If you own an Intel CPU, you are far, far more likely to have a Nvidia GPU as well.
I remember seeing that correlation many years ago, also on the Windows side, and likewise most people with an AMD CPU also had an ATI GPU. The acquisition of ATI by AMD seemed quite natural after that.
(I personally have the Intel+Nvidia combination, although it's very old, and I don't use Linux as my main OS.)
That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).
I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too.
Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders.
There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering)
Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.
Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release,
I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.
This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?
I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.
> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers
My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them.
Signed,
Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store
You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch.
On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added.
My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
Don't you also need to evade IP blocking for pinging their page every minute (or whatever interval)? And either way, right now no sanely priced 6800 series cards are being stocked anyway, from what I've seen. I'm not paying $1,000+ for a card where the AMD stock version is $650.
When I was hunting the 3090, in general I polled every 5 minutes (with some variability to look more natural). When the "official" release time came closer, I brought it down to something like 1-3 minutes. I never ran into problems with IP blocking.
Trust me, there are people sitting there refreshing the page more often than 1x per minute, and as far as I know they didn't run into any blocks either.
Hmm, good to know, thanks. I enjoy setting up little services and playing around, so maybe I'll give it a go. Still, for the 6800xt at least, stock is barely existent and is at huge markups (or tends to be the more expensive versions in 3rd parties' lineups). Gonna be a while...
Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.
I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing.
Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.
Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).
Yes - but for proper hardware support you often need to compile the latest Mesa-git. That's not super user friendly yet, but I expect it will get better down the road.
Is this true on rolling releases like Manjaro or Arch? If you get the latest Mesa packages regularly, new GPU support seems pretty robust.
(Windows 10, where you can expect the latest hardware to work, is closer to a rolling Linux distro in that way. Meanwhile, point-release distros like Ubuntu seem more fit for purpose as server, not end-user, distros.)
6800 is already working fine on release mesa for me. Mightn't have been the case if stock wasn't buggered and I'd have gotten my hands on it a couple of months ago at launch, mind.
I think that only tends to be the case with the newest hardware? Even 3 years ago when I finally made the switched from nvidia to an rx580 things just worked out of the box with stable Mesa and kernel versions.
Yeah, I got the 5700 XT in December for a new build with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. Everything works out of the box in Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS). And not just that, but I can run a host of Windows games from Steam using Proton without as much as a single tweak. GTA V ran out of the box, something I never manager to do with my previous build (Nvidia GPU with an Intel i5).
The driver situation is alright now, but don't buy a new AMD card expecting the experience to be this good. The first few months with this card were absolute hell for me, and I still have the occasional issue where the driver simply crashes and the machine reboots.
For game's yes but for Blender 3D's GPU accelerated Cycles rendering(Not CPU Cycles rendering) that relies on OpenCL that's not shipping in the Kernel.
So on some of the later HWE Kernels 5.8 for me that's not so good just yet for getting OpenCL working on AMD's Ryzen/Vega integrated graphics(Ryzen 5 3550H) and Radeon RX560X discrete mobile Graphics as well on the same laptop.
So Blender 3D currently on my laptop can not detect any OpenCL/Cycles compatible rendering enabled Graphics/GPU and will default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores instead(Way Slower and ties the CPU cores/threads up 100% until the CPU rendering is finished).
So the MESA OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape but really any OpenCL compute acceleration on AMD's Ryzen APUs and on Kernel 5.8/Later and that's a wait and see. And Blender 3D, Gimp, Dark Table and other open source Graphics applications that need OpenCL will have to wait for that for me.
So Compelling for gaming maybe yes but compelling for GPGPU compute workloads that rely on OpenCL not so much compelling on the newer Razen APU based hardware and AMD's Instructions and not as polished as some of the Intel/Linux related instructions.
But really most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux except system76/other linux laptop OEMs! But that ASUS TUF FX505DY laptop was on special sale pre pandemic for $499 so not a bad deal but with loads of special issues to surmount just to get a Linux Mint 20.0 Live USB to even boot to install Mint 20 in a dual boot configuration alongside Windows 10 10/1909 Home.
But Blobs and out of tree Wifi drivers and that laptop's getting a Samsung M.2/NVMe to replace the WD Black M.2/NVMe that shipped with the laptop and the Realtek WiFi card sits right under the M.2/NVMe SSD slot so that's getting a more Linux Kernel out of the Box friendly WiFi card with better features as well.
Just checking that ACPI works correctly would already be great. It took my current laptop almost a year of having to disable ACPI completely before fixes&workarounds were implemented in-kernel.
The problem is that mesa's "Clover" OpenCL driver currently only supports OpenCL 1.1 and does not support OpenCL images and was abandoned for years. This makes it more or less useless. Additionally, these code paths are not very well tested or optimized.
This has been in the works recently though, I've seen PRs for OpenCL 3.0 and OpenCL Image, not sure if they're in yet. With both Redhat and Microsoft being interested in working on this area now, I expect to see improvements soon.
How is OpenCL still a thing? No version beyond 1.2 gained wide adoption, compute shaders can do almost everything 1.2 can do, and the recent 3.0 version simply rolled back all changes since 1.2 by making them optional. It's a seriously dead horse at this point.
You might already be aware of this, but a less annoying way to test Safari compatibility is by using Epiphany (aka 'Web') as a substitute, since it's also based on Webkit. I've solved several Safari bugs that way.
It went okay, the install was a little messy, I had to restart the VM a couple of times when it hung, but I got it t work in the end, and the actual system itself is pretty stable. I used this project:
This kind of thing usually tends to be some sort of configuration error. Rare these days, but not entirely unheard of, and more likely if you build drivers from source.
Intel/Nvidia here, starting with Windows and then exclusively Linux. Both CPU and GPU are from early 2015 (ready to upgrade my GPU first, but impossible to get anything these days, as I noted in my other comment). Those parts have been great, but ready for AMD (open source drivers, better VR support, competitive on performance/price).
I swapped to AMD for proc but on PC I still want NVIDIA, simply because their drivers are often extremely messed up. Nvidia has a lot of hacks but driver stability is still a huge thing
Same. The only downside to Nvidia is they go out of their way to prevent sharing mainstream / consumer cards via virtualization. So it's not easy to drop a 2080 into an ESXi host and then share it to various VMs. Even applying the fixes on Virtual Ghetto doesn't work.
So don’t know how to do that with esxi but all in all you need to change your cpu hardware vendor id to some random string (that may or may not need to be 12 chars long) and not explicitely expose the fact that you’re a VM.
For those of us doing any ML that requires CUDA/CuDNN. It feels that AMD (specifically for GPU) still isn't a viable option at this moment in time. I sincerely hope that this changes.
While I agree with the current status quo, I don't think that it is too hard to break the vendor lock-in here. Most ML people code against pytorch or tensorflow/keras APIs, so as long as AMD is a viable backend for these frameworks, people won't really care. But whether and when this will happen is another story.
I still find this surprising given how crappy my experience has been with recent AMD cards. I have a 12 Core ryzen which I love. And every time I try to go AMD for the video it’s been a disaster. I have an old RX 480 which seems to work pretty well on everything except Wayland, and then in Nvidia that I VFIO into windows.
I've been rocking Intel CPU and AMD GPU for close to 15 years. Built a i7 6700k with an RX 480 back in mid 2016. Just upgraded over the holidays and flipped.
AMD CPU for obvious reasons(4950x while I wait for the opportunity for a 5950x) and an RTX 3070 OTW(haven't been able to get a 3080).
I have been mostly satisfied with AMD drivers, but I have not owned some of the problem cards(like the Radeon VII). I do like the latest Catalyst and Ryzen Master software.. But the new crop of NVidia cards crush the AMD cards on ray tracing performance, and DLSS 2.0 is voodoo I want for 4k gaming and VR. Would really, really have liked to go with an AMD 6800 XT to support the underdog but.. Those two features are clutch when shelling out nearly a grand for a video card.
