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Comment by piinbinary | Hacker News Reader

It seems that this has a better process (7nm vs. 12nm), more memory (and bandwidth), and more power draw than the RTX cards.

So why does it have equal/lower performance? Is it just that it has fewer transistors (13.2B vs. 18.6B)? (And if so, why doesn't the smaller process allow more transistors?) Or is there also a difference in the architecture where a better design could get more performance out of the same amount of silicon?

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There are so many variables. A few that you didn't mention in your comment is the number of shaders/cores and the core frequency.

However there's one other thing to consider for games. Essentially every big video game has a special profile in the Nvidia drivers that optimizes performance for that specific game. Gaming card reviews almost always use popular AAA games for benchmarking. It's possible and even likely that each was developed with Nvidia cards in mind, in coordination with Nvidia to optimize those drivers.

It depends on the game, many games (especially previous ones) would say POWERED BY NVIDIA or whatnot. Usually specific series get special treatment, Hitman goes AMD but the Witcher goes Nvidia or whatnot. To my knowledge that generally means that A) they're using hairworks or something, and B) they likely got to work with that company for extra optimization.

Then I believe the drivers also optimize games without the developers involvement (But I would assume this isn't as effective as working directly with that company).

But generally certain games "work better" on AMD/Nvidia based on whoever they worked with/built it for, however the majority are "better" on nvidia for various reasons.

There are AAA games optimized for AMD cards too. Like the upcoming Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - there's going to be a joint talk at GDC by Massive's Technical Director and Technology Engineer from AMD about this:

https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/advanced-graphics-techni...

Also don't forget that games are usually first and foremost optimized for consoles, and both PS4 and X1 use an AMD gpu ;-)

In case of Nvidia it also means game will force certain feature known to not work as well on AMD, like for example tesselation in Crysis 2 going down to many triangles per pixel just to make sure AMD cards struggle https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to... , or invisible tesselated water under main geometry https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to... Other times Nvidia will "help" developer drop DirectX feature it doesnt like, like Assasin Creeds removal of DX10.1 after joining Nvidia "meant to be played" program.

Optimizing drivers is one thing. Sabotaging libraries, and then forcing said libraries on developers under the guise of "support"/cross promotion (read Nvidia is paying developer in advance) is another.

'Yields' are what fraction of the chips produced end up usable rather than damaged/broken. With 7nm, yields are down. With larger chips by area, yields are always lower than smaller chips.

So AMD can save money by putting extra memory rather than gpu silicon because the memory costs less than gpu silicon.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-vi...

It seems like NVidia's fixed-function graphics are still superior over AMD's.

From a raw compute perspective, the AMD card performs as well as you'd expect. The phoronix OpenCL benchmarks prove that point. But in gaming, people have been blaming AMD's low allocation of ROP units and poor geometry pipeline.

A lot of it is drivers I bet. NVidia got a lot more money and puts more effort into drivers for sure. AMD pushes Vulkan / DirectX12 for that reason, since the raw hardware is better exposed to the programmer.

(And if so, why doesn't the smaller process allow more transistors?)

Smaller die sizes mean larger yields, which mean bigger margins. I can't read minds, but maybe they have the design dials set with that goal. It's a 7nm version of the Vega64, but with 4 compute units disabled. They're also pushing the clock more aggressively.

https://www.techpowerup.com/251444/amd-radeon-vii-detailed-s...

Or is there also a difference in the architecture where a better design could get more performance out of the same amount of silicon?

Which Nvidia have and AMD don't? Maybe.

Building more transistor = larger die size = very expensive on leading node. And RTX are using more transistors for Ray Tracing, hence the higher transistor count didn't translate to any increase in gaming performance.

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