AMD On Board with New Video Card Branding

blackacidevil said:
Even though I'm currently running a 970, this is my first Nvidia GPU since having a 6600GT.

NV 6600GT > ATI 1950Pro > 3870 > 4870 > 4870X2 + 4870 TriFire (that was a bitch though) > 6950 > GTX970.

I don't remember having issues with ATI/AMD drivers aside from trying to get TriFire to work.
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Well...maybe it is just me. I certainly intend to give AMD another go...no way I'm buying nVidia given their recent shenanigans.
 
dgz said:
I just want to buy a couple of good Ryzen laptops. I've been holding on for almost two years now. Really don't feel like giving Intel any money. Where are the good Ryzen laptops?
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Depends on what you quantify as "good"

These just came out to go along with this. Looks pretty potent for the price paid ;)
 
cjcox said:
While AMD cards can no longer uses cool names like "Republic Of Gamers"
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Ohh, they could. They would just have to build a better GPU architecture, grab the market share, haul in the dough and pay ASUS the Benjamins to give them exclusive access to the name.

But that ain't gonna happen because AMD's been phoning it in for a decade and now they're living on food stamps trying to keep up with those who were grinding out the hard work.
 
Don't know but personally I havent had driver "issues" on amd or nvidia for a while. Like 2016.

I always strip with DDU and install fresh.

Maybe that's key?

I am glad GPP is exposed like a cats belly, I would keep in mind they still have claws.

Also I am happy with the vega 64 speed..... Just not the price
 
Bielzebuddha said:
Lamest. Fucking. Excuse. Ever.
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Why?
You don't shoot yourself in the hands when your only competitor is trying to chop off your knees.

AMD, as a pure act of doing business, needs to continue working with any AIBs that 'allegedly' join GPP, so their products continue to reach the largest potential consumer base possible.

If they start giving grief to 'alleged' GPP AIBs, that will sour the business relationship, and since we have no visibility on the status and health of those relationships, we have no clue if an AIB is that one last straw away from ditching AMD entirely and going all-in with Nvidia.

Furthermore, with this AMD makes a 'we're not a dick' move, directly countering Nvidia's 'alleged' GPP 'we're all dicks here' move, and comes out on top from a moral and principle sense.

This plays well psychology wise, and could be a factor for how 'alleged' GPP AIBs change their line-up, but at the end of the day business is business and it must go on.
 
ChadD said:
You know that is exactly what Intels lawyers said.... Its Dells choice to take our "rebate" cheques. Its their choice to agree to not use any AMD parts in X Y Z market segments. MS also had lawyers that said... they all have a choice. Of course OEMs can install any OS they like, its their choice to opt into our prefered vendor programs.

It seems to me that every AMD generation things go much the same way... NV appears to beat them up in the same 10 benchmark games 99% of the tech review sites use. 6 months later if you re run the same tests on those same games with newer patches some how the performance delta is a lot closer even though no specific AMD code is mentioned in the patches. (although fixes to IQ seem to be mentioned all the time) And if you run games released a year later... the AMD cards all of a sudden out perform the same year old NV cards.
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This is less about game patches and more about AMD always releasing awful drivers with their new GPUs, it generally takes longer than a year, and usually they end up on par or at best a few percent ahead. And even this has stopped recently. Look at Fury; it's better now than it was at launch but it's below the 580/1060 in some games while the 980ti is trading blows a level higher. My RX570 is still behind the old-ass "broken VRAM" GTX970 in some games.
 
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viper1152012 said:
Don't know but personally I havent had driver "issues" on amd or nvidia for a while. Like 2016.

I always strip with DDU and install fresh.

Maybe that's key?

I am glad GPP is exposed like a cats belly, I would keep in mind they still have claws.

Also I am happy with the vega 64 speed..... Just not the price
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I agree. They're mostly the same. AMD was having problems with Overwatch and BF1 not that long ago though it didn't bother me too badly. Some of the newer features they've added, like the in-game driver settings panel, don't always work. I prefer the old style NV driver settings over AMD's fancy settings but NV's is unacceptably slow for what it is and could still use a visual upgrade.
 
Inacurate said:
Why?
You don't shoot yourself in the hands when your only competitor is trying to chop off your knees.

AMD, as a pure act of doing business, needs to continue working with any AIBs that 'allegedly' join GPP, so their products continue to reach the largest potential consumer base possible.

