Hacker News Reader

All that bothers me certainly but I have two further concerns based on the types of games I play. The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet. The second is Virtual Reality, AMD has lagged in the technology of VR and doing things smarter with support for foveated rendering and multiple pass optimisation are really important for getting hard to run games playable.

Raw performance looks fine, its all the lack of news on the features and zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games that get benchmarked and they need to run well too. Not to mention all the bugs, if I buy an AMD card I can guarantee based on history something weird will happen for the life of the card, it always has for the past 20+ years, I haven't yet had a clean experience with an ATI/AMD card and I have owned a bunch of them.

What I really need AMD to say and do is acknowledge how important a good customer experience is with their driver stack, how every game and API matter, that they understand that customer experience is reality and are now committing it to history for good. Then they can sell me a high priced card, until they do well its got to be a lot cheaper to be worth the risk.

>The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers

Try that under Linux sometime. It's a different song there thanks to Mesa.

>opengl

Is not the most popular API, and AMD had, until recently, limited economic resources, which they mostly directed towards their CPU team and towards hardware. For their proprietary windows efforts, they needed laser focus on what's most important: The newest and most popular APIs.

There's money these days, and they multiplied the size of their driver team, but money spent on OpenGL would be indeed wasted, as there's a pretty compelling solution for this API from the Mesa guys, in the form of an opengl implementation that's on top of Vulkan: Zink.

I expect future GPUs and drivers (for all platforms) to absolutely not bother with opengl and simply ship Zink instead.

Microsoft will ship GLon12, which is being developed as a part of Mesa.

Wow, how did I miss this news‽

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...

I understand that Mesa (with the Zink OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation) can be compiled for Windows. If you care that much, maybe give it a shot.

I'm sorry but OpenGL is dead on Windows. There are exceedingly few apps written against OpenGL and if you write such an app then don't be surprised with the result. Vulkan is the portable solution of course.

Really? I think the professional 3d software community would be surprised to hear this. Huge software suites with decades of opengl development.

Many of them have added DirectX backends in the mean time, and they will eventually had to either rewrite or contend to use OpenGL on DirectX 12 work Microsoft is doing.

The old ICD interfaces that OpenGL drivers rely on, might not be around forever, and so far Windows doesn't support them in sandboxed processes.

> The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet.

I'm really not finding anything that supports this claim, can you substantiate it? I see scattered sub-60fps reports in Minecraft for both Nvidia & AMD. It seems to just be a "minecraft's engine is shit" thing, not an AMD thing?

But I'm not seeing any actual comparisons or head-to-heads or anything showing AMD in particular is struggling with Minecraft in particular. This unknown quality benchmark is the only thing I'm finding for Minecraft: https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-57... and it's definitely not struggling to hit 500 fps numbers at 1080p, either.

And other OpenGL games & apps are not showing any severe AMD issues, although the only significant sample of those are on Linux so that also has a different OS, so there certainly doesn't appear to be anything systemically wrong with AMD's OpenGL as you're claiming. Unless for some reason they just never brought over the way better Linux OpenGL driver to Windows, which would be highly unexpected & definitely something that needs evidence to support.

> zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games

This is just completely false and seems to just be because your pet peeve is Minecraft in particular? Both Nvidia & AMD discuss popular games not just the latest AAA games. Usually in their latency section, since that's where it comes up as more relevant (esports games), but it's definitely not an ignored category entirely.

The significantly better Linux OpenGL drivers are from Mesa, not AMD.

No. Mesa's "drivers" are either a software fallback or support infrastructure for some open-source drivers.

When you're using AMD or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which are way faster, then you're not using anything interesting from Mesa.

EDIT: Also Mesa's open source Radeon driver came from AMD.

In the case of AMD, the open-source driver comes from AMD itself. The proprietary driver replaces Mesa, but builds on top of the same kernel portion.

> When you're using AMD [...] proprietary drivers, which are way faster

Haha, no.

