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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I want to believe this, but I have been burned way too many times in the past trusting anything other than Nvidia. The list of companies that were supposedly going to be better is rather exhaustive in the space. It is frustrating.

That is, what makes you think Nvidia is a) overpriced and b) not doing the best they can?

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I bought an RX580 and it's still working great! It was an excellent card with no drawbacks and was relatively cheap too.

I'd like AMD to go back to the RX580 days, when the offerings were simple, cheap and made sense.

I also have an Nvidia card, I don't have any complaints but they are NOT cheap that is for sure.

Nvidia was charging extra for DLSS. RTX2050 vs GTX1660 had a huge price difference. When the leak happened we found out DLSS doesn't even require AI cores to run properly, it was purely a software limit. So they were really selling overpriced and underpowered hardware.

The bad thing is, Nvidia keeps increasing the prices because AMD is not competing well enough and there's no limit to Nvidia's pricing. Top of the line cards used to sell for $300 and we thought that was expensive.

Unpopular opinion but NVIDIA is not overpriced when you consider the fact that it's the only product that actually works.

I've also been burned so many times by AMD GPUs that I have more faith in Intel catching up in the ML space than AMD.

Would love to be wrong though.

Would you mind commenting on how you've been burned by AMD GPUs in the past?

In DDR3 era heat, drivers, crashes (lots of crashes) during gaming.

In DDR4 era heat, drivers during game dev (substance painter, UE4 etc.). Lots of finicking with the card/drivers/software.

On my home NAS (Ubuntu for longest time, now Kubuntu) I've had more random issues with my RX 580 than my 3060, I know it's not the most fair comparison due to their age but still.

For me, it was buying a graphics card that was endorsed by Intel that turned out to not support any of the advanced graphics that were happening at the time. I was less than happy. I think Matrox, back in the day, was also a bit of a disappointment. Supposedly they supported standards and were going to be amazing. Reality is they were not amazing.

I've received two broken AMD cards in the last 30 days. It's also the very literal definition of "burned", as they're consistently hitting >110°C hot spot in minutes. The RMA process is also god awful and the software isn't that good.

It feels like there's actually no other option than Nvidia.

I can agree on one point: if I want 3D acceleration to Just Work on Linux and I'm muting my inner Stallman, the Nvidia binary drivers have always enabled thtat for me. But on the gaming side, I definitely get the feeling that a bit of Microsoft syndrome is starting to set in at Nvidia: we're by far the market leader, so you'll take what we give you. DLSS is constantly pumped in their marketing (and by reviewers, who are sometimes adjunct marketers) as a no-brainer upscaling solution that you don't need to ever turn off. But I've had two games (Death Stranding and Marvel's Midnight Suns) crash repeatedly and unpredictably with DLSS enabled, then run happily stable once DLSS was turned off. I only even became aware of the Marvel game because it was advertised in their Game Ready! driver update, but both the drivers and the game clearly weren't ready. In that particular case, it was also primed to devolve into a circular firing squad between Nvidia, Epic providing Unreal Engine, and the game developer as to who implemented what wrong... something I think we'll probably continue to see.

As far as overpricing goes, I think the pushback (and AMD's pricing advantage) will definitely come on VRAM. I was only able to get a 3080 10GB close to MSRP when the GPU shortage started to abate, and people are already reporting that it's maxing out that amount on Diablo 4 at 1440p ultrawide max settings. Yes, there's been inflation, Moore's Law isn't what it used to be, and it had been years since I had bought a discrete GPU, but that doesn't change the fact that I've paid a premium price and I'm not future-proof for 4K or ultrawide, either of the two popular monitor upgrade paths. The bulk of this can be attributed squarely to Nvidia's desire to maintain market segmentation and profit margins. If AMD really can close the yawning CUDA gap on the software side and start to force more commoditization in the GPU market, it can only be a good thing.

Certainly don't take my post as argument that they are the best company I can imagine. I'm fairly convinced this area is far harder than most internet commentary allows.

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