
AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle - fortran77
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-reckons-it-can-win-the-high-end-gpu-battle-and-dethrone-nvidia-just-like-it-did-with-intel
======
jamesblonde
The big problem right now is that ROCm, AMD's equivalent to Cuda for deep
learning, is not supported for the consumer Radeon Navi cards. I had hoped it
would be supported in ROCm 3.0 when that was released - but there has been no
official word, which is worrying. If AMD are to compete in the
GPU/DeepLearning space, it will be because they have hardware that is
competitive (not even as good as Nvidia), low cost, and doesn't have the same
EULA licensing restrictions as Nvidia. Could you imagine taking your
TensorFlow program on AWS and just running the same code on a AMD GPU, but
costing 25% of a V100 (with 80% of the performance)? That is where they should
be. And the "run unchanged TensorFlow program" is not actually a problem -
ROCm has been upstreamed into TensorFlow. It is support for their own Navi
GPUs that is the software problem right now!

~~~
atq2119
I agree that the lack of (official) Navi support is just bad strategy on AMD's
part, but I disagree with your numbers.

Their goal needs to be performance parity or dominance, and then perhaps offer
a slight discount. That's how they're succeeding with Zen on CPUs. Offering
the kind of steep discount you write about is just bad business.

~~~
jamesblonde
At the high-end (V100), Nvidia are price gouging, so there is room for a
profitable strategy here where AMD significantly undercut Nvidia. My reasoning
comes from my belief that AMD will not reach performance parity in the next
generation - for deep learning, at least. If the new Arcturus GPU is
competitive with Nvidia's new Ampere chip, that would be great. But they won't
sell if they are not significantly cheaper. But they won't be significantly
cheaper (Arcturus will be the "Enterprise" GPU). However, Big Navi will be
much cheaper and can be used in a data center for deep learning without the
legal problems that using a 3080Ti would have. I see this as the same "war"
between Enterprise hard-disks from 10-15 years ago. Google came out and built
their infrastructure on cheap commodity disks. But Dell, HPE and other vendors
would not let you use them - they said they were inferior, etc. Commodity GPUs
could "democratize" deep learning - ordinary servers could just include a
couple of GPUs as a cheap add-on.

------
pixelpoet
AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing
relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s
HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with
11GB.

Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better
with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your
data is not so compressible (often the case in GPGPU) this advantage
disappears.

Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially
OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive.

~~~
bamboozled
I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup.

As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can
help it). What a pain.

A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were
ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?

~~~
Nullabillity
Nvidia used to be the less bad option, but AMD's transition to AMDGPU
leapfrogged that a long time ago.

They're still focused on their proprietary drivers, and naturally that means
that they're way behind on supporting modern kernels. That's an issue if you
have other hardware that only had support added recently. Their integration
with X11's autoconfig also tends to have.. problems.

Nouveau basically doesn't work for their modern GPUs. My work laptop has a
1660Ti, and X11/Nouveau still can't render anything with it.
Wayland/Gnome/Nouveau kinda sorta works, but I'd rather not have to use
Wayland if I can avoid it.

Nvidia's support for PRIME is lacking. Their official stance was that you
should restart your X11 session every time you wanted to swap. Bumblebee kind
of worked, but was very slow and unstable. It looks like they _finally_
implemented support for dynamic PRIME now, but of course they had to name
their trigger environment variable something else, so that existing scripts
for AMD PRIME wouldn't work.

------
parsimo2010
Even if everything the article says is true, and the AMD software environment
was also improved to compete with Nvidia, it's probably still not enough to
beat Nvidia.

The best they are claiming with Big Navi is 30% faster than a 2080 Ti. Sounds
great, but they are comparing a card that won't be available for a year with a
card that has been on the market for over a year already. Nvidia will have
been working on faster stuff, and the best case for AMD is that they force
Nvidia to release their next generation of products faster than they
originally planned.

