Graphics Update, v1.1

I actually come across strong on this stuff because I'm passionate about supporting open standards. So no malice intended or anything, we are just arguing on the internet after all. Basically there is a ton of passion on my part for having a long term sustainable open ecosystem.

To give you an idea of how long I've been banging this drum read this ancient document: http://chrishecker.com/OpenGL/Press_Release

Anyway most of my real issue is that I feel like ATI has been dropping the ball on developer support.

Total coincidence afaik.

If it's was just developers, but there number of annoying problems for end-user like: no updates for legacy drivers, broken installers, no proper support for laptop drivers aka "go to HP website and grab those from 2009".
Seriously I don't believe those things are expensive to maintain so I can't understand why AMD do that while it's seriously hurt their reputation.

Personally I think it's because they are stretched thin and spend a lot of time concentrating on their console business.

I am all for it!

By the way, isn't Mantle open as well? I read that Nvidia is free to implement Mantle for their cards too!

Yes, Mantle is open... or more accurately will be open eventually, or so they say. It may be possible in the near future for Nvidia to support it. However as it's been mentioned by some others (like John Carmack) OpenGL on Nvidia gets near equivalent performance numbers to those AMD were touting Mantle getting over DirectX 11. As more information about Mantle comes out the more I see comparisons to existing OpenGL functionality.

I kind of suspect Mantle exists because OpenGL keeps going in the direction that Nvidia and Intel agree on, which is often very different than what AMD want. An example of this is AMD didn't want to support reading of textures in vertex shaders; for their architecture design they didn't think they could ever make it efficient. AMD suggested an alternative method, and both methods ended up being part of the official OpenGL spec. Unfortunately it meant AMD still had to support texture reads in the vertex shader which ended up being a common method for certain techniques which meant AMD had a significant performance deficit over Nvidia.

However, that's probably reading way too much into it.

here I was thinking they were really really cool and making changes to coincide with ya'lls update....

Carp, that's awesome.

Well looks like ill be selling my 7850 and going back to nvidia. 780 here i come.

That makes me sick by the way, amd should not be having these support problems, and really supporting consoles.

Consoles are getting to the point of becoming poor mans gaming computers, i love being a PCgamer.

My problem with nvidia is the price point. I can get similar performance for half the price(and electronics are disgustingly expensive here) so it isn't really viable. My last nvidia was a gt500 and that was luck because it had the sweet spot of price/perf. Now you get similar performance for top end cards without the price tag.

It's a damn shame about the dev support though.

Amd has been under serious pressure of late. Looks like they're getting back on a more stable footing but what we're seeing here is the repercussions of the cut backs that were made. I think it was about a year ago they closed their open source development office in Germany. Those guys used to be responsible for the linux drivers and apparently contributed allot to a range of open source projects. A real shame...

Guess where the money for the dev support comes from.

Although with the ongoing cryptcoin mania Nvidia has the price/perf advantage if you look at street prices.

I believe this is in order:

I've been a long time AMD supporter. In fact, I've never bought an Nvidia card, ever, in any of my builds or upgrades (dating back to early 90's).

That is, until yesterday when I got a 760. I would have preferred a 670 but for once I treated myself and just bought what Frys had instead of saving a couple bucks and waiting for delivery.

A part of me is sad, to have defected to Nvidia. Like everybody else I like to root for the underdog, but between legacy drivers lacking in linux and these reports around here, well, AMD really isn't leaving the end user much choice.

But then I fire up PA with my new 760 and start destroying things on a planetary scale with buttery smoothness and all the sadness goes away.

Maybe AMD will go on to do great things with consoles (don't they have both xbox one & ps4?) and hopefully someone else will step up in the PC realm to keep Nvidia honest.

AMD is making Xbox One & PS4's CPU & GPU, and the Wii U (& Wii)'s GPU.

ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro was a fantastic card, nothing could compete with it. By the time the GeForce 9800 GTX came out the tides had turned and GeForce cards were consistently better performing. I was kind of waiting for the Radeon HD 9000 series to see if there'd be another "9800", but instead AMD sidestepped and call them R9 instead.

HD 4000 and 5000 were both excellent as well. Around that time all nvidia was doing was rebranding their old stuff. Which is what the GTX 9000 were, just 8000 with a new name. Most of the GTX200 line was just 8000 rebrands as well save the top end.

They also had the lead with pretty much all of their DX9 cards, in fact I'm pretty sure the reason they lost it with DX10 was because nvidia had pressured MS into releasing a gimped version of the API so they could roll their stuff out sooner. We're seeing some of that planned stuff still trickling into DX11 and onward.

None taken, I read my previous post and I see how someone can totally read the opposite of what I was trying to say. ^^ My bad.

That is basically what I was also trying to say, I am an AMD/ATI fan, but I am really disappointed to hear that they are not supporting you at all! In their situation I assumed the total opposite.

That is terrible, what does AMD expect? It is not that they are GPU and CPU manufacturer #!?!?!

But good point that AMD might be short on staff... what a shame, I really like their products.

Story time.

Back when the very first cards came out that could do pixel shader 2.0 I got really excited. I wanted to experiment with the floating point texture formats and implement HDR, Bloom etc with good shadows. Finally we had programmable hardware again! side note: When I started working in graphics it was all cpu based so the first cards were quite annoying to deal with.

Anyway I cooked up an engine over a couple of weeks. I was using the hottest new nvidia card which supported 2.0. I tried everything but just couldn't get the frame rate up at any kind of decent resolution. It just seemed to not want to go above about 20fps when using the 2.0 features. You also couldn't do blends on floating point targets which made them somewhat hard to work with. Basically it was totally half assed.

Using the exact same code I put in an ati 9800 and it went up to a solid 90fps. No comparison, the ati just worked.

I've heard that AMD and Intel Processors are better at certain tasks . Intel good at number crunching/ amd better at ... handling multiple processes? (I'm pretty sure varrak or Bogulus wrote a metaphor for this or graphics cards)

Can the same be said with ATI and Nvidia cards? Or do the graphics card manufacturers alternate in ability to produce quality graphics cards?

Maybe i'm just generalizing a bit. ( i'm learning a lot more about drivers and graphics cards then I expected)