This is what having a monopoly looks like !
This is also why companies that manufacture their cards didn't report any uptick in profits. I'm wondering how this play out in some months ? Do they have any pricing power with respect to NVidia ? Or NVidia could just switch to another manufacturer ?
As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault.
For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential market.
To this day getting things like Stable Diffusion to run on an AMD card requires extra work. At least from my perspective it seems like dedicating a few engineers to getting ROCm working on all major OSes with all major scientific computing/deep learning libraries would have been a pretty good investment.
Is there some context I'm missing for why AMD never caught up in this space?
All systems hit snags. In most, you skid the tires a bit, maybe lose balance. With nvidia you're flying over the handlebars on to the asphalt.
I got snagged by this just about 2 weeks ago. It gets nasty. Not as bad as CUPS, but probably #2.
Do you want solid dependability and settings that are right first time, because you've only got one PC and if the graphics get broken you've got no browser to google for a fix?
Do you want the absolute most up-to-date drivers, to support the very newest GPUs, while running an LTS version of your OS?
Do you want to always run the latest driver version and upgrade without testing or worrying, like we do for web browsers?
Do you want to run CUDA and ML stuff, but also want to run Steam which for some reason wants 32-bit support available?
Do you want to run on a laptop with hybrid graphics, and have suspend/resume work reliably every time?
Do you have a small /boot/ partition, because you expected initrd.img to be 50MB or less?
Do you want to support Secure Boot?
If you want to achieve all these things at once, it'll take you a few tries to get it right :)
[0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_predicted...
And I don't mean to disparage the switch, just point out that the way it's designed is very different which makes the comparison questionable
Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work and investments to make better products. Today they are finally reaping their rewards.
>>> struct.pack('f',math.nan)
b'\x00\x00\xc0\x7f'
It was a nice way to debug tensors: render them to the screen, the green sticks out.
https://encycolorpedia.com/76b900 says Nvidia green #76b900.
[Edit] Could not find it under the name, but it shows how color blind users perceive it. And it loads much faster.
https://www.colorhexa.com/76b900
[Edit] Encycolorpedia has a color blindness simulator too. Have to check on desktop.
The thing that caused me to ragequit the AMD ecosystem was when I took an OpenCL program I had been fighting for two days straight and ran it on my buddy's Nvidia system in hopes of getting an error message that might point me in the right direction. Instead, the program just ran, and it ran much faster, even though the nvidia card was theoretically slower.
In terms of quality, I expect the competition to catch up in a generation or two, but then there is still the decade+ of legacy code to consider. Hopefully with how fast AI/ML churns that isn't actually an insurmountable obstacle.
Where both the sign (s) and the x bits can be anything and it will still be treated as a NaN.
There are lots of ways to encode colour, but there would be too much red with RGBA, and ARGB could be almost any opaque colour, but the red channel has to be at least 0x80, which is still too much red.
So NaNs are too red to encode nvidia green.
Wonder what caused the difference in the latter bits being all 1 or 0 together.
practical work with PhysX 13 years ago: https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/
"For Nvidia, decreasing the baseline CPU performance by using x87 instructions and a single thread makes GPUs look better."
Nvidia magically released PhysX compiled with multithreading enabled and without flags disabling SSE a week after this publication. But couple of days before release they made those funny statements:
"It's fair to say we've got more room to improve on the CPU. But it's not fair to say, in the words of that article, that we're intentionally hobbling the CPU," Skolones told Ars.
"nobody ever asked for it, and it wouldn't help real games anyway because the bottlenecks are elsewhere"
>Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work
Nvidias decade of work:
Ubisoft comments on Assassin’s Creed DX10.1 controversy https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...
AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...
AMD Dubs Nvidia’s GameWorks Tragic And Damaging, Fight Over The Developer Program Continues https://wccftech.com/fight-nvidias-gameworks-continues-amd-c...
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
"The world's greatest virtual concrete slab" https://web.archive.org/web/20121002034311/http://techreport... (images "somehow" vanished from original article at techreport where Nvidia runs marketing campaigns)
"Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures."
From the arstechnica article about Witcher 3.