Guess who maintains RadeonSI in Mesa — it's all @amd.com people :)

(Which is not the case for RADV, the Vulkan implementation)

Yea, I get 60fps @1440p on an 8 year old AMD GPU, no issues. I haven't checked the actual frame rate, but I've not noticed any dropped frames.

I'm not really worried about Windows OpenGL performance, even the new Minecraft edition (which performs enormously better all around) uses DirectX. Browsers use ANGLE to convert GL to DirectX for a reason, it's a crap API all around on Windows (not that it had to be but that's how it is).

The driver bugs are what I'm most worried about though. I remember when I got a 4670 in 2008 there was a cursor corruption bug (google it, it's common) and if you didn't shake the mouse enough for it to fix itself it'd crash. Then I built a new PC with a 5770 and I still had it. Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. Then 2x280X and still had it. It even occurred on Linux once. Then I went Nvidia for a few generations and it seems AMD finally fixed it. It seems fixed now (maybe because of new hardware) based on internet searches but from 2008-2015 the bug was there. And this is just one example of things.

Not that Nvidia drivers have ever been perfect but I never ran into this kind of shit so often for so long on their cards. Hopefully I don't end up regretting the 6900 XT because of it.

>Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it.

This cursor corruption bug was ridiculous. I ended up not playing some games (I think Dota) because I would get this bug. I went with an Nvidia card as my next one because of that as well.

It's interesting how something that seems relatively minor could have such an impact on purchasing decisions.

Is that an actual bug? Sounds like potentially a VRAM thermal issue.

This used to be a pretty common bug, I think. The cursor is often drawn using a special "hardware mouse cursor" feature specifically designed to make a tiny bitmap move around the screen as efficiently as possible. It'd be easy for a driver to mess that up and cause the cursor -- and ONLY the cursor -- to look garbled.

You can see problems today like the mouse cursor not respecting Windows 10's night-shift color filter for the same reason.

Cool, I never heard of that hardware mouse cursor feature! Makes sense to optimize that though as people will usually be updating the mouse position frequently

On a thread yesterday I said that Windows' settings and lack of native keyboard remapping (without registry editing) were the most ridiculous things about it.

This pointer not respecting night-shift hits the trifecta hat trick. There's a registry fix, of course, but the first time I saw it, I thought "huh, that's weird". How did this get out without somebody on the release train thinking to themselves the exact same thing?

Obviously with the range of settings and mods out there I'm not sure of everyone's Minecraft experience on AMD.

But my simple 3400G based rig using the integrated Vega11 plays stock minecraft just fine @ 1440p and 20 chunk viewing distance with everything else set to max.

> Driver Stability

Ironically, the exact opposite is the reason I use AMD on Linux. It "just works" without installing anything and everything is super stable, while Nvidia is a huge proprietary mess.

I replaced an NVidia 1060 with a 5700XT and also feel it’s been a major improvement on Linux. Ubuntu mostly handles the NVidia driver installation and upgrades, but only mostly. Having the card supported in the kernel is excellent.

That, and Proton in Steam have made it possible to play some old favorite games as well as new titles with impressive performance.

I will say that real-time ray tracing has me at least considering one of those new cards...

My big thing was that the AMD drivers support all of the Linux kernel graphics features. Things like DRM (direct rendering manager) and KMS. One of the neat things about the former is allowing interprocess graphics buffer sharing. One example of where they're super useful is in all of the browsers that run their rendering process separate of their window process. Chrome and Firefox for example. You can just send a handle to the graphics buffer across a unix socket rather than having to use something like Angle (Chrome) and actually send the graphics commands across some IPC mechanism.

this is also one of the mechanisms that Wayland is built on top of.

Am I the only one who notices a clear difference between DLSS 2 and native image? I get that "native" is also flawed due to TAA, but DLSS still has some work to do with regards to image clarity imho.

I can see the visual downgrade.