This isn't the same case as Intel which had been struggling with their 10nm
process and security issues, which meant their current chips actually slowed
down and they didn't have any new answers ready when AMD came out with Zen 2.
We have seen that Nvidia has an answer for everything that AMD has done so far
(price drops and Super variants to make the Nvidia cards remain the best
choice at every level), and likely has an answer for their next few steps. I
think the best that AMD can hope for is to achieve parity, they certainly
won't be dethroning Nvidia.

~~~
t0mas88
I agree, the author makes a vague point about the 3080 not being released yet,
but AMD also hasn't released their new chip yet.

What I think will be great for consumers is AMD releasing a good competing
offer in a similar timeframe as Nvidia releasing their next generation. That
may limit the Nvidia price increases, because over the past few generations
they have gone up a lot for their top offering. And even a year after release
they're still high. That can't stay like that if the next gen mid range AMD
has higher performance.

------
AmVess
They aren't going to win anything until they fix their laughably bad drivers
and keep them fixed. I have several Ryzens, but there's no way I'd go anywhere
near their graphics cards.

~~~
perceptronas
Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)

~~~
winter_blue
Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia _on Linux_???

I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had _a truly horrible experience_
on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching
my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had
on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play
games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a Steam derivative of Wine), as well
as native Linux games. So I do want a GPU. (Although, at this point I've even
considered getting a laptop with no GPU and only integrated Intel graphics,
since I want to at least be able to do business/work without problems.)

~~~
nl
The NVidia Optimus switchable cards are not well supported on Linux.

On desktop NVidia is good. On laptops I like Intel graphics. because I don't
want to muck around with getting working drivers.

~~~
zepearl
I agree. On laptops I usually have an nVidia hybrid GPU but I always switch it
off as I don't need it and use only the embedded Intel GPU.

Actually getting the nVidia GPU "really" switched off has often been a bit of
a challenge.

Currently on a Lenovo P71 what I do is to have the nVidia-module not loaded
(blacklisted or not even installed), load the "bbswitch" module and then
execute "tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF" (and check with "cat
/proc/acpi/bbswitch" if it returns "OFF"). Without doing this I noticed that
the internal temperature when idle was a bit higher than what I thought it
should be, so I must assume that otherwise the nVidia kind-of-GPU still
consumes some watts even if the module is not even loaded/present.

~~~
dTal
Nouveau ought to turn the card off automatically, if loaded. It might not be
able to do anything else, but it should at least do that.

NVidia on desktop "works" for me, but suspend/resume is a fiasco - one cycle
and the graphics are never right again, flickering and crap everywhere.

~~~
zepearl
> _It might not be able to do anything else, but it should at least do that._
> LOL... :)

Thx - I never even took into consideration Nouveau.

Sorry, I have 0 experience with desktop & suspend (I have 2 desktops, both of
them using nVidia, but they're basically servers running databases so I have
never made them go to sleep).

------
nyjah
AMD cards also work with hackintosh builds. Some of the cards work seamlessly,
others take minor config, but much better than the nVidia support these days.

~~~
amerine
Any recent hackintosh build guide recommendations?

~~~
Kliment
Not used it, but this was posted on HN a few days ago
[https://infinitediaries.net/my-2020-hackintosh-hardware-
spec...](https://infinitediaries.net/my-2020-hackintosh-hardware-spec/)

~~~
code_biologist
I recently built an AMD hackintosh and although I love it — this build guide
is exactly what I'd do if I did it again.

------
wruza
Another issues with AMD are power, cooling and deadlines. Our local term for
Vega 56/64 is electro-chargrill, which is not far from true. Those who bought
them report that PSU and tower-cooling costs are above normal. AMD can do that
again, blow dust in their eyes and roll out a card that could melt your ssd
and sound like a jet turbine. Also they are known for “soon” marketing, so
that you wait for a year, postponing games that you could play right now with
a decent nvidia card.

I think they have their own vision of high-end, while frametime enthusiasts
still struggle with making ryzen chips to not stutter three times a second.
Measures include carefully choosing a motherboard, a memory kit, finding right
timings, right cooling curves, etc. And still stock ring-bused 8700 beats
easily any infinity-glued cpu in 0.1% low by a margin. Streamers love ryzen
though, as it allows to stream from additional cores and microstutters are
irrelevant on youtube.

------
tyingq
As an outsider, it's encouraging that the debate seems mixed. That seems to
point to the idea that real competition is afoot.

A year or so ago, the discussion seemed much more clear that AMD wasn't in the
game at all.

------
spicyramen
I'm working in ML with NVIDIA, T4, v100, P100 GPUs, taking advantage of the
integration with TensorFlow, specifically mixed precision, TensorCores and
TensorRT, would like to see those levels of integration with AMD to start
considering in our Infrastructure

------
Damogran6
Which would be lovely. High End GPU movement and pricing has been depressingly
stagnant.

