Why has there been no critical look at how path tracing can be done on AMD GPU's?

For example this guy with an XTX is path tracing in Cyberpunk with 120+ FPS.

It’s a mod that culls some bounces whilst maintaining almost exact image parity with the original implementation and the spoeed improvement is over 2x on the XTX at 1440P or above.

I am not into RT and do not care about it but I bought an XFX MERC 310 earlier today and it will arrive likely on Tuesday next week.

I went down a rabbit hole and found out about this.

Comment to the video on YT.

"Actual good optimization lets non-RTX 4000 cards to do PT pretty well. FSR 3.1 and XeSS 1.3 DP4A give vendor agnostic upscaling roughly around the level of earlier DLSS 2.x versions, FSR even without using AI. AMD and even small dev teams implemented very solid Frame Gen and Latency mitigation tech. And both the upscaling and frame gen are easier to implement and more open. Just how manufactured is Nvidia’s advantage. "

A quick reminder of the history of Nvidia’s not so savory past.

2002 - Nvidia begins “the Way its meant to be played” marketing campaign that proved to be a way of sabatoging ATI GPUs by influencing the developers of high profile games to neglect optimizing their games for AMD GPUs and use Nvidia optimized code instead.

2003 - Nvidia starts getting caught sabatoging ATI GPUs by cheating 3D Mark benchmarks. Nvidia secretly minipulated their drivers to reduce the render distances and fraudulently boost performance result for their GPUs.

2006 - Nvidia heavily suspected of sabotaging ATI GPUs in the tech press by privately paying actors or offering free hardware to reviewers to promote Nvidia products online. This heavy suspicion of Nvidia collusion has only grown over the years even to this day.

2009 - Nvidia launches a new gimmick scheme in PhysX aimed at gimping AMD GPUs by purchasing Agea the makers of PhysXto make it run exclusively on their hardware depraving gamers from advanced physics support too this day. Nvidia also explicitly gimped CPU support by Neglecting to use SSE3 or AVX. Nvidia would go on for years using PhysX as a gimmick to attract gamers by paying developers to inject PhysX into games and benchmarks to make AMD GPUs run poorly.

2010 - AnandTech confesses that Nvidia aggressively persues control over GPU review websites to hand pick the game selection for benchmarks and control product comparison narritives to make AMD GPUs look worse than Nvidia GPUs.

2010 - Nvidia launches a new gimmick scheme in hardware tessellation aimed at sabotaging AMD GPUs by adding an excessive amount of tessellation cores to their GPU and then paying game developers to inject an excessive amount of tessellation into games to choke AMD GPU performance. Nvidia even tried to sabatoge a game benchmark by sending review websites their own custom build of that benchmark.

2013 - Nvidia colluded with AMD upper management, using them as spies. According to AMD several upper management employees at AMD leaked 100,000 confidential files to Nvidia before leaving AMD to work for Nvidia. The files included future company strategies, trade secret technology, etc.

2014 - Nvidia launches GameWorks; a collection of graphics gimmicks optimized for Nvidia hardware and designed to run poorly on AMD GPUs. Nvidia influenced game developers for many years to inject GameWorks collection of gimmicks into popular games to sabatoge AMD GPU performance. In contrast with AMD GPUOpen/Fidelityfx which is open source and runs well on AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

2018 - Nvidia launched GPP (GPU partner program) aimed at sabotaging AMD GPUs by intimidating 3rd party AIB makers to exclude their GPU brand to Nvidia. This cause such backlash that Nvidia cancelled the program.

2018 - Nvidia launched a new exclusive gimmick scheme in hardware ray tracing once again aimed at gimping AMD GPUs. Nvidia desperately scrambling to differentiate their GPUs from AMD, sought to persue a new gimmick disguised as a supposed passion for raytracing. Nvidia suckers gamers into giving away 50% performance on up to $2,000 GPUs just to turn on hardware ray tracing features which currently results in little to no relevant visual improvement over traditional modern PC game rendering methods. This is currently an ongoing gimmick aimed at sabotaging AMD GPUs by putting over engineered ray tracing processors in their GPUs and then influencing developers to inject pointless performance killing ray traced features into popular games which makes all GPUs run poorly but it makes AMD GPUs perform even worse.

2020 - Nvidia’s gets exposed for using their review program to control third party reviews by granting exlusive access to free GPUs, early drivers and new product information to reviewers willing to align their narratives to one in favor of Nvidia. The youtube channel Hardware Unboxed ousted Nvidia for banning them from receiving free GPUs as an attempt to bribe them into making videos that promote RTX raytacing.

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Problem is that Radeon has about 10% of the market (and it is falling pretty much every quarter and is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Whether or not what happened in the past was fair, Radeon has also harmed itself by simply being late to implement feature parity, get on board with developers working on AAA titles, mispricing its own hardware based on its own flawed perception of its own products and simply not understanding the gaming market in general.

Not only does it not make sense currently for most developers to support RT / PT optimization for Radeon hardware, it doesn’t make much sense to go out of their way to ensure a proper implementation of FSR or AMD Frame Generation is part of development. If they fall below 10% by any meaningful margin, it is possible that some smaller teams will exclude Radeon from testing during development and leave it to a post launch patch (or wait for driver updates to fix things). If they fall to 5% or less, they will be treated like Intel (i.e., just ignored and all optimization effort will only go to NVidia).

