Try that under Linux sometime. It's a different song there thanks to Mesa.
>opengl
Is not the most popular API, and AMD had, until recently, limited economic resources, which they mostly directed towards their CPU team and towards hardware. For their proprietary windows efforts, they needed laser focus on what's most important: The newest and most popular APIs.
There's money these days, and they multiplied the size of their driver team, but money spent on OpenGL would be indeed wasted, as there's a pretty compelling solution for this API from the Mesa guys, in the form of an opengl implementation that's on top of Vulkan: Zink.
I expect future GPUs and drivers (for all platforms) to absolutely not bother with opengl and simply ship Zink instead.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...
I'm really not finding anything that supports this claim, can you substantiate it? I see scattered sub-60fps reports in Minecraft for both Nvidia & AMD. It seems to just be a "minecraft's engine is shit" thing, not an AMD thing?
But I'm not seeing any actual comparisons or head-to-heads or anything showing AMD in particular is struggling with Minecraft in particular. This unknown quality benchmark is the only thing I'm finding for Minecraft: https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-57... and it's definitely not struggling to hit 500 fps numbers at 1080p, either.
And other OpenGL games & apps are not showing any severe AMD issues, although the only significant sample of those are on Linux so that also has a different OS, so there certainly doesn't appear to be anything systemically wrong with AMD's OpenGL as you're claiming. Unless for some reason they just never brought over the way better Linux OpenGL driver to Windows, which would be highly unexpected & definitely something that needs evidence to support.
> zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games
This is just completely false and seems to just be because your pet peeve is Minecraft in particular? Both Nvidia & AMD discuss popular games not just the latest AAA games. Usually in their latency section, since that's where it comes up as more relevant (esports games), but it's definitely not an ignored category entirely.
(Which is not the case for RADV, the Vulkan implementation)
When you're using AMD or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which are way faster, then you're not using anything interesting from Mesa.
EDIT: Also Mesa's open source Radeon driver came from AMD.
Haha, no.
The driver bugs are what I'm most worried about though. I remember when I got a 4670 in 2008 there was a cursor corruption bug (google it, it's common) and if you didn't shake the mouse enough for it to fix itself it'd crash. Then I built a new PC with a 5770 and I still had it. Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. Then 2x280X and still had it. It even occurred on Linux once. Then I went Nvidia for a few generations and it seems AMD finally fixed it. It seems fixed now (maybe because of new hardware) based on internet searches but from 2008-2015 the bug was there. And this is just one example of things.
Not that Nvidia drivers have ever been perfect but I never ran into this kind of shit so often for so long on their cards. Hopefully I don't end up regretting the 6900 XT because of it.
This cursor corruption bug was ridiculous. I ended up not playing some games (I think Dota) because I would get this bug. I went with an Nvidia card as my next one because of that as well.
It's interesting how something that seems relatively minor could have such an impact on purchasing decisions.
You can see problems today like the mouse cursor not respecting Windows 10's night-shift color filter for the same reason.
This pointer not respecting night-shift hits the trifecta hat trick. There's a registry fix, of course, but the first time I saw it, I thought "huh, that's weird". How did this get out without somebody on the release train thinking to themselves the exact same thing?
But my simple 3400G based rig using the integrated Vega11 plays stock minecraft just fine @ 1440p and 20 chunk viewing distance with everything else set to max.
The old ICD interfaces that OpenGL drivers rely on, might not be around forever, and so far Windows doesn't support them in sandboxed processes.
Raw performance looks fine, its all the lack of news on the features and zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games that get benchmarked and they need to run well too. Not to mention all the bugs, if I buy an AMD card I can guarantee based on history something weird will happen for the life of the card, it always has for the past 20+ years, I haven't yet had a clean experience with an ATI/AMD card and I have owned a bunch of them.
What I really need AMD to say and do is acknowledge how important a good customer experience is with their driver stack, how every game and API matter, that they understand that customer experience is reality and are now committing it to history for good. Then they can sell me a high priced card, until they do well its got to be a lot cheaper to be worth the risk.