I have a good feeling about AMD in general and for their next GPU architecture iteration. They are supposedly working on an answer to DLSS(details are thin and NVidia are ML giants though) and this was their first generation with hardware ray tracing support so lessons learned should bear fruit.
The rasterization performance of AMD is often better than NVDA's, only raytracing and DLSS are lacking, but nvidia has significant advantage in the two domains. The next few years will bring an interesting GPU market.
Despite the insane difficulty of actually buying amd parts for the last couple months its sort of crazy that they are still gaining market share like that.
I for one would upgrade my 5+ year old desktop, but I simply can't buy the parts (and I refuse to pay 2x MSRP to scalpers).
I don't understand how we're multiple years into a GPU shortage from both vendors. $400 retail price cards sell for $800, presumably from scalpers.
I read breathless reviews of how the latest card performs so well even though it's just $x MSRP and the reality makes that seem ridiculous. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 years to ramp up production that much. Yes, demand has increased, but again they've had years to react to that trend. I'd like to be able to buy a mediocre card for less than $500.
I’m with you. This is a really strange situation. Unless these chips are really hard to manufacture for some reason or there’s some kind of component shortage, mobile manufacturers pump out billions of devices annually (meaning so does the supply chain pumping out the CPU/GPU SoCs). Maybe a node issue, but lasting multiple node sizes? If it’s crypto and persisted so long, then wouldn’t they have ramped up their pipelines? Is it that sales aren’t as good as they need them to be and artificial scarcity let’s them drive MSRP higher so that their revenues are a bit boosted? Maybe the flagships are way too complicated and expensive to manufacture with sales too few so that it basically amounts to nothing more than an expensive PR campaign? Maybe the real focus is primarily on cloud/mobile offerings? I really don’t know the details of the GPU business model so perhaps someone more knowledgeable can provide some insight. I’m really curious.
> or there’s some kind of component shortage
There is a shortage of materials (ABF and glass substrates, PCB materials, GDDR6), that affects not only AMD/Nvidia but also car manufacturers (Toyota, Honda, VW, Ford etc.). It's caused by high demand and lower supply (due to covid)
When crypto bubble pops, there will be loads of used GPUs on the market and massive reduction of demand. I think that GPU manufacturers are afraid to scale because of that uncertainty. May be we need GPU futures.
Are serious miners using consumer grade graphic card for mining today? I thought they’d customize their own GPU solution and that the used GPUs because of bubble burst would not be usable for consumers.
During the crypto bubble the miners often used regular gpus, sometimes with firmware modification for undervolting that were easily reversible. But we are not in a crypto bubble now, I'm not sure where gp is coming from with that comment.
In the last year bitcoin is over 200%. Litecoin is almost over 100% (in fact, since April it is over 200%). I have no horse in this race, but I am not sure I would call it "not a bubble".
I meant this as "No GPU cyrpto mining bubble as no gpu mining takes place". Bitcoin and Litecoin are not mined with GPUs anymore.
I was under the impression that no one bought GPUs for mining anymore in general, as it's a waste of money compared to specialized hardware. During the last crypto bubble I noticed a lot of regular people building mining PCs, this time I noticed nothing of that sort. However, https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-financial-analysis-suggest... suggests I might have been wrong about that.
But there was a BTC halvening in May 2020 roughly doubling the amount of computing power required to mine same amount of coin. But I am not an expert on the mining economy so I have no idea if GPU mining is still a lucrative business.
Did you mean my original comment? I've tracked prices. Also google "GPU shortage" and you'll see articles like clockwork for the last few years, but here's a specific example of a GTX 1060 w/ $249 MSRP that averaged > $350 new & used over it's life, with sharp increases in 2017 after which the price practically never dipped below 125% MSRP: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01IEKYD5U
As cryptocurrencies pop up like flies, has ASIC design -> production started streamlining more?
It was my impression before BTC that ASICs weren't particularly frequent, since FPGAs existed for a lot of applications, but mining has the pressing need for absolute performance and tuning and iteration that it would accelerate that space.
Yes, for certain coins with GPU-optimised mining, like etherium (ASICs have long since obseleted GPUs for bitcoin-type mining). Reason being customised GPUs don't really save any significant cost but their resale value is basically nil, while they can resell consumer cards once they stop making money on the mining (they are usually still relevant by that point, though most savvy buyers will try to avoid old mining cards because they've been run pretty heavily already and are more likely to fail).
I don't understand how we're multiple years into a GPU shortage from both vendors.
Why multiple years? It's unlikely the current shortage will take that long, and it only started at the end of last year. In Summer 2020 buying a gpu was not a problem. Then the RTX 3000 series launched with basically no cards actually being available, and all following releases were like that from both vendors.
But both the RTX 2000 series and the Radeon RX 5000 cards have been easily available back then (okay, iirc the USA had some supply issues, but that was domestic Covid and not production related), so there was no reason for them to ramp up production for now during the last 3 or 4 years.
If you want evidence check out this link. It shows the the lifetime prices of a GTX 1060 card since its release in 2016. It had an MSRP of $250, yet for most of it's life since sometime in 2017 it's been around $320 or higher, more than 125% of the MSRP, and, when this particular model was last available, over $400. Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350.
I run pc-kombo.com, a PC hardware builder. Even if right now PC hardware is no fun at all even for me, I'm fairly familiar with price development during the last years ;)
> Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350.
It's a high end 1060. Which in practice means almost nothing but that people will overpay for it, expecting better performance and quality than they'd get.
The $400 price when last available is a pricing artifact of the end of cards lifetime. When they stop being available, some vendors will ask ridiculous prices to basically scam those that do not know they could get a newer better model instead, or are enterprise customers that have to buy the exact same model as the one to be replaced because of bureaucratic stupidity.
Also, camelcamelcamel tracks Amazon prices. US Amazon is the most ridiculously overpriced hardware shop I've ever seen, with only occasional good offers in between. You can't take those prices of specific models serious.
So yes, this 1060 might have had a "shortage" after it stopped being produced and even 1060s in general did have one at one point in time, but at the same time GTX 1650 Super, the GTX 1660, the GTX 1660 Super or especially a RX 480/580 had been readily available (after the crypto bubble of course).
Lots and lots of people built their first PC. Because being on lockdown and getting a stimulus check does that.
Demand has gone up, shortage even on PSU. There's hardly any shipping through air, because that is usually done in cargo bay of passenger planes. (with 5x increase in air shipping prices), so most must happen through ship, and all ships are full. There is also Chinese new year, where fabrics are closed for a while.
I do hope that this is a revival of the desktop PC!
Yes, COVID has made this worse, but the trend extends back years. If you pick a random GTX 1060 card and look at its price trend (see my other replies in this thread for an example, I don't want to copy/paste spam) you'll see trends that, since sometime in 2017, were about 25% higher than MSRP and their lowest prices, often higher.
I think you are mixing up a few cycles into one. There hasn't been a GPU "shortage" for multiple years. But there are certainly shortages at different times in the past few years.
Nvidia had to manipulate their Financial Numbers to cover up for excessive stock sitting in Channel due to Bitcoin crash. It took them 3 quarters ( and more ) to clear those inventory out. AMD had similar situation but their impact were much smaller due to less percentage using it for mining.
This teach GPU vendor an important lesson. ( Edit: Imagine the worst case scenerio AMD has a new product launch and has ample of stocks while you have three quarter worth of old products not moving. )
Since then they are much more conservative with respect to forecast and planning. It is FAR better to have enough demand waiting for GPU than it is for GPU sitting in channel quite literally begging for their Distributors to sell them.
