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.
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.
>>> struct.pack('f',math.nan)
b'\x00\x00\xc0\x7f'
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.
It was a nice way to debug tensors: render them to the screen, the green sticks out.
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...