The last time I owned an AMD video card was more than a decade ago. At the time their video card drivers needed work and could blue screen your box. There was a lot of back and forth on the internet about which driver version to load to get the most stable experience.

Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-f.... This may just be confirmation bias since there are also articles refuting that AMD still has driver issues.

On the gripping hand AMD themselves apparently acknowledge they have issues and are trying to address them . https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-downloa...

> Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place

Maybe for Windows, but the same cannot be said of Linux or macOS, where AMD's choice to open-source their drivers has led to these OSes having great support; while Nvidia, having to support their own closed-source drivers, seemingly hasn't had the bandwidth to get their drivers for these OSes up to par.

Not really, drivers for Navi were equally bad on Linux. Second thing is that you need to wait several months before open source driver is stable, first months you have to use latest kernel + mesa-git. On the other hand, you can use Nvidia blob from day one.

This. I've already decided my next GPU will be AMD regardless of if it's competitive at the top end in terms of performance. I am so sick of nVidia's Linux driver bullshit that I cannot wait to drop them. I don't game that much anymore anyway.

AMD is great for gaming on Linux, especially with projects like radv and ACO.

I'm not super interested in Linux gaming, I just want my desktop to be usable.

Honest question: If you're not interested in gaming, why even get a discrete GPU and not an integrated one? Are you interested in using it for other purposes?

I dual boot Windows for gaming. I work and code on Linux, except my monitor setup + nvidia graphics card results in a virtually unusable desktop. Integrated graphics can't run multiple 4k screens very well, if at all.

I do all my gaming on Linux and AMD works very well for it.

I'm not the author of the previous comments but I use Linux, not interested in gaming, and I have a dedicated GPU (2080ti). Mostly for working with Blender and Houdini, where the integrated one would work as well as using the CPU, at least for the workloads I'm dealing with, so having a dedicated GPU for both simulations and rendering helps a lot to speed up the workflows.

I can answer this question from my own perspective, at least. CPUs with integrated graphics are not as fast as standalone historically. Compare say, a ryzen 3600 to a 3400G.

Passmark below:

3400G: 9425

3600: 17850

for fun

1600: 12444

Linux support exists, but is a royal pain. With my 5500XT, even on Arch linux it wasn't properly supported unless I compiled a few things from Git.

I applaud the open source effort, but let's not pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.

Their Windows drivers are a pain as well, to be honest. I've had more than a few blue screens from various versions of their drivers over the last few years.

And you can undervolt your AMD card with the open source drivers to improve efficiency and gain performance at the same time.

I was on the market for a GPU and I would agree with you and wouldn't say it's confirmation bias. On Amazon, most Radeons have 3.5 stars vs 4.5 for Geforces; many reviewers say they purchased a Radeon only to return it later because of driver issues.

Also, as the owner of Macbook 16" with a Radeon 5500M Pro, I'll add that I find the bootcamp drivers much subpar. They're also rarely updated although the issue seems to be Apple there.

I happen to have a macbook pro now but 10 years ago that was the reason I avoided ATI cards. I had a Dell laptop with one and it always had driver's issues. On a windows machine I have nvidia card and I don't remember the last time I had an issue with it.

Yeah I got a good deal on a RX590 last year and I still regret it. Tons of crashes and outright hard lockups on my desktop. Looking forward to the RTX3070 so I can toss the 590 in the bin

Back in 2018 I was upgrading my computer, and I wanted an all-AMD system, so I picked up a 2700X and a Vega 64. I’m really happy with the 2700X, but I returned the Vega because the Linux drivers (open source and proprietary) were shoddy for separate reasons. I picked up a 1080ti instead and never had a problem.

I've had 2 Nvidia cards (GTX760 and GTX 1070) and between those 1 AMD card (Sapphire Radeon R9 390) and it was the AMD that constantly BSOD on me. It would run well most of the time but crash my PC often. I appreciate the competition but not willing to risk spending so much if AMD still can't manage.

Sounds like a hardware defect to me. I've had the 380 and never had a BSOD even once.

Sapphire 580 here too zero issues

I've had multiple generations of Nvidia GPUs in my PCs, all the way back from a Riva TNT up to a GTX 460 as the last one.

I switched to an RX560 and I couldn't be happier. Linux drivers that actually work and aren't a mostly closed source garbage heap. The current Windows drivers are fine too.

Am I the only person on this site who has had no issues with the blob (aside from Wayland), especially on desktop? The last actual thing that I remember being a bit of a pain was an Optimus laptop years ago but from what I understand that’s finally been officially fixed; the desktop cards worked quite well, including the 2060 in my current desktop.

No, I've been using NVIDIA Linux drivers on RedHat/CentOS for the last 14 years and seldom had anything like the problems everyone complains of here.

I've not had much luck on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus though, maybe that's improved.

The current situation with Wayland and EGLStreams is regrettable though.

Yup, I've got about a dozen motherboard/video card combinations that I'm adminning. All of them require some sort of hack to get the binary driver to work with our code. Most require a kernel flag, some require sub-optimal bios settngs, some require pinning to an old version, and one requires a monitor attached to boot.

Not had a single crash on the Linux open source drivers though, here my RX 550 is rock solid with excellent performance for the given hardware. We have two different Vulkan drivers and two different shader compilers to choose from, all open source.

TSMC slots are transferrable/sellable...