This conservativeness has a knock-on effect on TSMC planning. At the start of pandemic everyone thought the economy could take a tank, which means forecast and estimation were even lower. But reality is all of a sudden PC sales and GPU sales are hitting new height due to more Stay at home and Gaming. Bitcoin is pushing into new height so casual miners are back.
You are taking two conservative supply decision ( Previous over Supply and Pandemic ) and two Demand reality ( PC / Gaming and Bitcoin ). That is Four level of differences. Catching up takes time, and it doesn't help when the whole industry, not just GPU, but everything from WiFi, 5G Modem, SoC, CPU, Amazon Server GPU, NPU are all in demand. Both Intel and AMD grew 10% despite Intel having lower ASP ( i.e Higher Unit Sales ) and were selling as many as they could. The Silicon demand are far greater than even the most optimistic analysis has predicted.
Not really, there may have been ebbs & flows in demand, but the trend for the last 3-4 years has been prices much higher than retail:
If you want evidence check out this link. It shows the the lifetime prices of a GTX 1060 card since its release in 2016. It had an MSRP of $250, yet for most of it's life since sometime in 2017 it's been around $320 or higher, more than 125% of the MSRP, and, when this particular model was last available, over $400. Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350:
You should thank Bitcoin for the spike in prices. Everyone and their dog are buying a GPU to crunch some coins. Even mid-range cards are 70% up from where they were a month ago. Fucking lunacy.
There's a bunch of coins (largest being etherium) using a proof of work mechanism which is optimised for GPUs and can't really be more efficiently implemented by an ASIC (rough reason being it's limited by memory bandwidth, not hashing speed, and GPUs are basically already super optimised for memory bandwidth). This was a deliberate choice by the designers of the cryptocurrency because ASICs centralise mining even further.
Only real reason to mention bitcoin is that basically all cryptocurrencies go up and down in price with bitcoin, so when bitcoin goes up in price, other cryptocurrencies tend to do so as well, incentivising mining all of them.
What does the new kernel mostly rely on? I'm not sure what part of the cycle we're in for development although I am interested to see who wins this generation.
I run Ubuntu with an AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia RTX GPU. I'm all for open/nonproprietary drivers, but RTX giving me +20% perf/$ in Blender rendering over Radeon is a dealbreaker.
I feel like Intel is being dismissed much too quickly. I purchased 2 laptops in the last few months at about the same price, one having the latest-gen-available Ryzen and one having the latest-gen Intel. Here is a benchmark comparison of the chips:
The Zen 3 and M1 chips are unfairly being compared even in recent articles to 10th gen Intel chips when 11th gen is widely available. Considering there is an actual node change at the 11th gen it’s clear from the benchmarks that Intel has not actually fallen behind AMD —- they are neck-and-neck.
Considering the lack of disparity in benchmarks, though I am a long-time AMD fan (see my tongue in cheek username), I still think Intel is the better choice at this time for laptops. The reason is that the ACPI and general driver situation for Zen 2 and 3 is very bad. Power management and hibernation are totally unstable on Linux and Windows. I like my Zen 2 laptop for the better multithread capacity (slightly faster compile times!) but the Intel laptop is likely to last much better given that it will not destroy its own battery. The AMD machine discharges in a day even when hibernating, and in a matter of hours when sleeping.
Intel still has a chance to catch up. It all hinges on how fast they can move to 7nm. And given the “chip shortage” (i.e. limited capacity and likely yield/production issues at TSMC), Intel is well positioned to continue to dominate the market for quite a while by dint of having its own supply chain.
In the high-end laptop space, OEMs still aren't putting out their best stuff with AMD (excluding ROG Zephyrus). If you want a premium build quality machine with a color accurate, wide gamut display (and Thunderbolt), you'll still be purchasing Intel in 2021 as many flagships were partner-designed with Intel.
AMD is ~15% faster on the low-end and ~50% on the high-end. But as far as I can tell the actual comparison is Zen 2 with 10th gen in the same generation of laptops. For the Lenovo T14 for example this is the comparison between the high-end of Intel and the two AMD options:
It's ~80% faster to ~115% faster. Zen 3 will probably maintain a similar gap when the next generation comes out. The 11th gen Intel processors look fine but particularly at the high-end the 4 vs 8 core difference is huge.
I went with dual AMD for a lot of the reasons discussed (ability to drop into my Proxmox server later) but for a more salient one to me: ray tracing.
Personally I did not think it would change that much gameplay-wise when I picked up my RX5700XT since there were so few games in the pipeline. I decided it was not worth the premium. I can still do most any game at 1440p and 100 fps or more without the headache. Why should I pay the premium for GPU features I will never use?
I’m running a 3060 Ti with a 3600X, and I agree: raytracing isn’t remotely worth it.
DLSS though has been amazing. I hope AMD manages to get close soon with a similar feature, it’s brilliant for 4K gaming, and all my displays are 4K in my house these days.
I’ve been playing this game with and without RTX (2k, 27 inches, HDR) and the difference is “night and day”, especially if it's raining or it's a night in the game and you are in the city (where most of the neon lights are located). The only thing which is not better with RTX is direct, non-ambient shadows (surprisingly), but the overall image is much better with RTX on (I really wish I could say there is no difference because it would let me save 20-30 FPS, but image quality is more important than FPS).
Maybe a comparison of still images is not the best tool for “measuring” RTX impact.
>I might add that while Nvidia is often reviled for its GPU drivers being proprietary, they are still excellent drivers nonetheless.
Couldn't disagree more. For the last 4 to 5 months or so, Nvidia's drivers have been horrendous. I've experienced numerous crashes with my GTX 2080 Super card. About once every two days I experience a kernel panic and the only solution is to reboot. There are multiple threads on this issue on Nvidia's official Linux forum and Nvidia's driver developers have stated they don't know what the cause is and cannot reproduce it. [1]
My HDMI also doesn't work well after the computer wakes-up from sleep. Sometimes the monitor does work, sometimes it doesn't. It's also a known issue.
I'll be looking at AMD and their graphics cards a lot more closely when I build my next computer later this year. I just can't deal with Nvidia's driver issues. It's extremely annoying and it has wasted a ton of my time.
I've been using Nvidia's HW with GNU/Linux for about a decade and have never had any major issues and have always been happy with the performance and reliability. However, this is not the case anymore.
I'm pretty sure all this mess started when Kernel devs started blocking Nvidia's "GPL condom" effort [2].
Even on Windows, the driver batch of 2017 tanked my card performances to the point even old games I used to play on max were stuttering. I hold on the 36x series as long as games let me, but came late 2018 new release started complaining and then stopped starting due the old driver
So I jumped on AMD, missed the rtx train, but my card is still running strong in 2021 and I'm not in a hurry to switch; I'll wait until the release of a midrange ready tracing card from them.
When nVidia got what it wanted from Linux by dominating compute space using CUDA, they've just left visual part of their drivers to rot.
Moreover, they stay silent in the forums now. They don't listen to customer feedback or at least give any signs of hope or assurance. Their company image became too dominant and arrogant (I think it runs more than skin-deep).
Some of the nVidia's huge market share is coming from the momentum they have. Linux users do not refresh their hardware too frequently generally.
I'm running a GTX680 on my primary Linux box, but it won't be nVidia next time. I'll be returning back to red team and I'd be a happy camper.
You're right but, I'm deeply interested what AMD can do now or what's in the works.
ATI was left in the dust while the foundation has been forming, unfortunately, but the history is not that straightforward.
TBH, while I appreciate what nVidia is doing, I don't appreciate how did they came to this point.
I have some close friends who're doing game engine and very low level 3D development. His thoughts about nVidia's driver behavior, even under Windows, is worth another rant.
> When nVidia got what it wanted from Linux by dominating compute space using CUDA, they've just left visual part of their drivers to rot.
