NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 Series Launches With Impressive Specs, Competitive Pricing

[pal666]

Even midrange crap from NVIDIA like gtx 1650 is still 200+ euro, a comparable card from AMD is like 100-120 euro.

apparently there's no shortage of nvidiots

[pal666]

I'm no fan of NVIDIA but there's limits to how far I'm willing to go to 'support the little guy' in the name of competition. My next card is probably going to be a RTX 3070.

is there some crystal ball in which imbeciles like you read price and performance of future amd products?

[skeevy420]

in my book good product has drivers

Goddammit. As an AMD user I don't want to go here but....Unlike AMD which only provides a driver that officially supports 4 distributions, Ubuntu, Cent, Red Hat, and SUSE, NVIDIA provides a driver that should work on any Linux distribution as long as it meets NVIDIA's minimum requirements. Unlike AMD, they also provide that same driver for Linux ARM, 64-bit FreeBSD, and 32+64-bit Solaris. While AMD does have their FOSS driver, the driver I use, it isn't guaranteed to work with brand new hardware unlike their Pro driver that, again, only supports 4 distributions.

I wish AMD's Pro driver borrowed a page or two from NVIDIA's driver book.

[skeevy420]

is there some crystal ball in which imbeciles like you read price and performance of future amd products?

I've been wondering the same damn thing, for both sides

[pal666]

Goddammit. As an AMD user I don't want to go here but....Unlike AMD which only provides a driver that officially supports 4 distributions, Ubuntu, Cent, Red Hat, and SUSE,

apparently you are windows amd user. linux users get all drivers from their distro vendor. and amd mesa driver is best of all videocard drivers

NVIDIA provides

only nouveau on that front. and "provides" is a bit of a stretch

[bridgman]

Goddammit. As an AMD user I don't want to go here but....Unlike AMD which only provides a driver that officially supports 4 distributions, Ubuntu, Cent, Red Hat, and SUSE, NVIDIA provides a driver that should work on any Linux distribution as long as it meets NVIDIA's minimum requirements. Unlike AMD, they also provide that same driver for Linux ARM, 64-bit FreeBSD, and 32+64-bit Solaris. While AMD does have their FOSS driver, the driver I use, it isn't guaranteed to work with brand new hardware unlike their Pro driver that, again, only supports 4 distributions.

I wish AMD's Pro driver borrowed a page or two from NVIDIA's driver book.

Huh ? AMD provides a driver which is included in-box in every shipping distro (maybe not Clear Linux) and which is seamlessly updated by the distro maintainer.

In addition to that, we provide pre-built drivers for slower moving enterprise distros which are do not get frequent driver updates via the distro maintainers. Those drivers target the main enterprise distros - SLE*, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS. Are there other enterprise distros you think we should be targeting, or are you saying that you want Windows-style driver installs even for consumer distros ?

The gap I see is launch-day support for new products. We used to get approval to upstream the code for new products sufficiently early that consumer distros would usually include working code, but recently we have been required to delay upstreaming until closer to launch date, which puts launch-time support at risk unless we extend the enterprise driver support to include consumer distros and APU support as well.

Upstreaming earlier would probably provide the best customer experience but failing that we probably will need to rely on packaged versions of the open source drivers to fill the gap at launch time.

[skeevy420]

Huh ? AMD provides a driver which is included in-box in every shipping distro (maybe not Clear Linux) and which is seamlessly updated by the distro maintainer.

In addition to that, we provide pre-built drivers for slower moving enterprise distros which are do not get frequent driver updates via the distro maintainers. Those drivers target the main enterprise distros - SLE*, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS. Are there other enterprise distros you think we should be targeting, or are you saying that you want Windows-style driver installs even for consumer distros ?

The gap I see is launch-day support for new products. We used to get approval to upstream the code for new products sufficiently early that consumer distros would usually include working code, but recently we have been required to delay upstreaming until closer to launch date, which puts launch-time support at risk unless we extend the enterprise driver support to include consumer distros and APU support as well.