If they start giving grief to 'alleged' GPP AIBs, that will sour the business relationship, and since we have no visibility on the status and health of those relationships, we have no clue if an AIB is that one last straw away from ditching AMD entirely and going all-in with Nvidia.

Furthermore, with this AMD makes a 'we're not a dick' move, directly countering Nvidia's 'alleged' GPP 'we're all dicks here' move, and comes out on top from a moral and principle sense.

This plays well psychology wise, and could be a factor for how 'alleged' GPP AIBs change their line-up, but at the end of the day business is business and it must go on.
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Let me get this right: you support businesses breaking the law, doing illegal and immoral things, and without consequences, for a profit?
 
Bankie said:
This is less about game patches and more about AMD always releasing awful drivers with their new GPUs, it generally takes longer than a year, and usually they end up on par or at best a few percent ahead. And even this has stopped recently. Look at Fury; it's better now than it was at launch but it's below the 580/1060 in some games while the 980ti is trading blows a level higher. My RX570 is still behind the old-ass "broken VRAM" GTX970 in some games.
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As a linux guy I look at it very much this way.

Somehow somewhere along the way people seem to think specific title driver optimization is a good thing.

Specific title driver optimization = cheating in bench marks >.< IMO and no one will ever convince me otherwise. To often its a card manufacturer deciding to override a game developers use of X type of filtering ect in a scene cause they know better and want to ensure that extra 5 FPS so they can win the benchmark war.

Standards exist for a reason. If AMD creates a driver that conforms to open gl 2.0 or DX 9 or DX 11 or what ever STANDARD it needs to work with. If it is implemented 100% it should work 100%. The optimization patches where NV says this patch will make X or Y game 10% faster.... are not good things, it is NV admitting that they are telling their driver to look for that software and do a few things in a non standard way to boost performance in that one piece of software. There may be the odd occasion where its a game developer that is doing something non standard perhaps and a driver patch is adding a work around for that developers improper non standard way of doing X. (but those shouldn't be about 10% more performance they should be fixing a crash with type problems) I won't ever consider title performance boost drivers a good thing.

Driver updates that increase all titles because AMD or NV or Intel ect find a way to shorten a bit of code... or add an actual feature such as DX 10 going to 10.1 support or something are cool and of course there are ways to further optimize the code that talks to the card. Software specific fixes and improvements however... are complete and utter BS, if your driver is looking for specific programs and changing how it behaves there is no other way to put, they are cheating you somewhere on IQ or at the very least not delivering the game to your monitor the way the developer intended.
 
Axils said:
Honest question, whats the difference between this and GPP?
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There not asking anyone to sign contracts. They have not asked Asus to not release NV powered Arez cards, or perhaps Intel ones down the road.... or tried to make them sign anything in blood saying as such.

They also only use open standards... and any new bits they come up with they make open.

NV is for instance completely 100% free to add Freesync support to their drivers today if they wish. That NV chooses not to is because they don't want you to have a choice... they want you to buy the Gsync product they get kick back ahh I mean licencing fees on.

NV anti choice tactics go well beyond just the GPP.
 
Bielzebuddha said:
Let me get this right: you support businesses breaking the law, doing illegal and immoral things, and without consequences, for a profit?
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Where did I say that?

If your landlord pulls shady stuff, every lawyer in the world is going to tell you to keep paying your rent, because if and when it goes to court, the judge cannot give you grief.

Same situation here.
No matter how AMD's management/employees may feel, they need to keep calm and carry on business as usual for the time being.

To answer your question - absolutely not!
I realize it happens, probably a LOT more than it should, and I'm very much against companies taking such actions and profiting from them.
I'm by no means going to champion every single example, but when they are extremely egregious, I will respond and adjust accordingly.

IMO, courts should have more leeway to levy appropriate punishment that takes into account not just the actions, but also the results, direct and indirect, that came from those actions.
Intel vs AMD for example, AMD received a tidy settlement for sure, but who can say where they might have otherwise been in the CPU market had Intel not done what they did? It's an almost impossible determination, but I think there should be a process that accounts for it and justly rewards the offended parties, while also being drastically punitive to the interloper and sends a very clear message.

But, that wouldn't be fair and just, so companies roll the dice often on risk vs reward, and can usually get away in the positive from their perspective.
 
Axils said:
Honest question, whats the difference between this and GPP?
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It's true that both are about marketing.

The part pissing everyone off (rightfully so or not) is that nVidia wants to be the exclusive partner with the Graphics card manufacturers' "Gaming" cards 'Brands'.