Have they ever taken proper care of the visual part? I've thought that it exists in the first place because of the SFX industry's heavy use of GNU/Linux and Nvidia. That's a fraction of their market share so only got a fraction of their attention, likely mainly to avoid vacating the area for competitors than to actually make money (bad ROI compared to Windows).
Windows is essentially just the gaming market. Gamers are fickle, only buying a card every couple years and are very price conscious. But AI, and any other datacenter uses of GPUs (mining) buy cards in bulk, are not fickle, and are not obsessed with daily price fluctuations. Those are the markets Nvidea wants to be in and they are dominated by linux. Not playing nice with linux gamers will come back to haunt Nvidea.
Also, one should not underestimate the bias that gaming generates. All those linux gamers who suffer poor drivers while gaming saturday night walk into jobs at datacenters and AI research groups each monday. They remember. I certainly do. All things being equal, I lean towards AMD whenever the boss asks my opinion on our next purchase.
It's much more complicated. The application diversity is much higher than it looks.
There are also Quadro cards aimed at professional OpenGL acceleration for GIS, 3D modeling, CAD, etc. These applications run on both Windows and Linux (soem are cross platform, some are platform locked) and, the ROI pie is a complicated picture.
Windows is dominated by gamers and casual users, that's right, however it's not the sole market for gaming. Steam is pushing for Linux in a relentless pace. Steam in Linux is getting rooted like a Sequoia tree. When it becomes visible, its roots will be much deeper and stronger than the trunk (which is a good thing).
nVidia used to care for Linux users. Extensions required by composition, off-screen rendering and other stuff came to nVidia first (when compared to AMD). Video acceleration is also the same (AMD's video acceleration technologies can were much better than nVidia due to their legacy but, they acted slow. They're even now. Maybe AMD is still better. I need to test).
This trend reared its ugly head ~3 years ago for me. I've upgraded my monitor to a DP one and DPMS went out of window. Screen suspension and standby has gone. They didn't fix it for older cards for ~1 year IIRC. Currently I'm experiencing a strange frame-rate drop. Will investigate when I have time. If an onboard Intel card can drive same DE (KDE) on a same resolution screen better with a much inferior CPU when compared to a triple-slot, out of the box overclocked GTX680, then there's something very, very wrong.
nVidia was top of the line, just works out of the box GPU vendor. Now due to its arrogance and dominance, cracks start to appear. Even Intel's driver blunders are solved faster (ah, they're open source).
Just because I'm changing my GPU once a decade, it doesn't mean that I don't access to much bigger hardware pools and use their newer hardware for other purposes.
> When nVidia got what it wanted from Linux by dominating compute space using CUDA, they've just left visual part of their drivers to rot.
In their defense, from their point of view, gaming on Linux is a tiny fraction of their overall business and, presumably, even their Linux one. For them, Linux is the same as HPC and ML model training and, maybe, cryptocurrency mining.
That's true. I remember the SGIs and Suns tied to their larger siblings where the rack-sized behemoth did the number crunching and the desktop workstation did the visualization of the data. I didn't suspect Linux would still be relevant in this role - I see lots of Windows boxes doing that, even when the app is presenting itself through X (something I find quite amusing).
Nvidia spends several times as much as AMD on software. If they have that much more money, why is AMD able to ship more stable drivers? I just don't see how this holds any weight.
These companies aren't rewriting tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code for Linux. The difference is probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
I was very involved in this driver subject for some years. The issue is more complicated than it looks.
Closed source GPU drivers are not ordinary drivers. They have a lot of quirks and workarounds for programs, especially games.
When a dev studio makes some mistake in its engine or the engine doesn't fit well to current workflow of the driver, a new driver is shipped with specific workarounds for this game. These quirks generally add shims between the program and the driver by basically modifying calls to the driver to increase performance.
e.g.:
- A game is calling too many clears while it shouldn't? Pool them in the shim layer and let them through in batches of 1000.
- Is a particular benchmark is overloading the card by forcibly drawing off screen portions and hurting scores? Insert a shim to prevent drawing off-screen parts and chea... ehrm, optimize the performance.
- Is an important legacy application exploiting a quirk in an older driver for something? Introduce that quirk via another shim.
When you try to port these drivers as-is to another platforms, things get awry. Also the drivers were tremendously Windows specific. This is why FGLRX had (or does it still have) various daemons, HAL layers, during its teething years.
OTOH, free/OSS drivers has no shims, workarounds and other stuff. They are just drivers. Plain, simple, vanilla. They are easier to maintain and develop. Radeon driver is such a driver. Also AMD/ATI has some more tricks up their sleeve for more stable, better drivers regardless of their platforms.
- IP separation: All of the NDA bound parts of the GPU (currently it should be the HDCP stuff only) is a different IP module on the GPU. The cards are designed so that even the Radeon driver can work with HDCP module while being completely blob free. ATI/AMD specially altered silicon and GPU architecture to enable FOSS drivers on Linux and I think its effects are huge.
- "Factory Team:" Radeon driver is carried forward by volunteers but AMD also has a dedicated team working on Radeon driver full time. This group cannot communicate with FGLRX team to prevent tainting each-others wells. So, Radeon is blessed by AMD/ATI on hardware, software and management level.
When you publish your specs, dogfood it with another team, and optimize your GPU silicon and board to accommodate these open source exceptionally well, you have a killer combination.
Well, they don't — AMD drivers for new hardware famously take a few kernel releases to stabilize. (G)GP specifically noted their stability problem started only 5 months ago, which means at least that issue is not really systemic. The real differentiator here is handling of existing complaints: Linux has mailing lists, Mesa has a normal open for everyone bug tracker, while Nvidia has a user support forum, which they mostly ignore.
>> Linux users do not refresh their hardware too frequently generally.
Linux users don't have to refresh hardware as often. Long-term support is a cornerstone of linux. Linux gamers may spend less per year on gaming hardware but they are not broke. Give them a reason and they will drop that banked cash on anything they can trust to play nice with linux.
I never had crashes but, having switched from a 1070 (proprietary) to a 6800 (open) this week, the experience is far better. Things that were previously nigh-on impossible to get right, like fixing screen tearing, or freesync without bizarre performance penalties, just work now.
I keep flip-flopping between these as my needs change. I flipped to proprietary last time I tried some Steam games. I will gladly switch back to open source drivers if I'm wrong in thinking game performance on linux will suffer?
Not played anything very intensive yet, but Rocket League and Deep Rock Galactic, each via Proton, are performing way better than they were before, in line with what you'd expect moving from a 1070 to a 6800.
My guess is the huge file size is due to the GeForce
Experience tool that's included. It would be much better if it was a separate download, but you can choose not to install it during the setup process.
They are 'OK', I wouldn't say they're excellent. I have an RTX 3080 (prior to that I had a 1080Ti) and games crash more often than I would like. Waking from sleep is hit or miss, random driver crashes where the monitor goes blank, driver reinitializes itself, screen comes back on, etc. This is all with the latest and greatest drivers, 4K 160hz monitor (and an older 4k/60hz monitor), etc.
That's where I was on my last rig (AMD+nvidea). Every driver update was a dice roll. Am I going to play today, or spend three hours googling to figure out why my machine keeps booting into safe mode? Since I switched to AMD+AMD a few months ago: no issues. Maybe nvidea would give me a few more FPS at the same price, but you cannot put a price on "it just works".
When I was younger, I thought there was a choice between picking free software for ideological reasons, and picking whatever software did the job for pragmatic reasons. But I have mostly come to conclude over time is that this is a false choice; over a majority of use cases and time scales, open source is just pragmatic choice anyways.
In times past, open source was a much harder sell. You pretty much had to do things the Unix way or deal with a very limited program that mimicked its Windows counterpart. That has changed.
