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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.

That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.

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AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.

For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.

AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.

AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.

on older (read: older than RDNA) AMD GPUs the OpenGL drivers are so poor that half the games just either crash outright or have colourswap bugs (RGBA -> BGRA i.e. your game turns blue and orange)

On Linux at least you can use Mesa to fix it up. On Windows you're.... out of luck I guess unless someone writes a binarypatch or something?

I wouldn't call it great support, NV "just works"

> RGBA -> BGRA i.e. your game turns blue and orange

Citation very much needed.

IME a lot of bugs people attribute to AMD's OpenGL drivers were actually game bugs from developers who only tested on nvidia.

I've seen the bug with my very eyes because I wrote that renderer and I did test on all three vendors:P

Zero debuginfo-related warnings on any driver (except the usual "buffer location is VIDMEM" spam), NV is fine, intel is fine, my (RDNA) AMD card is fine on both Windows and Linux, user with a Vega 64 isn't fine.

We dug into it together and it literally swaps the colours somewhere, and the user said that it crashes randomly on games (confirmed by others, not one-off HW failure), does the same colourswap or have very glitched rendering.

I guess the only salvation is that people usually play DX games under Windows and the bug didn't happen over DX11. But the same rendering restricted to even standard GL3.3 just got BGRA-swapped.

There are many words to describe my experience with Nvidia on Linux, but "just works" isn't one of them. For modern cards it usually mostly works most of the time, but getting basic features such as "decode H.264 on the GPU" working still requires unofficial third-party wrappers.

On Windows you may be right, I haven't had to deal with Windows drivers for a few years now.

Surely this should be the opposite direction, no? Nvidia drivers on linux have always been trash. If anything, I would much prefer nvidia learn from amd.

Trillions.

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