What is the status with AMD drivers' OpenGL performance?

[gregory]

Because NV is a highly anti-consumer company. Some people care about that.

What do you mean by anti-consumer company ?

[Eloris]

Let's see, off the top of my head (and even ignoring older stuff like the 3dmark cheats), striking deals to get their blackbox gameworks tech into games and using it to exploit weaknesses in AMD cards (tessellation, specifically) in a way that doesn't provide any tangible benefit to NV users. Selling you a 3,5GB card as a 4GB card. Requiring users to register with an email address for data collection purposes in order to get things like automatic driver updates while at the same time sneakily installing telemetry services. Refusing to enable the VESA adaptive sync standard in their desktop GPUs (they use it with their mobile products) because they'd rather you pay them extra for the gsync box to get the same benefits. And so on.

Look, no companies are saints and they all care about their own bottom line first. NV just happens to be a bigger ***** about it, and unlike the CPU market the last few years where you couldn't in good conscience recommend AMD CPUs regardless of Intels d-baggery (which these days is mostly their ridiculous market segmentation and price points), AMD GPUs are competitive for most users in most use cases (PCSX2 and GSdx OGL is really the single exception in my day-to-day use, everything else is either DX and runs fine or has switched to Vulkan and runs fine). Hence for me, the decision is quite simple.

[xantier]

Well, you can use DX11...

dx11 has lots of inaccuracies unfortunately. ogl can play mgs2 and mgs3 with perfect graphical accuracy. I'm playing both at 3x native 60fps constant.

[lightningterror]

Because NV is a highly anti-consumer company. Some people care about that.

Can't argue with that. nvidia is a cancerous company. Which is why I didn't buy an nvidia gpu.

[dabore]

solved and derailed? i dunno about this anti-consumer. it's competition. ofc they gotta sell you extra. it's commercial. sure they had this architechural failure they covered up really bad. and they still just use telemetry to read your gpu stats to improve performance in specific usage scenerarios. and this is where they still are good at. in my segment i could find anything better for the bucket.

[refraction]

While Nvidia have done some of those shady things for sure:

striking deals to get their blackbox gameworks tech into games and using it to exploit weaknesses in AMD cards (tessellation, specifically) in a way that doesn't provide any tangible benefit to NV users.

that sounds a bit tinfoil hat to me. all companies optimise their programs in a way to benefit their hardware, if a competitor works differently and it doesn't play well, that's their problem

Requiring users to register with an email address for data collection purposes in order to get things like automatic driver updates while at the same time sneakily installing telemetry services.

Most sites on the web require you to register an email address to use their services, Nvidia is no different here. As for the telemetry, people keep getting up in arms about it, but if you actually look at the data transmitted, it's just a list of game profiles and your hardware specs, it's hardly intrusive to your privacy.

I do agree the other counts were a bit sucky though, but I'm sure AMD/ATi hasn't been innocent from a few PR disasters over the years.

[Eloris]

I do agree the other counts were a bit sucky though, but I'm sure AMD/ATi hasn't been innocent from a few PR disasters over the years.

Of course not, but the point is, NV is without a doubt guilty on quite a few more counts of shady behaviour, especially in the last few years. Gregory asked why someone would choose an AMD GPU, and this is a big reason why. Linux/OGL are unfortunately edge use cases, so for a lot of people AMDs deficiencies in those areas don't really matter.

[CK1]

I just never understood paying $100 less for a Nvidia card with the intent of saving money; only to get decent hardware with sub-par drivers. I remember how much they sucked on my first HP "craptop" with an AMD A6-3420M 1.5Ghz with a 6520G Radeon iGPU /rant over

[avih]

There's probably not much point in arguing who sucks more. For now, PCSX2 does not work well with AMD in OpenGL and we can't know if that will ever change. On Windows, other than for PCSX2 with OpenGL, AMD GPUs are decent.

[gregory]

@Eloris,
Do you think a game studio will cripple the rendering for half of theirs clients ? Goal of Gameworks is to provide extra for Nvidia users. If the extras run better on the competitor, you're screwed So yes, I prefer AMD approach to provide an open Source alternative. But let be honest, it is open source because they didn't have the manpower/workforce to provide it (hopefully now they understand that it is better).

IMHO, Nvidia understood a long time ago that AMD/Nvidia will always be on par. The tech is the same, so perf will be same ball park. (Nvidia didn't expect recent AMD failure when they release Maxwell). So in order to win the competition, they give/sell you extra soft. When you follow your competitor, except if you have a much better product, it is mandatory to discount the feature. Nobody will buy it otherwise.

You can't call Nvidia cancerous/anti-consumer because they push some innovation on the market (not for free)

telemetry is unfortunately the trend on all OS/APP. (I don't think Nvidia supports telemetry on Linux)