I would argue that open source can be more pragmatic these days. A lot of software offers the features people need. Managing a system based upon open source software is significantly easier since there is no reason to impose restrictions on use or redistribution. To choose an example relevant in this case, open source drivers can ship with a Linux distribution so you have functional drivers the moment you boot from the installation medium. In the case of proprietary drivers, there is typically an extra step once the installation is complete.
Personally I would love to switch to OSS tomorrow, but I still see many showstoppers:
- Desktop: Linux vs. Windows - worse support for gaming (e.g. anti-cheat), no support for major creative software like Photoshop/Affinity or Ableton/FL Studio
- Mobile: FOSS Android distro vs. Google Android - no guarantee that apps I currently use will work without Gapps, no paid apps or in-app purchases
I have really been thinking a lot about this in the past months, because I would like to improve my privacy. The only real play seems to be moving to Apple's ecosystem, and buying a console for the games (and paying a lot more and losing customizability and repairability in the process).
The event which persuaded me that open source software was the pragmatic choice happened in 1999 (though it took a few years afterwards for me to articulate my advocacy in those terms). That's when the Gibson Guitars, having acquired Opcode Systems previously, abandoned development on Opcode's flagship sequencer application, Studio Vision — leaving its users high and dry.
Many music users today are locked into proprietary applications analogous to Studio Vision and their proprietary formats. If the company goes under, or if management decides to kill the product, there goes all your work.
Theoretically proprietary software can support open file formats — but there are such strong incentives for companies to leverage network effects and lock in users that at any moment you are one upgrade away from a policy change and silent conversion of your document to a proprietary format.
Only FOSS guarantees that your documents will survive the tumult of capitalism.
Two decades later, history has repeated itself, with Flash, Macromedia, and Adobe in the roles previously played by Studio Vision, Opcode, and Gibson...
I have the opposite experience. AMD is effectively unusable for AI. As much as I'd like to switch, I need those NVIDIA drivers because CUDA is the only thing that works reliably. So it's AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU + Ubuntu sigh
Even in windows, nvidia drivers have been bad. One particularly nasty example is the SteamVR frame drop bug they introduced last... May? Still isn't fixed, though they finally posted they found the cause and the next patch will supposedly have a fix.
Having AMD GPU drivers in the mainline kernel makes me seriously consider selling my 2070 Super and getting and AMD. I'm tired of playing driver roulette with every kernel update. Crossing my fingers and hoping my setup won't break.
Dunno why you are getting downvote. I've been more than pleasantly surprised with the amount of games with minimal fuss that I have been able to get to not only run, but run VERY well on my new M1 MBA. For example, I think there is going to be far more expansion of Mac in gaming than there is going to be with Linux and as for hardware all it will take is for a desktop with a PCI slot and some driver support. It would not surprise me if Apple and AMD weren't working on Apple Silicon drivers already, especially if the rumored mythical "xMac" mini tower is indeed in play (I hope so!). I can get enough games running on my MBA right now that at this point I would have to think really long and hard about upgrading my Windows gaming box.
I upgrade my gaming machine every 3-5 years and it's typically a full rebuild. What I noticed in the last ones is that switching CPU manufacturer is easy, since you switch cpu+motherboard and never expect to be able to upgrade (3 years later you want a new motherboard anyway even if you could theoretically upgrade).
But what creates inertia is my big expensive G-Sync screen which ties me to Nvidia. My monitor is the only expensive piece of hardware that survives between machines. And that's the genius of Nvidia's proprietary sync solution: So long as the cards are anywhere close, I'd of course choose the one that doesn't force me to switch screens. So far it has luckily not been an issue since AMD haven't upset Nvidia nearly in the way they upset intel. So Now I'm running a Ryzen and an RTX in the latest build.
NVDA also enabled freesync on their graphics cards, so realistically you can swap between the two without any issues. I really don't think NVDA will become complacent in the way INTC became. Nevertheless, the last generation of GPUs seemed to close the gap if we ignore DLSS and raytracing. In the former NVDA has a non trivial advantage, and that is their cards have been the backbone of DL research. It'd be interesting to see how the NVDA+Arm partnership continues.
> interesting to see how the NVDA+Arm partnership continues
They also just completed the acquisition of Mellanox, a company working on 300G NICs (I have a few of their ConnectX-2's in my home lab). It would be very interesting to have all the networking, CPU, and GPU in one place to see what kind of things would come of it (as proprietary as they may be...).
> On Linux, most AMD enthusiasts have probably started by adopting CPUs for quite a while since they fared better for parallel workloads – and now AMD is even catching up on single-thread performance with their latest processors.
I did the opposite, and started with AMD gpus, as those provided best bang for the buck in ~2008. Driver situation on Linux was quite dire, but it improved tremendously around 2013 (when Steam appeared on Linux).
Even though I was still advising AMD in the bulldozer era, Intel was winning performance-wise. On the GPU side, though, GPU drivers have been quite hassle-free since 2015, provided your GPU wasn't the latest and greatest. They got better at supporting their latest GPUs recently.
Intel and Nvidia always had despicable market segmentation and anti-consumer practices, which is the main reason I always went ATI/AMD.
Intel: No ECC on consumer CPUs, reduced number of PCI lanes, restricted frequency multiplier.
Nvidia: Signed GPU firmware, non-redistribuable. Driver limiting the use of GPUs in datacenters. Proprietary tech everywhere: G-sync, 3D vision, Physx. Artificially restricts the speed of nvidia libraries on non-nvidia hardware (Intel did that too, to a lesser extent). Cripples FP16 and FP64 on "consumer" hardware.
I recently got myself a HTC vive. It works fine, while not perfectly, on my R9 Fury under Linux. Go team red!
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadI remember seeing that correlation many years ago, also on the Windows side, and likewise most people with an AMD CPU also had an ATI GPU. The acquisition of ATI by AMD seemed quite natural after that.
(I personally have the Intel+Nvidia combination, although it's very old, and I don't use Linux as my main OS.)
Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs?
The APU combos are particularly compelling for desktop Linux.
Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering)
Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them.
Signed,
Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store
On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
Trust me, there are people sitting there refreshing the page more often than 1x per minute, and as far as I know they didn't run into any blocks either.
I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing.
Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....
(Windows 10, where you can expect the latest hardware to work, is closer to a rolling Linux distro in that way. Meanwhile, point-release distros like Ubuntu seem more fit for purpose as server, not end-user, distros.)
I'm a convert.
So on some of the later HWE Kernels 5.8 for me that's not so good just yet for getting OpenCL working on AMD's Ryzen/Vega integrated graphics(Ryzen 5 3550H) and Radeon RX560X discrete mobile Graphics as well on the same laptop.
So Blender 3D currently on my laptop can not detect any OpenCL/Cycles compatible rendering enabled Graphics/GPU and will default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores instead(Way Slower and ties the CPU cores/threads up 100% until the CPU rendering is finished).
So the MESA OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape but really any OpenCL compute acceleration on AMD's Ryzen APUs and on Kernel 5.8/Later and that's a wait and see. And Blender 3D, Gimp, Dark Table and other open source Graphics applications that need OpenCL will have to wait for that for me.
So Compelling for gaming maybe yes but compelling for GPGPU compute workloads that rely on OpenCL not so much compelling on the newer Razen APU based hardware and AMD's Instructions and not as polished as some of the Intel/Linux related instructions.
But really most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux except system76/other linux laptop OEMs! But that ASUS TUF FX505DY laptop was on special sale pre pandemic for $499 so not a bad deal but with loads of special issues to surmount just to get a Linux Mint 20.0 Live USB to even boot to install Mint 20 in a dual boot configuration alongside Windows 10 10/1909 Home.