------
m0zg
I don't know where they make their money, but if the hope is to compete in
compute, I'd suggest that they do not "play the game" at all in GPUs and
instead put together something 7nm and TPU-like. If I were them, I'd be
working on that right now. 1TFLOPs/W would be a good goal, 100TFLOPs in 100W,
using bfloat 16. Sidestep the GPU bullshit entirely, print money in a niche
instead.

~~~
bobajeff
I wouldn't consider TPU/NPU/NNPUs a niche. It's inevitable at this point that
you'll need machine learning accelerators just for running inferencing on edge
devices.

Even if done only on the cloud I can see more could providers investing in
their own TPU-like hardware for their clusters.

------
shmerl
I'd appreciate RDNA2 card for 2560x1440 too that's not crazily priced. Less
power consumption and more performance would be useful.

------
bitL
Latest Ampere datacenter rumors are 70% speedup compared to V100, meaning
25TFlops in FP32, whereas AMD in theory could to 15Tflops and in practice only
8Tflops due to their software. They would have to improve speed 3x just to
match NVidia's next generation GPUs; I am not sure upcoming Big Navi would be
sufficient.

~~~
trynumber9
It's not comparable in efficiency but AMD is already shipping Vega II modules
in the Mac Pro that claim "up to 28.3 FP32 TFLOPS".

And regardless, the article is about 4K gaming. I don't doubt Nvidia will have
some 7nm monster but there might be a time period before it launches where AMD
briefly regains the crown.

~~~
shaklee3
That's not equivalent. That's a card with two ASICs on it, with each being
14TFLOPS. It's identical to the V100, but 2-3 years later.

~~~
trynumber9
Nvidia doesn't make any cards with two ASICs on it. There is no equivalent.

~~~
shaklee3
Yes, they make the K40, which has two ASICs. They do not make a _current
generation_ card with two ASICs.

~~~
bitL
You probably meant K80. K80 = 2x K40 basically, i.e. 2x 12GB 4TFlops GPUs on a
single board.

~~~
shaklee3
Yes, thanks for the correction. I should also add that the reason it's not
fair to compare these kinds of cards is the inter-processor link is usually
extremely slow. Because of that, performance with that kind of card is roughly
equivalent to just having two cards in the machine as opposed to having the
chips on the same card.

------
fxtentacle
AMD is blocked by being not versatile enough. Their consumer cards support
neither AI nor do they have good Linux drivers.

Of course, the average gamer doesn't care, but developers do. And as the
result, almost all the video games - their core sales driver - are not as
thoroughly optimized and tested on AMD as they are on the (likely overpriced)
NVIDIA cards that developers use in their own home rigs.

~~~
imtringued
I chose an AMD card specifically because of their great Linux drivers.
Building a system on top of proprietary drivers is a non starter for me. Being
heavily dependent on a vendor to support your platform has bitten me multiple
times and it's especially frustrating when a proprietary software company uses
something like electron but never ships a Linux release. Running these
applications in wine is a complete pain in the ass and doesn't even work 90%
of the time.

~~~
new_realist
I’ve found amdgpu to be a terrible driver for high end displays; 8K doesn’t
work, for example.

~~~
t4h4
FYI, 8K/4K120 support was fixed with Linux 5.5 release.

~~~
new_realist
No, that was 8K over HDMI. 8K over two DisplayPort cables, as the only 8K
monitor currently available (the UP3218K) requires, is still broken.

------
IronBacon
Not an AMD fault, but I'm bummed that the only model of RX 5700 with ITX form
factor is available exclusively in Japan, cause a I would love to assemble a
full AMD 5 liters PC (without selling a kidney for importing the GPU...) T__T

I guess mini ITX is a niche market.

------
naveen99
Tempted to try out the Mac Pro with 2x2 Vega2 pros / PlaidML. At $10k, you get
132gb Of hbm2 memory, 4x of a Nvidia v100.

PlaidML got acquired by intel, but looks like amd support is still included.

I wonder if I can convince our hpc people to buy some Mac Pro racs

------
dep_b
As a MacBook user having equally performing GPU’s from AMD is really great.
Though raytracing demo’s impress me, in-game it’s often not so impressive.

So if AMD’s there in two years or so the software caught up at roughly the
same time.

------
hellofunk
> If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD’s incoming high-end graphics card
> could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units)

I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something
different?

