Originally posted by ryao
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1) The thing with AMD shader architecture is that it has vastly more cores that run on a much lower frequency. So we end up with the typical "more cores are harder to optimize for" problem. Sure, graphic workloads are easier to parallelize but this does not mean core counts can increase exponentially, they have limits in utilization. I don't think it is an issue of the shader compiler, and i don't believe Nvidia's shader compiler would help AMD cards. Also, the thing about non opensourcing the driver due to keeping the shader compiler secret is bullshit, they don't have to, AMD also keeps their binary shader compiler secret, they are using another LLVM based compiler for the open drivers.
2) Nvidia does not actually have better performance.At least not *compute* (read shader) performance. There is a reason bitcoin miners preferred AMD cards and it is not because they were cheap, if anything during the mining crisis you couldn't find an AMD RX 580 for under 600-700 euros here in Europe... We are talking about a 200 dollars MSRP card... Nvidia gpus were much cheaper, because miners only took Nvidia gpus when they couldn't get AMD...
3) As for games, AMD is not that far behind in gaming performance, with Vega 64 matching the 1080 on average and Vega 56 mostly being on par or better with 1070. The reason most games tend to perform better on Nvidia has to do with Nvidia meddling with key game developers and offering their gameworks tech which is optimized for Nvidia hardware. Gameworks is not just a "shader effects" library, it replaces key parts of a game engine. Naturally most game developers took the "gift" since it meant less work for their developers, some like Ubisoft essentially didn't have their own engines, they had only gameworks... Nvidia was trying many shenanigans with gameworks to minimize AMD performance, from increasing tesselation far more than they should have, to having tailor made D3D11 Command Lists, to physx ( a part of gameworks) always providing a boost by executing on gpu and being crippled (made single core) for the cpu version for amd cards, etc. You can see how crippleworks was bad by benching other games that don't use all of its features like The Witcher 3 which fared much better on AMD cards after CDPR patched the game or Deus Ex Mankind Divided which does not use gameworks at all.
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