The fact Nvidia hasn't sold their slots to AMD for CPU production, yet AMD's GPU team has given up slots to their CPU team, tells you Nvidias GPU range is more profitable than AMD's one in this high-end market.

Doesn't that assume that the value of the slots is directly proportional to the price of the product you sell from those slots? That seems like quite a big assumption. For example, I would speculate that having a product shortfall (because you sold your manufacturing capacity) is going to significantly impact your market share and thus long term profitability.

For this generation, NV only makes the flagship datacenter/professional GPUs/A100 on TSMC, smaller GPUs are made on Samsung's 8nm process.

30xx parts are made at Samsung on a process inferior to TSMC's N7/N7P. This might indicate that Nvidia's datacenter/HPC parts are worth more than AMD CPU production, but that's not very shocking. Also it would be bad business to sell your slots to your competitor, so they could have ever greater production capacity on a leading-edge node.

> but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots

Your second assertion that they can make more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU is probably correct, but assuming they don't abandon the GPU market entirely, they will still be using fab capacity to produce GPUs.

If they're using limited slots for GPUs anyway, doesn't it make sense to focus on the high-end high-margin parts first?

It makes sense to focus on the GPUs with the highest price per area of die. And remember that the larger the individual chip, the more of the wafer is lost to part failures. So for this rumour to be plausible, AMD’s better GPU tech would probably require larger chips.

I don’t think AMD need to kick Nvidia’s ass to be successful or even competetive.

If they can land a decent GPU that’s between the 3080 and 3090 for an affordable price people will buy it.

They don’t need to beat the 3090 to win, I think that ship has sailed, let Nvidia have the high end market, there’s still plenty of space in the midrange, low end to succeed.

If you don't mind, I have what is probably a dumb question.

Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC.

I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM? Wouldn't it be nice if the the PCI slot wasn't a bottleneck? They're not graphics cards any more... often enough they're used for AI and scientific computing. It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial. Plus eaiser for other companies to get their fingers in things.

> Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM?

How would you achieve any of that? The single meaningful difference between data rates in normal DDR memory and GDDR is that the latter is designed for signaling where the chips are soldered directly on a pcb with very short traces, whereas the former is designed to accommodate the longer distances and narrower buses necessitated by having socket connections.

Any hypothetical new GPU connector would still have to have the memory soldered on the same board as the GPU. (Or, if you are going for the more advanced packaging methods, connected through an interposer or EMIB or something.)

> Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still?

Because PCI-Express is basically the best anyone can do. It has been rapidly evolved to the point where in the past there was a lot of win by using custom busses, but now everyone just uses PCIe because it's the best available. (And I mean everyone, almost all of the remaining custom buses used in high-performance workloads are basically PCIe with a few restrictions loosened.)

Basically the only way you can go up from PCIe is to go wider. And if you do that, what you will likely to do is to make a LGA or PGA style socket format, that talks PCIe.

> Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC.

PCIe is the fastest I/O mechanism in computers these days.

> I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better.

GDDR6 and HBM2 RAM cannot be broken out. GDDR6 requires you to solder the RAM directly onto the board, while HBM2 RAM requires an interposer with 4096 individual wires connecting the HBM2 stacks to the GPU.

> more modular design a bunch of things would be better.

Its very difficult to make a "modular" set of 4096 wires (HBM2). Or a "modular" set of GDDR6x (which is now using 4-bits per clock cycle per pin, thanks to PAM4: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15978/micron-spills-on-gddr6x...)

The quality of the connections requires direct soldering in the case of GDDR6x, or incredibly specialized packaging in the case of HBM2. These RAM architectures, while incredibly fast, are almost impossible to extend.

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> It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial.

Xeon Phi tried to do that, and it failed. I'm not entirely sure what you expect to gain from moving the GPU closer to the center of the motherboard.

Again: high-speed RAM trades flexibility for high-performance. So any GPU using the high-speed RAM like HBM2 or GDDR6 will be stuck at very limited configurations.

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DDR4 and DDR5 are an order of magnitude less bandwidth, but their ability for multiple configurations is what makes the motherboard even possible.

Remove the ability to buy more or less RAM per computer, and what do you have? You just have a graphics card. Its not like you'll be able to pipe information from your hard drives or SSDs faster than a PCIe pipe anyway.

What makes you think that PCIe is a bottleneck? You can just populate your machine with another GPU if you need more memory or cores (thanks to the PCIe bus system).

While reading about OpenGL programming, one of the first things nearly all books mention, is the cost of moving data from your system to the GPU's memory.... So I assumed that's still true, is it not? Adding more GPU's does not change things as much as reduce the problem by providing more space.

Memory bandwidth is usually the bottleneck before PCIe.

You see this effect in other things too, such as Intel NICs being able to place packets directly in L3 cache because avoiding main memory is such a huge win (for both bandwidth and latency reasons):

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/data-direct-i-o-t...

That is true in a sense of: Of all the things in the graphics pipeline moving data between CPU and GPU is the slowest thing you can do. But that doesn't really mean the PCIe bus is slow. The truth is that most machines have a single GPU, connected to the CPU with all 16 PCIe lanes but they usually hit their performance cap utilizing much less then that.

This is coming out to PCs nowish: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...

Nvidia's 3000 series will support it, the new consoles have it one form or another, and we can safely presume AMD's 6000 series will support it as well.

Under Windows, obviously. Linux will be a completely different bucket of chum.