Possibly an Interesting Topic to Cover?

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
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I have been thinking recently that it would be an interesting topic for Logan and Wendell to cover various issues regarding nVidia and AMD.

The first part is the myth that nVidia has better drivers, something I've found to be completely untrue, as have others. When actually analysed, it seems nVidia actually produces consistently worse software.

This isn't really an AMD versus nVidia thing, but an observation on how nVidia have the reputation for golden drivers, and AMD have the reputation for bad drivers when the reality is actually the opposite.

Also, another subject is the dodgy doings that nVidia seems to get itself caught up in, with regards to proprietary software and the underhanded tactics that they have used on a number of occasions.

It's something I think Logan and Wendell would find particularly distasteful considering the topics regularly discussed on The Tek.

There have been multiple instances of nVidia doing something dodgy that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. Batmann Arkham Asylum with Anti-Aliasing to name one, Assassin's Creed and DX10.1 is another. The way they were pushing developers to use extreme levels of tessellation, levels beyond what you could actually discern so that performance was dragged down for everyone, just not as much for nVidia users.

The way they use and implement PhysX with developers, where basic physics effects are left out of games unless you play with GPU PhysX enabled to give an artificial impression that PhysX is doing much more than it actually is.

As you can see, I don't think much of nVidia, so I don't buy their products, however this isn't an nVidia versus AMD thing. I dislike nVidia for things that they themselves as a company have chosen to do, and the reason I buy AMD is simply because they are the only option for PC gaming if you don't want to support nVidia and their underhanded ways financially.

 

 

 
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I agree with you. 

Although my dislike towards nvidia wouldn't prevent me from buying their GPU if it performs better for the price. 

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Well so far I've had the luxury of nVidia always charging more for the same or less performance.

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I've always bought what worked best for my use, even though now I'm pretty unsatisfied with my GTX680, because it sucks, I was hoping (which traditionally was the case), that nVidia would produce better proprietary drivers than AMD, but that turned out to be an expensive miscalculation lol. nVidia drivers now suck balls, I don't even get OpenCL or CUDA acceleration for Darktable, which is pretty lame. On my backup gaming PC, which has a 7850 for the moment, everything works honky dory. And I see the same on the production machines in my offices, where the cheap FirePros clean the floor with the expensive nVidias. And it's not just nVidia, it's also Intel, Asus, HP, Canon, etc... all been sources of grief lately... 

I have the impression that the whole hardware quality in general is going down the drain, because they just don't care anymore about the hardware, they only care about marketing reports and sales. I actually had to replace 3 2 year old HP lasers (1500 bucks a pop new), that cost over 500 bucks (a pop!) to get fixed, and didn't return anywhere near fixed. We got one of those fixed ourselves by resetting the print counter through a hardware hack, so that was clear right, never buying a single HP product again in my life. At the same time, I have Epson 8-colour printers running overtime for almost 10 years, and they work as new, and I buy a new one 8 months ago, and it's good for the trash container after 6 months. The same with Canon, been running a Canon copier for 10 years, I get talked into buying a new one, also Canon, it breaks within 3 weeks and the guy has been around 5 times and still can't get it to work right, so the old one is going back. I'm really frustrated with Asus, every single mobo of them that I had bought in the last 2 years (and those are expensive WS mobos) has died after first working so badly and unreliably that it was nearly causing a nervous breakdown with the operators, and Asus don't do RMA, they just don't answer the request form and refuse to send me an RMA number, so I had to take that up with the distributor I bought it from, and exchanged them for cheaper Gigabyte GA boards that do seem to work as they should (knock on wood). Bad hardware quality is really costing a lot of money and effort these days, it serioulsy pisses me off.

As to nVidia, every feature they promote their products with, is either the result of an artificial software blockade, that can easily be lifted with a minor hack, or doesn't work as it should, not even after 6 months of software development, and of course, they still refuse to submit code to the linux foundation, which is inexcusable for a company that tries to monetize linux based products. And they are fucking expensive for offering nothing more than the competition (like get a Beagleboard or even better a quad core A31 based dev board with a display+button cape - or "shield" as they call it with arduino, so nVidia doesn't even hide where they got their idea from... - and you have an nVidia Shield for a quarter of the price, and no, that's not an exaggeration). So I'm definitely not buying any nVidia stuff for the moment, and will be trying to keep the things that actually work for as long as possible. With everything running on linux there is hardly a performance increase in latest and greatest gear anyways, and the existing gear is more than fast enough.