IMO, VRS (variable rate shading), which is in all major GPU providers (NVidia, AMD, and even Intel iGPUs / Xe), provides the "upscaling-ish" performance gains that we want for the next generation.

Its much harder to see the difference between native and VRS.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading...

-----

Its not a "competitive" feature, because everyone is doing it. But it basically accomplishes the same thing: carefully upscaling results (2x2 instead of 1x1) in locations where the gamer probably won't notice.

What I had been wondering about was "what if you place DLSS like technology into the screen itself?

DLSS 2.0 requires motion vectors as an input to re-project the previous frame, so an equivalent of that at least can't be implemented in the display.

DLSS is also a rather heavy computation, taking 1-2 ms per frame on high end GPUs. That's a serious amount of processing power to put into a display and doing so makes it exclusive for that use. On the GPU those tensor cores can be used for other tasks when they're not doing DLSS.

You need to add Nvidias supercomputer to the screen too then.

Well of course you'll notice, but do you notice it more than if you need to drop off to non-native resolution because your card keeps dropping under screen FPS?

Because that's where the difference gets important. If I compare to my PS4 Pro, many games "look" better because they drive the UI at full native resolution while using checkerboard rendering to keep the framerate up. The same game on my 970GTX will chug, drop frames or have all the text and UI look blurry because I need to drop the resolution.

If DLSS 2.0 fixes this issue, it's a massive improvement.

DLSS 2.0 is "just" an upscaler. There's a ton of techniques to upscaling, and a lot are way better than a shitty bilinear filter. Temporal upscaling, for example, is also a thing, and is very good ( https://youtu.be/A2A-rhCQCuY?t=605 ). Upscaling in general has been a huge area of technique improvements & innovations thanks to the xbox one & PS4 struggling so hard with 4k desires.

DLSS 2.0 is a great addition to that field, but it's far from being the only good option here. AMD has also done some things in this area, too, like Radeon Boost which was the idea of dynamically reducing resolution in response to player inputs, with the idea being if you're sitting still-ish you're OK sacrificing FPS for better quality, but as soon as you start whipping about you want the FPS more. Game engines also do similar things, and combined with temporal upscaling & antialiasing are quite compelling.

It is one of those technologies that is very well hidden in effect behind Youtube's compression. Given how aggressive compression is on Youtube the gap in what it looks like in front of you verses on the tube has widened quite a bit. DLSS seems to be indistinguishable on Youtube but in front of you on a monitor it clearly introduces some odd artifacts and is not native looking. The gain in performance is usually worth it but its definitely not just magic free performance with no impact on image quality.

For me personally, in Control, 720p upscaled with DLSS to 1080p looks better than native 1080p presentation. I say that with a hand on my heart, the DLSS image is cleaner, the lines are sharper, and the texture filtering is just vastly superior. I have no idea how they are doing it, because it seems to be pure black magic, the traditional logic of "upscaled can never look as good as native" has been completely thrown out of the window. It doesn't look as good - it looks better in my opinion.

The magic essentially works because they're feeding lots of hidden information in for the upscale - the 1080p is being constructed from a bunch of 720p frames + depth/motion vectors, etc. So it's natural that it is able to look better, and they wisely tap into the (mostly/entirely unused in games) tensor units on the GPU to do it without eating too much into your shader performance.

I'm sorry but I don't understand how is natural that could make it look better than the native version.

Care to explain more or have some good resources where I can learn about it by myself?

DLSS is trained with a much higher resolution version of the game. So when it 'upscales' 720p to 1080p its not just using the 720p data as input but also the knowledge of how the game should look at an extremely high resolution. Basically it has a lot more (hidden) knowledge than the current low resolution frame. Hence why its more effective than a traditional upscaler.

> CUDA, Tensor Cores, Ansel, etc. I don't really use these things but if I'm paying the same amount I want similar capabilities.

CUDA might be a bit tough. It's hard for an equivalent to catch on if everyone is doing CUDA. It's the chicken-and-egg problem. There's ROCm* if that matters.