Upstreaming earlier would probably provide the best customer experience but failing that we probably will need to rely on packaged versions of the open source drivers to fill the gap at launch time.

You were the last person I expected to respond in this particular thread.

It depends on the user and distribution if the in-box distribution provided driver is good enough. For some, almost universally new launch users, it isn't and those users are limited to the special 4 distibutions...technically 5 since the SUSE driver works on OpenSUSE...but I digress...

But to answer your question as far as enterprise support goes, CentOS Stream and Oracle Linux support would be nice. Not likely for me, mind you; just that those seem like the last two mainstream enterprise distributions that y'all'd consider supporting since most of the rest seem to either be more RHEL clones or more for designed for servers and non-gui environments. Plus those two are so close to RHEL8 that the RHEL8 driver might work as-is...well, Oracle's "Unbreakable Kernel" might throw a wrench in things.

As far as what I'd like, well, it'd be nice if AMD's Pro driver was similar to Nvidia's driver in that it doesn't care what distribution that it's running on for the instances that the distribution provided driver isn't sufficient. That's the one area that Nvidia still has a one-up on AMD-- a universal "Pro" driver that can be packaged up and employ DKMS when necessary.

Pretending Nouveau doesn't exist, on Nvidia there is less confusion overall and things can be considered easier to work with because there is the one driver that has all the components the users need that works everywhere whereas AMD has multiple drivers that don't work everywhere and multiple Vulkan implementations that lead to all sorts of questions that we've both answered. A universal Pro would solve a lot of those problems.

So, yes, I suppose that in a way I am suggesting Windows-style driver installs even for consumer distros. Though I'm not looking at it as a consumer or enterprise choice. For me, the choice is simply newer versus older software. That said, if there was some mythical paid-for Arch Hat Enterprise Linux, that's probably what I'd use. I suppose that could be Manjaro in a few more years if they play their cards right.

IMHO, the only supporting Enterprise distributions with our non-free driver stance is the biggest downside to buying AMD hardware from a Linux user's point of view. Once it is guaranteed that the new GPU will work just fine with Linux with the free driver, buying AMD is a no brainer. I studied up and waited for the 480 to be refreshed as the 580 before I bought in and I can't tell you how happy I've been with that decision. Just a terrific card for my uses. Played THPS 1+2 at a smooth 1080p60 maxed out earlier today....and it will again after this post.

The problem is that not everyone is as informed as I am about the AMD GPU ecosystem on Linux as a whole. I've been around since the Catalyst days, did the entire Radeon to AMDGPU transition, so I know as well as you do that, outside of GPU refreshes, new GPUs probably won't work all that well and that Pro is more-than-likely needed which is why I've been so optimistic and happy for y'all in the Sienna Cichlid articles because I'm hoping that using Code Names means Upstreaming Earlier to provide the best customer experience.

Y'all (meaning AMD execs and decision makers) can't expect your gaming-oriented buyers to know all of that or to even know the difference between a consumer and enterprise distribution...or to expect your gaming customers to run an enterprise distribution for that matter since, almost universally, "enterprise desktop" is the antithesis of "gaming desktop". Plus it seems like users are gravitating towards rolling and semi-rolling distributions like Manjaro and Fedora with distributions like Ubuntu having their HWE program to prevent this discussion to CentOS having their Stream version which, all combined, means that y'all are gonna start having a bunch of moving targets in the future and that migrating to a universal driver like Nvidia has might end up being the easier path than trying to cater to everyone individually.