~~~
imtringued
Imagine you have a fleet of 64 buses each filled with 64 passengers. Does that
count as 64 individual vehicles or as 4096?

~~~
smcl
Well "vehicle" in this case is unambiguous - there's no confusion between a
passenger and a vehicle in the scenario you described. For many there's not
such a clear distinction between "cores" and "compute units" so I can see
where the confusion arises.

------
_bxg1
AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young
technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to
make a serious push for the top.

~~~
SCdF
Real time ray tracing hardware is in a funny place right now.

Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be
playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is
a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how
quickly it falls over.

Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray
tracing.

Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you
take is criminal. We're talking 40%. If you're most people, who buy a graphics
card to a budget based on your requirements (say 1440p/60, or 1080p/144, or
whatever), supporting ray tracing means you either need to massively over
spend (in my calculations about 6 months ago, I would have had to __double
__my budget), or drop your quality presumptions in resolution and framerate
drastically.

Which brings us to third: support. RTX has been out for over a year, and there
is really only 2-3 games where RTX makes any kind of interesting visual
difference, and really only 1 (Control) that you're actually going to actively
notice after playing for more than 5 minutes.

AFAICT then, RTX is useful as a fun demo to play around with for a few
minutes, before disabling it and getting your framerate back so you can
actually play the game, and for absurdly rich people (which is convenient for
nVidia, because absurdly rich streamers have normalised 1080p gaming on
2080tis for awhile now).

I am looking forward to seeing the shape real time ray tracing takes on
consoles, because I presume that will determine the true shape for the next
decade or so.

~~~
hnuser123456
>Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit
you take is criminal. We're talking 40%.

I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for
a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it
correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster
as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p, so it's
not worth it unless you can get the same frames. You can, it's just a premium
technology and you'll need to budget accordingly.

(this ignores the games that half-ass their raytracing and make almost no
perceptible improvement, which to be fair is most of them)

I do agree though, that Control (and Metro Exodus) are the best examples.
Every other RTX title just uses it for reflections, which are neat but not as
much of a categorical upgrade as RTGI, imo.

People who spend serious chunks of time gaming (but who also remember what
reality looks like...) will increasingly notice the inaccuracy or lack of
ambient occlusion and shading overall.

This time last year, RTX, in popular discussion, was a joke. I'm seeing more
and more people who've looked into it, can see the objective improvement, and
are ready to adopt it once as it enters their budget range. It would
definitely be a sore sport if Navi had even worse raytracing performance than
the RTX series, or none at all. As the hardware proliferates, there will be
more and more reason to developers to look into implementing it at its best.

Crazy idea: Maybe we could train a neural network on before/after images of
raytraced scenes and implement it with a constant, minimal penalty, like DLSS,
or maybe that requires too large of a network or maybe it results in a trippy
mess.

~~~
SCdF
> I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames
> for a competitive game, just turn it off.

I think "if you need tons of frames" may be where your misunderstanding is
coming from: most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand
new AAA games that are the only ones implementing this technology).

For most people (and you can see this in sales data and hardware surveys), if
they are looking to buy a new graphics card they are going to be buying one
that they think will fit their needs for the next few years, not massively
overshoot it. If you play games at lower than your monitors resolution, they
look bad. If you play games at lower than your monitors refresh rates, you
either get bad looking tearing, or lose a much larger proportion of frames
than you need to.

To use myself as an example: I recently upgraded my computer that runs on a
3440x1440/60 monitor. My goal was to play games at 1440p60 for the next 3
years (ie until the new console generation settles and we know where things
are going). I bought a 5700XT because it provided the best bang for buck, hit
1440p60 in most games benched, and it seemed reasonable that I could drop
setting here or there and maintain good frame rates until I was done with it.

