tegra4 than out of everything that the competition offers today. And this is entirely down to drivers, not because the Tegra4 is such an advanced chip. Not even talking about the K1 or X1 here which are different levels entirely.
Edit: inserted a "not"
This generation the Fury and Fury X aren't quite as good as the 980 Ti (turns out Maxwell is really good) but aren't bad either.
I like AMD, but CUDA >>> OpenCL, so for any scientific computing Nvidia is the way to go. For gaming the 970, 980, and 980 Ti are too good this time around. AMD isn't far behind however, and next generation could easily flip things around.
Benchmarks are useless for most things because they are always fabricated or don't refer to real world scenarios. For example, Firefox JS engine is always very fast in benchmarks, but in the real world we know how it goes. Same with everything.
So the only thing that matters is your opinion.
People always assume only Gamer care about recent hardware.
> And it's probably motivated by a desire to generate lock-in for their hardware.* Open source game and rendering middleware, tools and most of it is for Direct3D11/12, but some things is OpenCL / OpenGL. None of it can be AMD-only because it's all based around standard APIs. Techs that Nvidia provide with GameWorks only support hardware acceleration on top of CUDA which is proprietary.
* HSA-related stuff include compiler from CUDA. I'm not expert in this area, but HSA is also not just AMD-only thing and there is several companies backing it.
* Linux graphics stack. It's of course AMD-only, but AMD announced that they'll open source their OpenCL and Vulkan implementation so other vendors may benefit of it.
So no. They don't release things that can only be used with AMD GPUs or anything like that. What more important anyone can take MIT licensed code and turn it into the proprietary product, etc.
Also as far as I understand the default licensing option for most of Nvidia middleware don't contain source code at all.
I think they're both great graphics cards, but NVidia tries its best to stifle competition.
If the trend continues of Intel adopting AMD's open standard / libre alternatives to NV's tech, I'm not sure how NV can seriously stand against AMD + Intel using the same solutions. Intel IGPs are only going to get better and better and be more relevant over time, Broadwell Iris Pro was already impressive and Kabylake intends to take that to the next level.
AMD is Commodore of this decade.
Though I only heard good things about Nvidia OpenGL developers support and as far as I know they do support even devs who isn't part of "Meant to be Played" thingy. So I suppose many studios that don't even use Nvidia-only features prefer their middleware because of support.
Sadly AMD is opposite and developers support for OpenGL just not exist. E.g you can send them emails, tickets and there won't be answer for months.
NVIDIA isn't exactly losing this race ... why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?
Also, maybe if you are a major studio who will with certainty release your game within 18 months, perhaps you should. But if you invest heavily and lock yourself to a specific SDK of a single vendor, you better hope the SDK survives and remains relevant.
The 22nm process node they wanted to use was cancelled, and now they're basically working to push it their 14nm products instead. Kind of such (edit:sux) for them to be fabless.
The Zen design would have been complete or nearly so by the time he left, but it looks like they're already slipping on their original time frame.
I'm looking forward to what they do, but it's not without some bumps in the road yet.
Shouldn't have sold their fabs, then.
AMD just stopped being competitive too quickly to gain a proper foothold.
Yeah because developers have unlimited access to all sorts of GPU/CPU combos that the customers have...
> why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?
Because only Nvidia users benefit of it, which manages barely 55% of the PC market share – everything else is dominated by AMD or Intel (or, in the case of handhelds, various other companies).
Because AMD has been putting out great cards the past few months, completely revamped their their driver software. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been doing not much of anything. The latest reports have shown AMD regaining market share in discrete CPU's and this trend will most likely continue. AMD has ZEN coming out next year, and they will probably be profitable again by the end of 2016. AMD isn't going anywhere anytime soon.