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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

As a GPU buyer, I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all. They list all their specs as like "X ray tracing cores, Y tensor cores, Z CUDA cores" and I have no idea how that translates to real-world performance. Which of those does my game use? Which of those does Blender use when raytracing? (Those are the two applications that I use a GPU for, so the ones I personally care about.) And the cores are listed as separate things, but I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right?

I think it all ends up being useless at best and completely misleading at worse. The reality is that I don't even know if I want to buy their product or not. I guess that's what reviews are for? But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department? Seems strange to me.

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This is a criticism that has been made of consumer computing since its inception: Even if you're versed in the technical details, you can still get misled.

In all cases it helps to know your must-haves and prioritize accordingly, given that it's rarely the case that you can "just" get the new one and be happy: even if it benchmarks well, if it isn't reliable or the software you want to run isn't compatible, it'll be a detriment. So you might as well wait for reviews to flesh out those details unless you are deadset on being an early adopter. The specs say very little about the whole of the experience.

I actually hate the idea of having a high-end GPU for personal use these days. It imposes a larger power and cooling requirement, which just adds more problems. I am looking to APUs for my next buy - the AMD 4000G series looks to be bringing in graphics performance somewhere between GT 1030 and GTX 1050 equivalent which is fine for me, since I mostly bottleneck on CPU load in the games I play now(hello Planetside 2's 96 vs 96 battles, still too intense for my 2017 gaming laptop) and these APUs now come in 6 and 8 core versions with the competitive single-thread performance of more recent Zen chips. I already found recordings of the 2000G chips running this game at playable framerates, so two generations forward I can count on being a straight up improvement. The only problem is availability - OEMs are getting these chips first.

> But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department?

Are you suggesting you would rather read reviews of Nvidia products that are written by Nvidia, and you would trust them more than 3rd party reviews?

> I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all.

Do read @TomVDBs comments; this isn't Nvidia, this is the industry-wide marketing terminology.

Cores are important to developers, so what you're talking about is that some of the marketing is (unsurprisingly) not targeted for you. If you care most about Blender and games, you should definitely seek out the benchmarks for Blender and the games you play. Even if you understood exactly what cores are, that wouldn't change anything here, you would still want to focus on the apps you use and not on the specs, right?

> I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right?

FWIW, that's a complicated question. There's more going on than just whether these cores are separate things. The short answer is that they are, but there are multiple subsystems that both types of cores have to share, memory being one of the more critical examples. The better answer here is to compare the perf of the applications you care about, using Nvidia cards to using AMD cards, picking the same price point for each. That's how to decide which to buy, not worrying about the internal engineering.

I wouldn't trust them more, but it would be a good rule of thumb for whether or not I need to be awake during this product cycle. For example, if they're like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I can just ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews. Instead, they're just like "well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is totally meaningless.

> Instead, they're just like "well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is totally meaningless.

That's referring to memory and not cores; is that a realistic example? I'm not very aware of Nvidia marketing that does what you said specifically - the example feels maybe a little exaggerated? I will totally grant that there is marketing speak, and understanding the marketing speak for all tech hardware can be pretty frustrating at times.

> if they're like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I can just ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews.

Nvidia does publish some perf ratios, benchmarks, and peak perf numbers with each GPU, including for specific applications like Blender. Your comment makes it sound like you haven't seen any of those?

Anyway, I think that would be a bad idea to ignore the reviews and benchmarks of Blender and your favorite games, even if you saw the headline you want. There is no single perf improvement number. There never has been, but it's even more true now with the distinction between ray tracing cores and CUDA cores. It's very likely that your Blender perf ratio will be different than your Battlefield perf ratio.

I haven't seen any of those. All I've seen is a green-on-black graph where the Y axis has no 0, they don't say what application they're testing, and they say that the 3070 is 2x faster than the 2080 Ti. Can you link me to their performance numbers? As you can tell, I'm somewhat interested. (And know that real reviews arrive tomorrow, so... I guess I can wait :)

The official press release of the 3000 series[1] has a graph that seems to be what you're looking for. Look for the section named "GeForce RTX 30 Series Performance".

It has a list of applications, each GPU and their relative performance. Y=0 is even on the graph!

[1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30...

Ah, OK, I saw that. I am just very suspicious of the fact that they didn't use "fps" as the units, and instead chose "relative performance".

Nvidia does publicize benchmarks in its marketing, but many people (correctly) are skeptical of benchmarks published by the same company that makes the product. The number of CUDA cores and other hardware resources is a number that feels a bit more objective, even though it is hard to understand the direct implications on performance.

Apple is a good example of a company that just doesn't really talk too much about the low-level details of their chips. People buy their products anyway.

Is HT/SMT on CPU any different?

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