I’ve been a fan of AMD for a long time and it pains me to see how far Radeon has fallen over the last several years. But make no mistake, Radeon has lost the battle and the ‘war’ at this point. They should seriously consider existing the dGPU market after RDNA 4 flops hard and they use up any outstanding wafer agreements they have.

They can regroup into a more focused AI team supporting additional Instinct efforts and of course continue to keep around enough support to help Sony with future PlayStation development (it looks like Microsoft is going to be exiting the console business soon).

So rather than care about shit business practices that harm everyone even the Nvidia GPU buyers, hence the ridiculous monopoly forming and low VRAM.

We should just allow Nvidia to do whatever?

Intel is no where near AMD let alone Nvidia.

Another guy with PT on their XTX.

Well the majority got cucked and will get fuqqed.

:smile:

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That is a very revisionist view of AMD’s/ATi’s success in the past and current succes. A really bad take really. Intel did the same things in the CPU space to dominate that market and now Karma is catching up with them. The issue is not about AMD under performing. The issue is Nvidia using deceptive and anti competitive business practices to lock their AIBs and consumers into their eco system and the willingness of influencial people to go along with it for the almighty dollar. Case in point, zLuda allows CUDA code to run natively on AMD cards and they are just as petformant if not more than Nvidia cards. So Nvudia changes their EULA and threatens the companies supporting and using zLuda so that people do not see that they are being fleeced by Nvidia.

This book sheds light on how over the top Jensen is about winning and literally destroying the competition.

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Do you want to pay 4,000 for a GPU? Nvidia’s pricing, as crazy as it is, is held in check by the existence of AMD GPUs. Second, competition makes everyone better, even Nvidia. With AMD out of the game, Nvidia will have no reason to push forward and innovate either. I want no one company to have a monopoly whether I like them or not.

What I would like to see is AMD do to Nvidia what they are doing to Intel right now in the CPU space.

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This is financially not possible. At parity of performance, AMD requires a discount of 40%+ relative to NVidia to get the market to even consider them as an alternative. That may not allow profitability and as a publicly traded company, AMD cannot justify losing billions of dollars a quarter to ‘gain share’ against a competitor in a market that has a fraction of a profit margin compared to every other business line they compete in (think Instinct and ML/AI).

In order for AMD to compete and become relevant they need to:

  • Have software feature comparable to NVidia (which they do not have)
  • Sell at a massive discount for equivalent performance multiple generations in a row (i.e., sell everything at a loss for a minimum of two - three years)
  • Somehow keep funding R&D while losing money in a segment they are completely irrelevant in

Part of the reason why Radeon is currently in the state it is in is that they tried a while back to gain share by heavily discounting prices for comparable performance. The end result was no money for R&D which lead them to fall behind multi-generationally in both hardware and software.

Radeon has no way forward unless NVidia literally walks away from the market (or Jensen passes and a moron takes over NVidia). This might happen. It might not. But NVidia doesn’t see Radeon as a competitor and doesn’t restrict pricing based on anything AMD does right now given they have only 10% of the market. In other words, Radeon is already effectively absent from the dGPU market and they no longer influence what is happening there in any way, shape, or form.

I think this is what people though about AMD as a whole a few CPU generations back. Ask Intel how they feel about that now.

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That is like, you opinion, man. Losing Market share does not mean that AMD is losing money. And again, AMD is making in roads in the Enterprise AI space. Intel is also making in roads there. Nvidia got a 10 year head start in the AI space when no one, I mean no one, took it seriously. Now everyone is playing catch up, even Meta, Google, Microsoft, and etc. Look at all of the non-CUDA based models out there now. It takes time but competition is good. Whether in the CPU space or the GPU space, AMD has always marketed themselves as the cost advantage and good enough alternative. Eve while on top of the CPU space they are still cheaper with than the comparable Intel CPU. Competition is good for the consumer.

Your take is pretty absolutist and it seems like you are ignoring some real facts out there. But how ever you slice it, what goes up must come down. Nvidia has a major target on their back and if they don’t innovate, some one will take the crown.

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I would disagree and call this a bad take, your forgetting about all the triple a games that are console exclusive runing on amd rdna in those consoles. Yes amd may not have the corner specifically on dgpu’s how ever filliped the other way they do have the corner on consoles and igpus. Developing an architecture and features for one means they have a lot of the leg work done for the other, why not keep trying in the dgpu space competition is good, 10% market is better than 0 and makes money you would not have gotten otherwise, and further capitaalizes on research and development you did for those console and mobile products.

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To be fair, most of the mobile GPUs are spin offs of ATi’s and AMD’s iGPU and dGPU IPs. Even though AMD sold thos off as a cost cutting measure during the Heavy Machinery days, it is still a win for us. Also, AMD gives more back to the open source community than Nvidia has ever done which is a reason why the majority of GNU/Linux users like myself have all AMD or AMD/Intel desktop and laptop builds.

Good will is good will and Nvidia is hella hostile to the open source world. Their Jeston AI products exist off of the backs of the nouveau devs. They only run the open source driver but that is after Nvidia co opted their driver so that they only needed to do minimal work to sell “AI”. Even now, the top deva of nouveau are not even paid by Nvidia, let alone actually work for them.

Over all, there is more than just gaming and AI market share out there. Market share that Nvidia either cannot or will not compete in. Again, competition is good for the customer and comsumer.

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