*: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm

Honestly at least for now for the desktop marked it doesn't matter that much.

Software devs might consider it as a factor because they might want to play around with it, but for everyone else is a irrelevant feature.

I thought ROCm didn't support RDNA1 as of yet, let alone RDNA2.

Yes, it still doesn't... (officially) There is some support that was contributed by the community but it's not complete.

That's too bad. Gonna start a workstation build and even though it's only gonna do deep learning for prototyping, fiddling with low level stuff is just a non-starter compared to just spinning up anaconda env.

Any chance AMD would hire some engineers to upstream rocm support into tensorflow/pytorch?

They are 10yrs behind, I doubt they will ever able to catch up.

People claimed similar things about AMD CPUs and GPUs ;)

> - Driver stability. Nvidia is not perfect but the 5700 series was awful from AMD (had to return mine). They need to at least match Nvidia.

Seriously. I have the RX 5700 XT and at least once a week the driver crashes with the same error on `dmesg`, with the only solution being to reboot the machine because the 5700 XT for some ungodly reason doesn't support software reset. I love the card and I feel like I got what I paid for in terms of performance, but the driver instability is absurd.

You might want to see this: https://github.com/rogeriomm/proxmox-pve-kernel-amd-reset/bl...

I'm aware of the patch and have used it previously on my VFIO endeavors. It worked surprisingly well for me, but unfortunately for a lot of cases it simply doesn't, according to the author on the VFIO Discord. It's disappointing to say the least.

>- DLSS. It started out as a gimmick but with DLSS 2.0 it's just 70%+ free performance improvement with the only downside being somewhat limited game support.

Watch Dogs Legion comes out tomorrow and I've been benchmarking it today, as have many others in the subreddit. DLSS is sometimes improving things but is also quite often leading to worse performance, especially if RTX is set to ultra. I have no idea if the issue is game specific or not but I'd be curious to know which games use it well.

4k DLSS takes something like 1.5ms to compute on a 2080ti IIRC, so the drop in render time has to be at least that to give any improvement. So it's quite situational and doesn't help with for example when frame rate is high already. Ray tracing at high settings would be expected to be one of those situations though, so something might be just broken.

That _has_ to be game specific. Every other game sees major wins with DLSS2.0+

Apparently the issue is that the game is poorly optimized.

In addition, my CPU seemed to be overheating and was likely throttled. I tracked the issue down to my new RTX 3090 which was dumping heat inside the case in a noticeable way.

I re-applied thermal paste to my CPU and replaced my watercooler fans (due to rattling) and I’ve improved fps by 15%.

The latest nvidia driver also increased fps by 12%.

Given the framerates they're showing games running at 4k without a DLSS equivalent I'm not really sure it's necessary yet, maybe when stuff comes out that really pushes the hardware though (and when they announce lower end cards).

And even then, higher performance would mean they can source their upscale from a higher resolution.

Virtual reality is pushing the boundaries of performance.

Are they though? Most VR games just lower their graphical fidelity enough to get similar/better performance as non-vr games even on relatively mid range hardware.

Speaking of features: Do the new AMD GPUs feature SMP, Simultaneous Multi-Projection?

Use case: iRacing on triple screens, it offloads the CPU, in a CPU limited title.

Looks like it's a big no, same for VR features as well as far as I can see. That takes AMD out of contention for me (iRacing is the only thing I play, just about), but thankfully it is applying significant price and feature pressures to the market. I'll jump in a 3080TI when it is out and readily available. No rush.

Meanwhile I'm loving my 3900XT Ryzen CPU.

The announcement briefly mentioned that they are working on a "super resolution" feature, but specifically what that is has so far been left as an exercise for the viewer. It sounds like it might be a competitor for DLSS, but only time will tell.

Which is a terrible name considering they already have a Virtual Super resolution feature (https://www.amd.com/es/support/kb/faq/dh-010)