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Nvidia won, we all lost

(blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
977 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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__turbobrew__ ◴[] No.44468824[source]
> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us.

I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets.

I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing something else.

Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.

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darkoob12 ◴[] No.44470357[source]
I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough. It's weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs.

I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore large console market.

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senko ◴[] No.44470614[source]
> AMD GPUs aren't good enough.

Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their drivers. (They also missed the AI train and are trying to catch up).

I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.

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jorams ◴[] No.44471900[source]
> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs

The situation completely changed with the introduction of the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years ago.

Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers were so poorly updated you'd have to downgrade the entire world for the rest of your software to be compatible. At that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though the driver needs to be updated separately and they invented their own versions of some stuff.

With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any effort, while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things really started grating. Much of the world started moving to Wayland, but Nvidia refused to support some important common standards. Those that really wanted their stuff to work on Nvidia had to introduce entirely separate code paths for it, while other parts of the landscape refused to do so. This started improving again a few years ago, but I'm not aware of the current state because I now only use Intel and AMD hardware.

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MegaDeKay ◴[] No.44472911[source]
I use the amdgpu driver and my luck has not been as good as yours. Can't sleep my PC without having it wake up to fill my logs with spam [0] and eventually crash.

Then there is the (in)famous AMD reset bug that makes AMD a real headache to use with GPU passthrough. The card can't be properly reset when the VM shuts down so you have to reboot the PC to start the VM a second time. There are workarounds but they only work on some cards & scenarios [1] [2]. This problem goes back to around the 390 series cards so they've had forever to properly implement reset according to the pci spec but haven't. nvidia handles this flawlessly

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3911

[1] https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

[2] https://github.com/inga-lovinde/RadeonResetBugFix

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1. eptcyka ◴[] No.44474660[source]
I was under the impression that nvidia just didn't let consumer cards do GPU passthrough.
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2. MegaDeKay ◴[] No.44515820[source]
For the longest time they had something in their driver that threw an error and bailed if it detected the GPU was being passed through to a VM but that was easily worked around in qemu or libvirt. nvidia must have realized that that check in the driver was pointless and removed it.