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I really do hope Logan or Wendell picks this up and addresses it on one of their videos because it really does need to be done.


I also certainly agree that a lot of hardware is being made more cheaply, or with an intended fail date so that you keep having to replace the hardware.

I have 2 HP laser printers, and it's disgusting the level with which they claim the toner cartridges are empty.

I ran my printer on a set of cartidges for a year after the printer was reporting the cardtridges were empty, simply by enabling a setting that was along the lines of "ignore the reported cartridge quantities".

Speaking of Asus, I have an old P5K deluxe that literally caught fire, running a Q6600 at stock speeds.

I typically did like Asus boards, however their prices have been going up for what I can see as no reason at all other than brand name.

I have a few Gigabyte boards in my PCs at the moment. I actually like Gigabyte stuff mainly because they have an RMA centre within the UK, so the costs of return would be fairly negligible.

 

As to nVidia, every feature they promote their products with, is either the result of an artificial software blockade, that can easily be lifted with a minor hack, or doesn't work as it should, not even after 6 months of software development, and of course, they still refuse to submit code to the linux foundation, which is inexcusable for a company that tries to monetize linux based products. And they are fucking expensive for offering nothing more than the competition (like get a Beagleboard or even better a quad core A31 based dev board with a display+button cape - or "shield" as they call it with arduino, so nVidia doesn't even hide where they got their idea from... - and you have an nVidia Shield for a quarter of the price, and no, that's not an exaggeration). So I'm definitely not buying any nVidia stuff for the moment, and will be trying to keep the things that actually work for as long as possible. With everything running on linux there is hardly a performance increase in latest and greatest gear anyways, and the existing gear is more than fast enough.

This is part of my main issue with nVidia, they do a lot of this stuff, but deny it. They have a focus group, but deny it, they have had countless hardware problems, but deny it and yet there's so many nVidia fanboys that think nVidia can do no wrong at all.

The drivers thing is the weirdest one for me, I really don't understand where the golden drivers thing has come from. To clarify something I said earlier as well, I don't think AMD have golden drivers, but their drivers are consistently more stable than nVidia's.

One of the main reasons I brought this up is that I recall Logal claiming that nVidia's drivers are consistently more stable than nVidia's and felt a bit let down that he'd been swept up in to the nVidia hype around drivers.

 
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Agree with you. I've been a evga user for 10 years, so I'd like to know if I can trust AMD.

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It is an interesting discussion. However, anti-competitive practices are not uncommon. AMD has its own bad business practices. AMD has been fined, Nvidia has been fined, Intel has been fined. So I must ask, is it a hot topic?

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/27/amd-and-anti-competitive-practices.aspx

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Well back way back when, I remember ATi did have worse drivers than Nvidia. However I think more games were optimized for Nvidia than for ATi, and that certainly made an Nvidia card perform better than an ATi one with similar specs correct? I could be wrong, but it seems like this was the case years back. More optimization somehow equals more stable drivers? Then came the whole latency and frame pacing clusterfuck with those graphs that made Nvidia look extremely consistent vs AMD all over the place. Moot point now anyway as AMD have taken this issue to heart.



The fanboys and hivemind really bother me. I've heard ASUS don't need better support because they're so good that their products almost never fail. Seriously?

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Because their actions are to the detriment of the gaming industry, and is very short sighted of them as they have no customers without the PC gaming industry.

That's the biggest issue, they are happy to pay developers off to gimp games for everyone, just to give them an artificial "edge" in performance simply because of their proprietary rubbish.

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The whole time I've been building my own PCs, I've very rarely had any driver problems, and the ones that I did have were caused by something I'd done. Both (then) ATi/AMD and nVidia. I stopped buying nVidia when I realised that they were doing underhanded things.

That aside, the frame latency/pacing thing was blown massively out of proportion, and I found people who had nVidia graphics cards would go really out of their way to let people using AMD cards, that their frame rates weren't consistent. The real issue was multi-GPU configurations, but it was odd to see people telling others what they are experiencing when they don't actually know themselves. 

As for Asus, I've had an Asus motherboard catch fire before, and it wasn't even due to overclocking, it just decided one day to burst in to flame.

 
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Don't Leave out a small footnote for Intels recent progress on their APU's

I know they cant play complex 3D titles but the driver set on Linux is outstanding and they are not too bad as a result when compared to AMD's APU's on Linux. They probably cater for many more PC gamers on laptops (which is the majority according to steam surveys) than people would give credit for!