The reasons I got an AMD GPU for my gaming machine:
much better support for Linux gaming
That’s it. That’s the list.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD (nor also-ran Intel) have come out with meaningfully novel hardware approaches in a long fucking time. It’s all horizontal scaling on the die (plus “let’s add more memory”) combined with incremental efficiency improvements in die layouts and chip lithography process / feature size.
This is why monopolies are bad. They have a vested interest in acquiring and/or killing any company - indeed, any innovation - that has even a slight potential to disrupt their market dominance.
This isn’t really possible anymore (at least unaided by LLM). In the era of fixed function pipelines, it was possible to do something new under the hood.
The current standards of Vulkan and DirectX have exposed a lot of inner workings to extract performance which makes it hard to make a large shift. While this makes it easy to use the HW, it also makes it hard for the devs to have a single algorithm for diff HWs, ie, each new feature will need in investment by them.
For any novel functionality, devs will not like to work on features only on a small set of HW, unless they are aided by HW vendors. This creates a chicken egg situation: new features don’t get prioritized up by devs which makes it hard to market the features which makes it a small market which makes it likely not to be a priority by devs.
In this era where code is cheap, perhaps we’ll see more fast moving devs and HW both
Maintain the same algorithm optimised for each new generation. The algo needs to tailored to suit the game but adjusting per HW which was a daunting task (and why PC ports were sub optimal on a console comparable HW)
AI needs much simpler HW (since the SW is bespoke) and that’s why we see so many startups tackling this. I’m sure as ML becomes a bigger part of gaming (via coop matrix and LinAlg), we might see analog entering the gaming HW.
Gaming HW has a lot more cruft added on by standards and legacy SW. The number of gaming HW startups can be counted on one hand. QC and Apple have taken generations to get their HW ready. Even Intel needed 2 generations for their dGPU despite having a long line of iGPU
FPGA are very inefficient as compared to ASIC and need dedicated programming. It feels further than analog if we’re talking about a gaming HW using them
Your info is out of date. Nvidia drivers on Linux are trivial to install these days. They provide a deb repo (and others) with both the proprietary and open source drivers. Add, install, done.
It has? My laptop and desktop haven’t had any problems with it. They’ve been suspending and resuming just fine.
I did have one problem where on my desktop, the latest version caused everything to go really slowly, but downgrading fixed it. But that’s part of using the latest drivers, instead of a stable version. You can get the same problems using the latest version of any in-tree driver, or the kernel itself.
I found the experience bad when i tried bazzite on a spare drive to test it out on my nvidia desktop. NVIDIA legacy gpus that stopped getting updates and included in distros also a pain when it came to laptops for me with bugs coming out of sleep.
Meanwhile AMD and Intel laptops been trouble free throughout the years, so I’ve avoided getting NVIDIA GPU laptops.
The reasons I got an AMD GPU for my gaming machine:
That’s it. That’s the list.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD (nor also-ran Intel) have come out with meaningfully novel hardware approaches in a long fucking time. It’s all horizontal scaling on the die (plus “let’s add more memory”) combined with incremental efficiency improvements in die layouts and chip lithography process / feature size.
This is why monopolies are bad. They have a vested interest in acquiring and/or killing any company - indeed, any innovation - that has even a slight potential to disrupt their market dominance.
Nvidia has released lots of innovation. Mostly in software, but still really cool stuff. Shame about their non-Windows driver support, though.
This isn’t really possible anymore (at least unaided by LLM). In the era of fixed function pipelines, it was possible to do something new under the hood.
The current standards of Vulkan and DirectX have exposed a lot of inner workings to extract performance which makes it hard to make a large shift. While this makes it easy to use the HW, it also makes it hard for the devs to have a single algorithm for diff HWs, ie, each new feature will need in investment by them.
For any novel functionality, devs will not like to work on features only on a small set of HW, unless they are aided by HW vendors. This creates a chicken egg situation: new features don’t get prioritized up by devs which makes it hard to market the features which makes it a small market which makes it likely not to be a priority by devs.
In this era where code is cheap, perhaps we’ll see more fast moving devs and HW both
What’s an LLM going to do to help, repeat their own documentation back at them?
Maintain the same algorithm optimised for each new generation. The algo needs to tailored to suit the game but adjusting per HW which was a daunting task (and why PC ports were sub optimal on a console comparable HW)
You’re not considering FPGAs, or the analog domain. For example:
AI needs much simpler HW (since the SW is bespoke) and that’s why we see so many startups tackling this. I’m sure as ML becomes a bigger part of gaming (via coop matrix and LinAlg), we might see analog entering the gaming HW.
Gaming HW has a lot more cruft added on by standards and legacy SW. The number of gaming HW startups can be counted on one hand. QC and Apple have taken generations to get their HW ready. Even Intel needed 2 generations for their dGPU despite having a long line of iGPU
FPGA are very inefficient as compared to ASIC and need dedicated programming. It feels further than analog if we’re talking about a gaming HW using them
Your info is out of date. Nvidia drivers on Linux are trivial to install these days. They provide a deb repo (and others) with both the proprietary and open source drivers. Add, install, done.
“Done”, until the complexity of being an out of tree kernel driver causes yet another issue… suspend has been broken for months on 615+ series
It has? My laptop and desktop haven’t had any problems with it. They’ve been suspending and resuming just fine.
I did have one problem where on my desktop, the latest version caused everything to go really slowly, but downgrading fixed it. But that’s part of using the latest drivers, instead of a stable version. You can get the same problems using the latest version of any in-tree driver, or the kernel itself.
It doesn’t sound like you’re using your laptop for gaming
Nonetheless, having fixable problems are still problems that will be a hard barrier for prospective users to adopt.
I found the experience bad when i tried bazzite on a spare drive to test it out on my nvidia desktop. NVIDIA legacy gpus that stopped getting updates and included in distros also a pain when it came to laptops for me with bugs coming out of sleep.
Meanwhile AMD and Intel laptops been trouble free throughout the years, so I’ve avoided getting NVIDIA GPU laptops.