But Blobs and out of tree Wifi drivers and that laptop's getting a Samsung M.2/NVMe to replace the WD Black M.2/NVMe that shipped with the laptop and the Realtek WiFi card sits right under the M.2/NVMe SSD slot so that's getting a more Linux Kernel out of the Box friendly WiFi card with better features as well.
Just curious, what would they actually change in the firmware to "tune a laptop for Linux"?
I have no clue why this is not included in distros by default though.
This has been in the works recently though, I've seen PRs for OpenCL 3.0 and OpenCL Image, not sure if they're in yet. With both Redhat and Microsoft being interested in working on this area now, I expect to see improvements soon.
- the kernel driver (AMDGPU) - the user space driver (Mesa, AMDVLK, AMDGPU-PRO)
The lack of CL support has nothing to do with the kernel driver, that's something that gets implemented in the user space driver.
You might already be aware of this, but a less annoying way to test Safari compatibility is by using Epiphany (aka 'Web') as a substitute, since it's also based on Webkit. I've solved several Safari bugs that way.
https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
Thanks for the tip in regards to Epiphany, I am aware, but it doesn't help with testing stuff like ITP unfortunately.
Closed source blob, OpenGL 4.1 with video hardware acceleration.
Open source drivers, OpenGL 3.3 with a kind of working video hardware acceleration.
Windows drivers, still OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.
So much for the benefit of open source drivers.
If it is a configuration error, Canonical has been making the error since it decided to replace fxgl drivers.
Isn't there actually a worrying amount that do? Wifi for instance.
Yes I had to apply a workaround but this part was easy.
Basically that’s how you do it in a libvirt environment: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM.... In qemu terms this translates, I _think_, to having "hv-vendor-id=Nvidia43Fixx,kvm=off" in your "-cpu" line.
So don’t know how to do that with esxi but all in all you need to change your cpu hardware vendor id to some random string (that may or may not need to be 12 chars long) and not explicitely expose the fact that you’re a VM.
Hopefully OneAPI just makes this whole conversation irrelevant.
AMD CPU for obvious reasons(4950x while I wait for the opportunity for a 5950x) and an RTX 3070 OTW(haven't been able to get a 3080).
I have been mostly satisfied with AMD drivers, but I have not owned some of the problem cards(like the Radeon VII). I do like the latest Catalyst and Ryzen Master software.. But the new crop of NVidia cards crush the AMD cards on ray tracing performance, and DLSS 2.0 is voodoo I want for 4k gaming and VR. Would really, really have liked to go with an AMD 6800 XT to support the underdog but.. Those two features are clutch when shelling out nearly a grand for a video card.
I have a good feeling about AMD in general and for their next GPU architecture iteration. They are supposedly working on an answer to DLSS(details are thin and NVidia are ML giants though) and this was their first generation with hardware ray tracing support so lessons learned should bear fruit.
I'm definitely very excited for RDNA 3. I think AMD's GPU momentum is just starting, similar to the 1000s series.
I agree that NVIDIA QUADRO GPUs have an edge in stability.
The AMD FirePros are very nice cards and AMD actively works on improving the drivers. The RX 580 is also a really nice card.
NVIDIA dominates in the vGPU and compute side of things in the data center.
I for one would upgrade my 5+ year old desktop, but I simply can't buy the parts (and I refuse to pay 2x MSRP to scalpers).
I read breathless reviews of how the latest card performs so well even though it's just $x MSRP and the reality makes that seem ridiculous. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 years to ramp up production that much. Yes, demand has increased, but again they've had years to react to that trend. I'd like to be able to buy a mediocre card for less than $500.
In the last year bitcoin is over 200%. Litecoin is almost over 100% (in fact, since April it is over 200%). I have no horse in this race, but I am not sure I would call it "not a bubble".
I was under the impression that no one bought GPUs for mining anymore in general, as it's a waste of money compared to specialized hardware. During the last crypto bubble I noticed a lot of regular people building mining PCs, this time I noticed nothing of that sort. However, https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-financial-analysis-suggest... suggests I might have been wrong about that.
It was my impression before BTC that ASICs weren't particularly frequent, since FPGAs existed for a lot of applications, but mining has the pressing need for absolute performance and tuning and iteration that it would accelerate that space.
Why multiple years? It's unlikely the current shortage will take that long, and it only started at the end of last year. In Summer 2020 buying a gpu was not a problem. Then the RTX 3000 series launched with basically no cards actually being available, and all following releases were like that from both vendors.
But both the RTX 2000 series and the Radeon RX 5000 cards have been easily available back then (okay, iirc the USA had some supply issues, but that was domestic Covid and not production related), so there was no reason for them to ramp up production for now during the last 3 or 4 years.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01IEKYD5U
> Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350.
It's a high end 1060. Which in practice means almost nothing but that people will overpay for it, expecting better performance and quality than they'd get.
The $400 price when last available is a pricing artifact of the end of cards lifetime. When they stop being available, some vendors will ask ridiculous prices to basically scam those that do not know they could get a newer better model instead, or are enterprise customers that have to buy the exact same model as the one to be replaced because of bureaucratic stupidity.
Also, camelcamelcamel tracks Amazon prices. US Amazon is the most ridiculously overpriced hardware shop I've ever seen, with only occasional good offers in between. You can't take those prices of specific models serious.
So yes, this 1060 might have had a "shortage" after it stopped being produced and even 1060s in general did have one at one point in time, but at the same time GTX 1650 Super, the GTX 1660, the GTX 1660 Super or especially a RX 480/580 had been readily available (after the crypto bubble of course).
I do hope that this is a revival of the desktop PC!
I think you are mixing up a few cycles into one. There hasn't been a GPU "shortage" for multiple years. But there are certainly shortages at different times in the past few years.
Nvidia had to manipulate their Financial Numbers to cover up for excessive stock sitting in Channel due to Bitcoin crash. It took them 3 quarters ( and more ) to clear those inventory out. AMD had similar situation but their impact were much smaller due to less percentage using it for mining.
This teach GPU vendor an important lesson. ( Edit: Imagine the worst case scenerio AMD has a new product launch and has ample of stocks while you have three quarter worth of old products not moving. )
Since then they are much more conservative with respect to forecast and planning. It is FAR better to have enough demand waiting for GPU than it is for GPU sitting in channel quite literally begging for their Distributors to sell them.
This conservativeness has a knock-on effect on TSMC planning. At the start of pandemic everyone thought the economy could take a tank, which means forecast and estimation were even lower. But reality is all of a sudden PC sales and GPU sales are hitting new height due to more Stay at home and Gaming. Bitcoin is pushing into new height so casual miners are back.
You are taking two conservative supply decision ( Previous over Supply and Pandemic ) and two Demand reality ( PC / Gaming and Bitcoin ). That is Four level of differences. Catching up takes time, and it doesn't help when the whole industry, not just GPU, but everything from WiFi, 5G Modem, SoC, CPU, Amazon Server GPU, NPU are all in demand. Both Intel and AMD grew 10% despite Intel having lower ASP ( i.e Higher Unit Sales ) and were selling as many as they could. The Silicon demand are far greater than even the most optimistic analysis has predicted.
If you want evidence check out this link. It shows the the lifetime prices of a GTX 1060 card since its release in 2016. It had an MSRP of $250, yet for most of it's life since sometime in 2017 it's been around $320 or higher, more than 125% of the MSRP, and, when this particular model was last available, over $400. Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350:
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01IEKYD5U
Only real reason to mention bitcoin is that basically all cryptocurrencies go up and down in price with bitcoin, so when bitcoin goes up in price, other cryptocurrencies tend to do so as well, incentivising mining all of them.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-1135G7-v...
