AMD is even on performance and significantly more affordable for consumers. but people wont stop buying nvidia's ripoff products like the 4060. really frustrating
That’s not to mention having to fiddle with the drivers/games more than I was accustomed to, which IIUC is more a consequence of having less market share and thus not being a priority for game developers to work out of the box. I can excuse that, but not crashes or reinstalling every couple months.
It's been 11 years since Linus gave Nvidia the finger. Nobody who is thinking of possibly running Linux should ever buy an Nvidia product. Yet Nvidia is still very commonly spec'd into Linux builds even today.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
In the Windows land it's indeed mostly Nvidia.
They’re stuck on the concept of rasterized graphics being the ground truth in gpu value.
Then they’re shocked when the wider consumer market doesn’t hold their perspective.
AMD hasn’t had the big picture vision that nvidia has had. For example, with Vega AMD had a gpu architecture with exceptional async compute performance a generation before nvidia was competitive.
AMD then abandoned Vega, switched to a leaner and less compute friendly rDNA architecture while nvidia went in the opposite direction, pushed compute heavy features like raytracing and dlss and AMD hasn’t had an exceptional response since then.
Creating reflections using rasterization requires shortcuts and sacrifices. And once you see them, you can't unsee them, and then you find them visually distracting.
There are basically 3 ways to create reflections without ray-tracing:
1. Double the geometry and render it in the reflection. This is rarely the approach taken because it's incredibly resource intensive. Oddly, Duke Nukem 3D back in what, 1996? did this, but that had pretty simple graphics. Genuinely not feasible for any sort of reflect surface that is curved.
2. Screen-space reflection: Just take the rendered image, invert it, and overlay it onto the reflective surface. This is probably the most common way to do it. It's fast and looks decent. The problem is that it requires the reflected image to be visible on the screen. When it's not, there's no reflection. It creates a bizarre effect when, for example, you're looking over a body of water at something in the distance, and you see the reflection in the water, but as you move the camera down, the reflection gets cut off and eventually disappears entirely.
3. Using a static image as an environment mapped texture. Apex Legends does this for shiny surfaces. It creates a great illusion of a reflection, but taking even a second to actually look at it, you'll notice that the reflection doesn't actually show what it should unless you're standing in the exact right place.
I will concede that gamers typically don't notice the issues created using methods 2 and 3, especially in a game like Apex Legends where you're moving around too much to notice.
But me? I dunno. I notice and get distracted.
EDIT: DLSS, on the other hand, is basically a crutch. It's not surprise that DLSS became a big thing at the same time RTX did. RTX requires more juice to run at full resolution than the GPU has, so they introduced DLSS to render at a low resolution and upscale it.
Crypto really only managed to use it because there was more money to be made using AMD, justifying the wrangling needed to get compute to work on it.
Now they continue to waste their potential with ROCm's design choices which make its hardware support range very limited.
AMD is already backporting ROCm to "lesser" hardware [0]. I wouldn't expect them to spend too many resources on going back further than that though. I'd rather see them improve their newer stuff. The larger issue is that it is impossible to rent time on the super high end GPUs that they use to build the super computers with... nobody offers that and it is something I'm working on fixing.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-enables-rocm-and-pytor...
$250-270 is fine for this type of product even today.
Similarly, the 4070 is also fairly attractively priced even compared to 6800XT/6950XT or 7800XT. More efficient, better feature set, same performance tier, similar perf/$. But people still get upset about intangibles like memory bus or die size (despite this already being measured in the performance!), or just don’t want to admit that wafer costs and R&D costs are rising in the post-Moores law era. Operating margins were actually down relative to the last few gens (until AI hit), and were broadly similar to 2012 levels. This is just what it costs now, and smaller die take the worst of the cost increases because memory controllers and pcie don’t shrink anywhere near as much as logic (the gpu cores). There is a “minimum cost floor” that has been rising substantially due to this.