The nVidia option was a 2060S / 2070, which would have given me slightly more
frames at 1440p, but for $50 more. If I wanted 1440p60 _and_ RTX, I would have
had to go all the way up to the 2080ti, which was roughly double the price.

~~~
Dylan16807
> most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand new AAA
> games that are the only ones implementing this technology).

Especially because it's probably first person and over-the-shoulder games that
probably get the best benefit from RTX, but those are the same games where a
high frame rate improves playability the most. Not 'tons' of frames to be
'competitive', but 144Hz to be able to perform the actions you intend to
perform without frustration. So at that framerate, in a pretty game, maybe you
could run RTX at 720p? But resolution is pretty nice too, so the performance
hit really is a big deal.

The kind of game where you'd get 300Hz and can burn frames on a whim isn't the
kind of game that uses RTX, at least so far. Or you'd have to drop the other
settings to low, which kind of defeats the point of improved visuals.

------
Iwan-Zotow
Their software things (drivers, compilers, apis) are laughable.

~~~
shaklee3
I would add libraries to that list (cuda equivalent).

~~~
pixelpoet
OpenCL is all you need, and for the sake of a healthy (read: non-monopoly) GPU
computing ecosystem you must _insist_ on good OpenCL support! Having an
additional CUDA backend is fine if you want, but AMD GPUs are often really
strong in a level playing field, which is exactly what you want as a consumer.
Basically no consumer ever benefitted from a monopoly, and GPU computing is
very important.

I've developed (as lead GPU dev in a 3-man team) two successful rendering
applications with OpenCL on all 3 desktop platforms, it's not some kind of
impossible task. More developers just have to stick their necks out and do it.

~~~
shaklee3
It's not, though. The blas and fft libraries are not only much slower (less
efficient for the claimed peak of the cards), but they're missing features.
For example, gemms don't work on complex half precision in any opencl library
I've seen. Batched modes are missing for some types, etc. For basic
operations, they're sufficient. But it's hard to get behind libraries that AMD
doesn't really control.

The ship has sailed on opencl for Nvidia. It's not going to happen, and it's
not worth holding out hope. At this point, cuda has improved at a much faster
rate, and the support is much higher. It's just not worth building a new
scientific computing product around opencl, since it's as portable as cuda at
this point if Nvidia doesn't support it.

~~~
pixelpoet
In principle there's nothing stopping people from developing similarly great
libraries for OpenCL, which I would on the one hand expect to happen
eventually, but on the other hand it's impossible to deny the existing
achievements of Nvidia's software team.

What I'm hoping is that people in a similar position to mine, where I could
easily choose OpenCL since I was coding everything from scratch in basically
C, choose OpenCL instead of CUDA.

It's completely possible in many cases, and I'm not the world's greatest
developer or anything; twice I chose OpenCL over CUDA and both turned out
great. Particularly the JIT model is very useful. Judge for yourself:

[https://indigorenderer.com](https://indigorenderer.com)

[https://chaoticafractals.com](https://chaoticafractals.com)

It's also very useful for cross-vendor GPU benchmarking, see
[https://www.indigorenderer.com/benchmark-
results?filter=sing...](https://www.indigorenderer.com/benchmark-
results?filter=singlegpu)

------
unnouinceput
And when that day comes, I will buy it. But for now I will go with nVidia.
Also I badly need same CUDA codebase/documentation on AMD part as well to make
such a move. ML is such a breeze when you throw CUDA at it these days.

~~~
joe_the_user
I am stiiiill mostly reading/researching but I'm pretty sure that CUDA is
crucial and OpenCL just won't cut it for ML.

That said, AMD had a CUDA clone/conversion system a while back. I'm not sure
where that's gone.

The ideal would be to leapfrog CUDA and present something more usable and
straightforward, especially something where the memory and threading model is
really clear. CUDA already seem pretty good but there's always room for
improvement.

~~~
jdc
well, there is SYCL

~~~
pixelpoet
I believe it's going to get a lot of support from Intel as well for their
forthcoming GPU efforts.

------
ngcc_hk
Cuda and ... it is not just hardware.

------
PedroBatista
It needs the help from Nvidia just like Intel helped them winning the CPU
battle.

------
new_realist
AMD can’t even get 8K displays to work under Linux.

------
willis936
I’ll believe it when I see it. ATI has never made a good product and nothing
has changed recently to turn them around.

~~~
catalogia
The ATI brand hasn't been in use for something like a decade.

~~~
willis936
Same technology and same ship being run by the same people. Why patronize a
rebrand if nothing has changed?

~~~
snvzz
>being run by the same people

Not true. They're gone as of a year or two ago. Ironically, they're at Intel.