The Zen 3 and M1 chips are unfairly being compared even in recent articles to 10th gen Intel chips when 11th gen is widely available. Considering there is an actual node change at the 11th gen it’s clear from the benchmarks that Intel has not actually fallen behind AMD —- they are neck-and-neck.
Considering the lack of disparity in benchmarks, though I am a long-time AMD fan (see my tongue in cheek username), I still think Intel is the better choice at this time for laptops. The reason is that the ACPI and general driver situation for Zen 2 and 3 is very bad. Power management and hibernation are totally unstable on Linux and Windows. I like my Zen 2 laptop for the better multithread capacity (slightly faster compile times!) but the Intel laptop is likely to last much better given that it will not destroy its own battery. The AMD machine discharges in a day even when hibernating, and in a matter of hours when sleeping.
Intel still has a chance to catch up. It all hinges on how fast they can move to 7nm. And given the “chip shortage” (i.e. limited capacity and likely yield/production issues at TSMC), Intel is well positioned to continue to dominate the market for quite a while by dint of having its own supply chain.
For a desktop Ryzen sounds great. But for a laptop it has given me only frustration.
That isn't a CPU-related issue right? The CPU would be completely powered down when hibernating
You are still right that Intel mobile is still performance competitive if you don't care much about the core count gap.
If you do the opposite and compare Intel 11th gen to Zen2 the differences are stark:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-1135G7-vs-AMD-...
AMD is ~15% faster on the low-end and ~50% on the high-end. But as far as I can tell the actual comparison is Zen 2 with 10th gen in the same generation of laptops. For the Lenovo T14 for example this is the comparison between the high-end of Intel and the two AMD options:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-...
It's ~80% faster to ~115% faster. Zen 3 will probably maintain a similar gap when the next generation comes out. The 11th gen Intel processors look fine but particularly at the high-end the 4 vs 8 core difference is huge.
Personally I did not think it would change that much gameplay-wise when I picked up my RX5700XT since there were so few games in the pipeline. I decided it was not worth the premium. I can still do most any game at 1440p and 100 fps or more without the headache. Why should I pay the premium for GPU features I will never use?
DLSS though has been amazing. I hope AMD manages to get close soon with a similar feature, it’s brilliant for 4K gaming, and all my displays are 4K in my house these days.
What?? Actually, it's quite contrary. RTX has significant impact on the image in this game.
So, in lower resolutions/level of details AMD wins. In 4k Ultra NVidia leads by 4/5 fps. But you for 4k you probably want 6900XT/RTX3090...
Maybe a comparison of still images is not the best tool for “measuring” RTX impact.
Are people really buying new mid/top-tier graphics cards to play at low resolutions and levels of detail though?
Couldn't disagree more. For the last 4 to 5 months or so, Nvidia's drivers have been horrendous. I've experienced numerous crashes with my GTX 2080 Super card. About once every two days I experience a kernel panic and the only solution is to reboot. There are multiple threads on this issue on Nvidia's official Linux forum and Nvidia's driver developers have stated they don't know what the cause is and cannot reproduce it. [1]
My HDMI also doesn't work well after the computer wakes-up from sleep. Sometimes the monitor does work, sometimes it doesn't. It's also a known issue.
I'll be looking at AMD and their graphics cards a lot more closely when I build my next computer later this year. I just can't deal with Nvidia's driver issues. It's extremely annoying and it has wasted a ton of my time.
I've been using Nvidia's HW with GNU/Linux for about a decade and have never had any major issues and have always been happy with the performance and reliability. However, this is not the case anymore.
I'm pretty sure all this mess started when Kernel devs started blocking Nvidia's "GPL condom" effort [2].
[1] https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-unix-graphics/linu...
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Ke...*
So I jumped on AMD, missed the rtx train, but my card is still running strong in 2021 and I'm not in a hurry to switch; I'll wait until the release of a midrange ready tracing card from them.
Moreover, they stay silent in the forums now. They don't listen to customer feedback or at least give any signs of hope or assurance. Their company image became too dominant and arrogant (I think it runs more than skin-deep).
Some of the nVidia's huge market share is coming from the momentum they have. Linux users do not refresh their hardware too frequently generally.
I'm running a GTX680 on my primary Linux box, but it won't be nVidia next time. I'll be returning back to red team and I'd be a happy camper.
The flip side is that if you want to do GPGPU work (even if it's just local testing) you more-or-less need an nVidia card.
ATI was left in the dust while the foundation has been forming, unfortunately, but the history is not that straightforward.
TBH, while I appreciate what nVidia is doing, I don't appreciate how did they came to this point.
I have some close friends who're doing game engine and very low level 3D development. His thoughts about nVidia's driver behavior, even under Windows, is worth another rant.
Have they ever taken proper care of the visual part? I've thought that it exists in the first place because of the SFX industry's heavy use of GNU/Linux and Nvidia. That's a fraction of their market share so only got a fraction of their attention, likely mainly to avoid vacating the area for competitors than to actually make money (bad ROI compared to Windows).
Windows is essentially just the gaming market. Gamers are fickle, only buying a card every couple years and are very price conscious. But AI, and any other datacenter uses of GPUs (mining) buy cards in bulk, are not fickle, and are not obsessed with daily price fluctuations. Those are the markets Nvidea wants to be in and they are dominated by linux. Not playing nice with linux gamers will come back to haunt Nvidea.
Also, one should not underestimate the bias that gaming generates. All those linux gamers who suffer poor drivers while gaming saturday night walk into jobs at datacenters and AI research groups each monday. They remember. I certainly do. All things being equal, I lean towards AMD whenever the boss asks my opinion on our next purchase.
There are also Quadro cards aimed at professional OpenGL acceleration for GIS, 3D modeling, CAD, etc. These applications run on both Windows and Linux (soem are cross platform, some are platform locked) and, the ROI pie is a complicated picture.
Windows is dominated by gamers and casual users, that's right, however it's not the sole market for gaming. Steam is pushing for Linux in a relentless pace. Steam in Linux is getting rooted like a Sequoia tree. When it becomes visible, its roots will be much deeper and stronger than the trunk (which is a good thing).
nVidia used to care for Linux users. Extensions required by composition, off-screen rendering and other stuff came to nVidia first (when compared to AMD). Video acceleration is also the same (AMD's video acceleration technologies can were much better than nVidia due to their legacy but, they acted slow. They're even now. Maybe AMD is still better. I need to test).
This trend reared its ugly head ~3 years ago for me. I've upgraded my monitor to a DP one and DPMS went out of window. Screen suspension and standby has gone. They didn't fix it for older cards for ~1 year IIRC. Currently I'm experiencing a strange frame-rate drop. Will investigate when I have time. If an onboard Intel card can drive same DE (KDE) on a same resolution screen better with a much inferior CPU when compared to a triple-slot, out of the box overclocked GTX680, then there's something very, very wrong.
nVidia was top of the line, just works out of the box GPU vendor. Now due to its arrogance and dominance, cracks start to appear. Even Intel's driver blunders are solved faster (ah, they're open source).
> I'm running a GTX680 on my primary Linux box, but it won't be nVidia next time.
Well, you're kind of making their point. Your business is probably insignificant for them, you have an 8 year old GPU :-)
In their defense, from their point of view, gaming on Linux is a tiny fraction of their overall business and, presumably, even their Linux one. For them, Linux is the same as HPC and ML model training and, maybe, cryptocurrency mining.
Quadro cards are used for real-time rendering of ultra-high resolution models for post-compute analysis or pre-prod/pre-analysis design work.
Quadro cards are not more useful in CUDA computations when compared to the Tesla cards.
They're different beasts for different scenarios.
Disclaimer: I'm an HPC administrator.
These companies aren't rewriting tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code for Linux. The difference is probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Closed source GPU drivers are not ordinary drivers. They have a lot of quirks and workarounds for programs, especially games.