FWIW, I'm not complaining or upset about what AMD is doing, just pointing out that is isn't necessarily as great as a lot of people think it is on Linux and that there are some rough edges where the Green Team does make it easier. Because AMD has that upstreamed FOSS driver, the only driver I've ever needed to use with my RX 580, a lot of people tend to act like that's the best thing there is and, well, sometimes it isn't and the Pro driver is necessary. It's like they all forgot the rough patches between Catalyst and sometime around mid-2018 and completely ignore the VII and Navi users when they discuss their launch and +6 months issues. You know, I'm only this critical of y'all because I want you to succeed and beat the other guys.

[piotrj3]

I thought that was fixed year(s) ago..., it doesn't change the fact that if you want to pass green GPU to the VM, you are obstructed by vendor itself..., with famous code 4something.

Either way, only Intel does it right on that sphere (and I am no fan of Intel, let me be clear about that), but they do not have vested interest in it, Intel supports SR-IOV on integrated solutions on mainstream products, while for both AMD and nvidia you need to pay arm and leg for pro products to do that.

Good news then, redactor of Anandtech said that new nvidia 3xxx serie supports SR-IOV.

[bridgman]

OK, I think we're saying the same thing - that the main gap today is launch-time support for new products, since we aren't currently being allowed to upstream sufficiently early to have decent support in enough consumer distros. The rolling-release distros tend to be OK, and we have packaged drivers for enterprise distros, but there's a gap in between those two.

We package two versions of the graphics stack - one using Mesa for OpenGL and one using the proprietary OpenGL WS driver. Right now the newest consumer and LTS versions of Ubuntu are the same (20.04) so as long as you don't update to 20.10 the moment it comes out you should be OK for Navi21 launch.

The packaged driver userspace can also be installed on top of the distro's built in kernel or on top of a newer kernel packaged by the distro maintainers, although we need to fix up the install instructions to make that more clear.

At the risk of asking a dumb question, doesn't the trend towards rolling releases mean that users will be less dependent on packaged drivers (because the upstream support will be in their distros already) rather than us having to create packaged drivers for a bunch of rolling release distros in addition to the enterprise and six-ish-month-cycle consumer distros ?

[leipero]

Good news then, redactor of Anandtech said that new nvidia 3xxx serie supports SR-IOV.

That's interesting, I do have my doubts on it tho., that feature was reserved for pro products for all except Intel. I personally think that feature is mature/old enough to be mainstremed by all, it is very useful for regular users as well with VM usage tendency, the only valid argument against it is "to differentiate products", I do not know if there's enough important features on the pro products to beat that argument (so you don't end up with pro customers using consumer grade products for their work).

bridgman
I guess it really depends on the distribution and user choice. As long as version of driver is "marked stable" (released with version number = non proprietary) in the upstream, that will end up in rolling distribution packaged by the distribution maintainer. I don't know how proprietary driver stack works really, and I assume most (non professional) users of rolling distributions prefer to use open one (with Mesa).
I wouldn't count on rolling distros tho., there are still many legitimate reasons to not use rolling distributions (unrelated to "stability").

Small rant..., the way I see it AMD marketing/whoeverisincharge simply don't get it = consumers are not rational. What I mean by that is the fact that one company may release it's top-end product, and even if other company have compeling products at any other segment, they see it "X product = fastest = better in all segments", even when you have compeling products at any other price range. That's what nvidia whoever/marketing understands very well, hence "class" separation in the user mind share.
The (wrong IMO) approach AMD took with "brute forcing" that "share" with pricing will likely fail, it simply doesn't work like that. Unfortunatelly, the only solution that might work for AMD is = be better at every aspect (speed, power consumption, software support), and that is very high risk approach obviously since it still doesn't grant that "mind share" of average consumer.
I don't follow that much, but recently I was looking for a at least ~40Gpixels ~80Gtexels ~3Tflops product at <50W TDP, and it seems to me that there is a room for such product, at this point, it should be in "low end segment" (that's mid-range/high-end from ~8 years ago), the closest product to that would be RX 560 at 75W but with terrible pixel rate.
TL;DR: There are segments to be filled, but consumers not being rational means high end market is very important (together with software support etc.).