How dare Nvidia optimize their game enhancing effects for Nvidia hardware and forget to do it for their competitors hardware as well! And as for a lot of these complaints, could it be that a lot of companies only optimize for hardware that has the largest market share?
According to the steam hardware survey in July of 2023, Nvidia accounts for 75% of the GPUs[0]. Nvidia and Amd have a lot of incompatibilities, and it can be hard to make the same code performant on both. It makes sense, as a game company, to prioritize optimizations for the largest market. No collusion and evil corporate mega lord scheming needed for this.
Edit: Also, Nvidia does put out a lot of research efforts for free. Path rendering on the GPU for example (PhysX being another). You can find research papers and videos published by Nvidia for these things. I would consider that practical work. You can hate on Nvidia for lots of things, but this is one thing I find weird to be combative over.
Second Edit: Also, why do you find the statements Nvidia said about the PhysX improvements funny? They’re right. Most games 13 years ago left a lot of idle time on the GPU while the CPU worked overtime to do logic, physics, sound, culling, etc. Lots of that stuff has also been moved to the GPU to minimize the amount of idle time on either the CPU or GPU. Nothing funny about what they said there.
Yes, but also Nvidia partners directly with companies too (money can/does change hands).
Now the flip side is: so does AMD.
And their antics shutting out Nvidia (eg: FSR only, no DLSS) aren't being received well, not the least because their offerings are objectively inferior to Nvidia's.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3vppv1/crysis_2_t...
Instead, they've been going after the CPU market (and winning), HPC/scientific computing (high FP64 performance, in contrast to Nvidia's focus on low-precision ML compute), and integrating Xilinx.
However, I agree that it's an unfortunate situation, and I hope AMD becomes competitive in this space soon.
However, a lot of this has to do with the fact that AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy before the launch of Zen in 2016 (when their share price was ~$10). They simply did not have the capital to the kind of things Nvidia was doing (since '08 ?).
The bet on OpenCL and the 'open-source' community failed. However, ROCM/HIP etc. really seems to be catching up (I even see them packaged on Arch linux).
There are now distro-provided packages on Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
I believe it's a highly undervalued stock right now.
They just don't have those capabilities in their consumer GPUs.
AMD is also nearly 50/50 with nVidia for supercomputers in the Top500 (and dominates at the top)
It took a few years after completeing the massive purchase of Xilinx to get going, but they are picking up speed rapidly.
They prices were already double, it was just scummy resellers capturing that value rather than Nvidia.
the other companies have to up their game to compete with a company that has been executing well for 20+ years.
It's not like Intel and AMD don't exist, but if everyone is pushing each other at the door for Nvidia chips..
MAMAA
And by saying FAAMG instead of FAANG I make the statement that Cramer was high as a kite when he put Netflix in there instead of Microsoft. Today you might make a case for an N, but not at Microsoft's expense.
Yep and we are suffering as a result. Want the best in computing and CUDA? Give M$ and Nvidia money.
Linux and Nvidia don't play well. Apple doesn't even attempt to try.
The absolute state of computing right here.
Hopefully Intel continues to improve it's GPU offerings
I don't think GPUs are commoditized. You can't swap a Nvida GPU with a AMD GPU, and get the same performance/results.
The HIP interface even has almost exact interoperability with CUDA, so you don't have to rewrite your code.
Not sure AMD would be considered a big player, what would be the percentage threshold for that?
According to the Steam Hardware (& Software) Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...), ~75% of computers with Steam running has a NVIDIA GPU, while ~15% has a AMD GPU.
AMD is the closest to a competitor NVIDIA has, but they are also very far away from even being close to their market-share.
I'm sure in AI/ML spaces, NVIDIA holds a even higher market-share due to CUDA and the rest of the ecosystem, at least in gaming things are pretty much "plug and play" when it comes to switching between AMD/NVIDIA hardware, but no such luck in most cases with AI/ML.
and thats the consumer market, which lets say is 30% of the B2B enterprise market, which is probably even higher % nvidia
I'd wager the enterprise market is 90% intel integrated graphics.
It's the cheapest option, the best for laptop battery life, and modern integrated graphics can run excel and a web browser at 4k just fine.