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Nvidia vs. AMD. Their technologies... (No flame please) Please add.

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mas5acre

Member
Joined
Mar 8, 2009
I have never felt that different graphic cards had so many different features until recently. I'ts nuts how unlike their technologies are becoming.This post is purely for the uninformed as such I can be stupid so please elaborate and help me and everyone else out. I created this thread to discuss the many differnt technologies of both AMD abd nvidia graphic cards.

Cuda is an nvidia technology for parallel processing on nvidia gpus, It puts processing on the gpu and takes it off cpu, This is great for quick video encodes yet sacrifices quality as an expense for speed. Also great for Folding at home I hear. There are other CUDA accelerated apps that mostly revolve around photo/video editing as well as viewing.

AMD's answer to CUDA is stream, it's very similiar to CUDA in function using parallel processing as well and shares many of the same implementations

Gsync is a nvidia technology, so you'll need a nvidia card to use it as it as well as' a Gsync supported monitor.

Yes it can be a game changer.

Gsync is kinda like vsync, only much better. Instead of the monitor being 60hz or whatever, it is the same speed as the fps being spit out by the gpu. Therefore, there is no screen tearing and your frames per second isn't limited by the speed of your monitor's refresh late. Instead of your monitor telling your gpu to go 60fps so it can keep up with its 60hz refresh rate, your gpu is telling your monitor to to go 120hz to match the 120fps the gpu can display and should it slow down, the monitor will match it.


Another very important technology is mantle, this is an AMD gpu technology.

Mantle can be a game changer for pc games too. AMD is making the next generation consoles, both the ps4 and xbox one. Consoles use a low level api to get the most out of them. Both consoles have both AMD processors and GPUs, and in turn support AMD's Graphic Core Next Architecture as does all current AMD HD 7000 series and "R' series GPUs. The idea with mantle is to bypass DirectX calls and program it straight to the hardware for even more performance without DirectX as the middleman. The console versions of games are highly optimized for the hardware they are ran on. The idea with Mantle is to bring those optimizations to the world of pc gaming. This is great for console ports, or for developers willing to program for the new Mantle low level API without the directx overhead.

Though nvidia does have physx as well for particle effects in games like batman Arkham series and Metro 2033.

Theres also surround gaming combining 2 to 6 monitors. nvidia version is called 3d surround, if you want the 3d part of that setup you have to use nvidia 3d glasses. AMD has eyefinity but with no 3d and instead relies on 3rd parties like IZ3d for 3d support, but this way you can choose your own 3d glasses technology.

Another thing is AMD is much better at bitcoin/litecoin mining. Nvidia is better for emulators. This is because nvidia has better opengl support, which in turn also makes nvidia better for linux.

AMD has TrueAudio which places a sound processing chip on the graphic card to keep the main processer from having to do the work but only for games that support it. It, of course, is suppose to yield better audio as well than a normal motherboard integrated solution.

What I'm doing is running a hybrid setup which requires hacked drivers. This way my main card that's coming Tuesday, the AMD R9 290x will be my main card., with the Geforce 9800gt as backup for physx. Which eventally I'll replace with a GTX 660 or better. This way I get Mantle and physx.

I'm really not try to persuade you either way. Sorry about the length of this post, just please make an informed decision.
 
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good news is amd's APU13 is starting today we should be getting some hard numbers on performance increases with the mantle api sometime in the next few days :)
 
One thing to note is that even though Mantle was developed by AMD it is an open platform that nVidia could implement in their cards if they want to.
 
One thing to note is that even though Mantle was developed by AMD it is an open platform that nVidia could implement in their cards if they want to.

yes but they would also have to completely redo their chips to a GCN architecture. Just like compatibility for certain direct x versions, they cant just take the mantle api and just adjust it to work with their cards.
 
It's bad enough that cross-platform game developers already have to develop 2 renderers for DirectX (Windows and XBox) and OpenGL (everything else).

Now they have to write another one for just AMD?

Also, one of the biggest complaints of OpenGL is the huge number of extensions and differing hardware capabilities all exposed by the API, which makes bug-free cross-platform (as in across AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs) coding difficult. AMD is taking all that and advertising them as advantages of Mantle. NVIDIA has their own low level API, too, of course, that the driver translates DX/OGL calls to internally. They just don't expose that because they support existing standards to make people's lives easier.

I feel like they are just getting desperate trying to come up with something new of their own.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, even considering just very recent stuff, has adaptive vsync, TXAA/FXAA, bindless textures, and GPU virtualization, all of which are significant.

AMD may not be behind on raw performance, but they are definitely still behind on innovation.
 
The benefit to Mantle is it should allow for better graphical performance on the consoles (which are both based on GCN architecture) and a much easier time porting that code over to PC (or vice versa). Also by interacting directly with hardware it purportedly will allow for better performance over DirectX and OpenGL.
 
I guess we'll just have to wait and see if there are really any gain. I'm fairly certain even if there are gains, it won't be enough to be worth developers' time to develop for yet another API, but they will not have a choice if they want to develop for consoles.

It won't make porting to PC any easier, unless both NVIDIA and Intel also adopt Mantle, which won't happen. It will be harder because they now have to support another API. The existence of universal APIs like DX and OGL is so that developers can code with a common API, and their code will theoretically run on all GPUs (of course, in reality it's not that easy, and games still have to be tuned for each GPU, but that's still a lot less work than writing a completely new renderer).

It makes business sense for AMD to do this, using their new monopoly on consoles to force developers to adopt their own platform-specific API, a lot like how MS forced developers to adopt DX on Windows instead of OGL years ago by intentionally crippling OGL on Windows. Every time anyone gets a monopoly in anything, they try to come up with their own "standard" and force people to use it, so they have more control.

It's very good for AMD, but probably not good for consumers (who pay for developers' salary), and definitely not good for developers.
 
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