When a dev studio makes some mistake in its engine or the engine doesn't fit well to current workflow of the driver, a new driver is shipped with specific workarounds for this game. These quirks generally add shims between the program and the driver by basically modifying calls to the driver to increase performance.
e.g.:
- A game is calling too many clears while it shouldn't? Pool them in the shim layer and let them through in batches of 1000.
- Is a particular benchmark is overloading the card by forcibly drawing off screen portions and hurting scores? Insert a shim to prevent drawing off-screen parts and chea... ehrm, optimize the performance.
- Is an important legacy application exploiting a quirk in an older driver for something? Introduce that quirk via another shim.
When you try to port these drivers as-is to another platforms, things get awry. Also the drivers were tremendously Windows specific. This is why FGLRX had (or does it still have) various daemons, HAL layers, during its teething years.
OTOH, free/OSS drivers has no shims, workarounds and other stuff. They are just drivers. Plain, simple, vanilla. They are easier to maintain and develop. Radeon driver is such a driver. Also AMD/ATI has some more tricks up their sleeve for more stable, better drivers regardless of their platforms.
- IP separation: All of the NDA bound parts of the GPU (currently it should be the HDCP stuff only) is a different IP module on the GPU. The cards are designed so that even the Radeon driver can work with HDCP module while being completely blob free. ATI/AMD specially altered silicon and GPU architecture to enable FOSS drivers on Linux and I think its effects are huge.
- "Factory Team:" Radeon driver is carried forward by volunteers but AMD also has a dedicated team working on Radeon driver full time. This group cannot communicate with FGLRX team to prevent tainting each-others wells. So, Radeon is blessed by AMD/ATI on hardware, software and management level.
When you publish your specs, dogfood it with another team, and optimize your GPU silicon and board to accommodate these open source exceptionally well, you have a killer combination.
The quirks part is a bit of a meme. Mesa contains a few application-specific overrides here and there: https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/c62996796cc46f1a1406f365..., https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/a678ec9b8c057311ed7e9697.... The reason Linux drivers, including the one from Nvidia, have fewer quirks is simply that Linux has fewer 3d applications overall. Those quirks also reside in userspace driver parts and should not affect system stability.
> When you try to port these drivers as-is to another platforms, things get awry.
Again, quirks are a property of a relatively high-level userspace part of the driver. There is nothing hazardous about porting them.
Well, they don't — AMD drivers for new hardware famously take a few kernel releases to stabilize. (G)GP specifically noted their stability problem started only 5 months ago, which means at least that issue is not really systemic. The real differentiator here is handling of existing complaints: Linux has mailing lists, Mesa has a normal open for everyone bug tracker, while Nvidia has a user support forum, which they mostly ignore.
Linux users don't have to refresh hardware as often. Long-term support is a cornerstone of linux. Linux gamers may spend less per year on gaming hardware but they are not broke. Give them a reason and they will drop that banked cash on anything they can trust to play nice with linux.
I'm well aware of that (since I'm one of them too), however I didn't make it clear I presume.
Thanks for highlighting it again.
It's also stems for efficient utilization of the hardware, too.
Same with my trusty 1070. The WHQL driver from 2019 didn't crash, but it is now too old for current games.
Partly this will be because I'm not playing games like CS:GO not cyperpunk, but I'm capped on 144hz with latest OSS drivers.
GTFO with that BS.
My guess is the huge file size is due to the GeForce Experience tool that's included. It would be much better if it was a separate download, but you can choose not to install it during the setup process.
They are 'OK', I wouldn't say they're excellent. I have an RTX 3080 (prior to that I had a 1080Ti) and games crash more often than I would like. Waking from sleep is hit or miss, random driver crashes where the monitor goes blank, driver reinitializes itself, screen comes back on, etc. This is all with the latest and greatest drivers, 4K 160hz monitor (and an older 4k/60hz monitor), etc.
Turns out that it's the NVidia drivers every time.
I've had to test out several combinations before I got a relatively stable config.
Now I'm afraid to apply an automatic update since I don't want to lose several hours to debugging BS driver issues.
That's where I was on my last rig (AMD+nvidea). Every driver update was a dice roll. Am I going to play today, or spend three hours googling to figure out why my machine keeps booting into safe mode? Since I switched to AMD+AMD a few months ago: no issues. Maybe nvidea would give me a few more FPS at the same price, but you cannot put a price on "it just works".
I would argue that open source can be more pragmatic these days. A lot of software offers the features people need. Managing a system based upon open source software is significantly easier since there is no reason to impose restrictions on use or redistribution. To choose an example relevant in this case, open source drivers can ship with a Linux distribution so you have functional drivers the moment you boot from the installation medium. In the case of proprietary drivers, there is typically an extra step once the installation is complete.
- Desktop: Linux vs. Windows - worse support for gaming (e.g. anti-cheat), no support for major creative software like Photoshop/Affinity or Ableton/FL Studio
- Mobile: FOSS Android distro vs. Google Android - no guarantee that apps I currently use will work without Gapps, no paid apps or in-app purchases
I have really been thinking a lot about this in the past months, because I would like to improve my privacy. The only real play seems to be moving to Apple's ecosystem, and buying a console for the games (and paying a lot more and losing customizability and repairability in the process).
Many music users today are locked into proprietary applications analogous to Studio Vision and their proprietary formats. If the company goes under, or if management decides to kill the product, there goes all your work.
Theoretically proprietary software can support open file formats — but there are such strong incentives for companies to leverage network effects and lock in users that at any moment you are one upgrade away from a policy change and silent conversion of your document to a proprietary format. Only FOSS guarantees that your documents will survive the tumult of capitalism.
Two decades later, history has repeated itself, with Flash, Macromedia, and Adobe in the roles previously played by Studio Vision, Opcode, and Gibson...
* https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
* https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
AMD usage is rising on Linux and for obvious reasons.
But what creates inertia is my big expensive G-Sync screen which ties me to Nvidia. My monitor is the only expensive piece of hardware that survives between machines. And that's the genius of Nvidia's proprietary sync solution: So long as the cards are anywhere close, I'd of course choose the one that doesn't force me to switch screens. So far it has luckily not been an issue since AMD haven't upset Nvidia nearly in the way they upset intel. So Now I'm running a Ryzen and an RTX in the latest build.
They also just completed the acquisition of Mellanox, a company working on 300G NICs (I have a few of their ConnectX-2's in my home lab). It would be very interesting to have all the networking, CPU, and GPU in one place to see what kind of things would come of it (as proprietary as they may be...).
> On Linux, most AMD enthusiasts have probably started by adopting CPUs for quite a while since they fared better for parallel workloads – and now AMD is even catching up on single-thread performance with their latest processors.
I did the opposite, and started with AMD gpus, as those provided best bang for the buck in ~2008. Driver situation on Linux was quite dire, but it improved tremendously around 2013 (when Steam appeared on Linux).
Even though I was still advising AMD in the bulldozer era, Intel was winning performance-wise. On the GPU side, though, GPU drivers have been quite hassle-free since 2015, provided your GPU wasn't the latest and greatest. They got better at supporting their latest GPUs recently.
Intel and Nvidia always had despicable market segmentation and anti-consumer practices, which is the main reason I always went ATI/AMD.
Intel: No ECC on consumer CPUs, reduced number of PCI lanes, restricted frequency multiplier.
Nvidia: Signed GPU firmware, non-redistribuable. Driver limiting the use of GPUs in datacenters. Proprietary tech everywhere: G-sync, 3D vision, Physx. Artificially restricts the speed of nvidia libraries on non-nvidia hardware (Intel did that too, to a lesser extent). Cripples FP16 and FP64 on "consumer" hardware.
I recently got myself a HTC vive. It works fine, while not perfectly, on my R9 Fury under Linux. Go team red!