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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

I used to be an AMD diehard fan. Bought their processors and GPUs for close to 20 years until I simply couldn't take it anymore - 5 years ago I started buying NVIDIA GPUs with Intel CPUs and honestly never looked back. Sure I pay more, but it's worth paying more for reliability and software support. Anything else and I'm losing money out of ideology to give to a business that doesn't have its act together.

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It's always intriguing to see other people's takes. I'm in nearly the complete opposite boat: in recent years I've switched to AMD and it feels like all of my hardware problems have gone away.

New hardware is better than old hardware

I'm assuming GP runs Windows and you run Linux. NVidia's proprietary drivers are known to be a lot more stable than AMD's. But on the other hand the open source driver and software stack for AMD (partially shared with Intel) is much more stable than NVidia's on Linux.

Heaven is using AMD cards for graphics and NVidia for computation.

Hell is the reverse.

I have an extra Radeon VII in my ML work station because I don't have to fight nvidia graphics drivers to get it to work. I have the NVidia cards so I don't have to fight AMD drivers to get ML drivers to work.

I'm surprised to read such a take given pretty much every enthusiast I know went through the reverse cycle over the last 5 years when it comes to CPUs. I don't know anyone right now who is running Intel on their desktop computer. Even on mobile Intel seems to be loosing grounds. Only the GPU department is an uphill battle for AMD where they can't compete with any of NVIDIAs high end offerings.

However, observing Intels cards from an average consumers perspective, they really showed what difference good software makes when it comes to having great performance hardware.

Meanwhile my 7800x3d and 7900xt sip power compared to the new Intel chips pulling 400w on the processor alone. I also have 20GB of vram future proofing me for some time.

Funny, AMD CPUs have started becoming viable (and then better than Intel) five years ago.

Imagine being a fan of a company when your options are VERY limited ((A or B) or C). Making an informed decision at the time you want to buy/upgrade something is a relative simple task these days.

As someone who basicially grew up with Intel/Nvidia but now running AMD/AMD, while i could agree with you on the GPU side that AMD still has more work to do, I would hard disagree on the CPU side.

Especially with the X3D line, AMD cpus can absolute smoke intel and at worst, come within a single percentage of performance in usually single thread bound scenarios.

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