The GPP program is nVidia providing marketing assistance (money), plus technical/engineering assistance. My feeling is that nVidia wants to be sure that:

1) That nVidias' marketing dollars given to the card manufacturers, is ONLY spent marketing nVidia powered cards. When they were all under the same brand, that is probably hard to separate out... and it is entirely likely that some Graphics card manufacturers used solely the money provided by nVidia and AMD for their marketing. Since AMD hasn't been doing too great, I would not be at all surprised to hear that they are offering less marketing subsidies (money) than in the past, along with less engineering assistance. If nVidia is paying a bigger piece of those pies for the card manufacturers, you can see why they have taken this position, and why it is apparently legal.

2) They do not want their competitor riding on the brand success that nVidia might feel (rightly or wrongly) that they have helped build. This position also makes sense.

Now, I have no idea if this is all of the pieces of the puzzle. I have no idea how much if any marketing assistance AMD provides to the card manufacturers. I would think they provide some engineering support, but no idea how it compared to those same services offered by nVidia, or whether it is even pertinent since the cards for nVidia GPU's cannot have an AMD GPU swapped in and vice versa. If AMD does provide marketing assistance money, then having a separate brand ensures they do not help promote nVidia cards, just as GPP will do for nVidia.

My understanding is that GPP only pertains to Graphics card manufacturers' brands used to sell those Graphics cards..

imho, as long as GPP does not affect game developers' technical assistance, where new game X has to be exclusively nVidia to get nVidia technical assistance, it, as I currently understand it, doesn't bother me nearly as much as some folks on the forums. And I know nVidia has the Way It's Meant To Be Played program, AMD has one as well, and for all I know, this is already how this goes for game dev's... Last I remember hearing something along these lines, was nVidia's hair-works was part of an optional bit that game dev's could use, and it performed poorly (at the time) on AMD cards. The conspiracy theory being that nVidia was making it slow on purpose on AMD hardware. I don't think that was ever proven, it was the number of shader units (or something) on nVidia's vs AMD's that affected that features' performance. (Kyle correct me if I am wrong).

All of this aside, there are other things that I think the market in general would be better off if nVidia would open them up, with G-Sync primarily coming to mind. It sucks that you have to buy a G-Sync monitor or a Freesync monitor, and that neither are compatible with each other, if you want to use the Sync capabilities. nVidia did pioneer this, it was from findings that frame-times affecting the stuttering feeling games could have, even when the FPS was reading fairly high. I think that [H] game reviews at the time was part of discovering this too if I remember right.. But they could have opened it up after a few years, or when freesync came out, so that the Monitors aren't locked into one or the other. For a time, G-Sync was all there was with this technical capability. If they had opened it, it likely would have benefited AMD GPU sales, since back them AMD cards had really bad frame-time issues. Now that AMD can do freesync, they are at least on a more level footing. There isn't much point any longer in keeping it closed, except for the licensing/hardware for the G-Sync tech that the monitor manufacturer has to buy from nVidia. Though the 2 Sync techs work differently, so maybe there is some hardware reason that a Freesync capable monitor might still not be able to do what Gsync does... some Monitor engineer would have to answer that. But nVidia probably wants to keep collecting the $$ they get when Gsync monitors are sold. None of this Sync tech stuff is a part of GPP, but it's one more thing people complain about. This one more rightly so imho, even though in the beginning I can see why they wanted it exclusive. I wonder if AMD could make their GPU's compatible with G-Sync... (lol).

Zion Halcyon said:
They can't keep doing that. If Arez takes off, and nVidia just takes over that, there will be legal consequences.
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They could not do that. They cannot just take over a brand they have nothing to do with.
 
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GoodBoy said:
All of this aside, there are other things that I think the market in general would be better off if nVidia would open them up, with G-Sync primarily coming to mind. It sucks that you have to buy a G-Sync monitor or a Freesync monitor, and that neither are compatible with each other, if you want to use the Sync capabilities. nVidia did pioneer this, it was from findings that frame-times affecting the stuttering feeling games could have, even when the FPS was reading fairly high. I think that [H] game reviews at the time was part of discovering this too if I remember right.. But they could have opened it up after a few years, or when freesync came out, so that the Monitors aren't locked into one or the other. For a time, G-Sync was all there was with this technical capability. If they had opened it, it likely would have benefited AMD GPU sales, since back them AMD cards had really bad frame-time issues. Now that AMD can do freesync, they are at least on a more level footing. There isn't much point any longer in keeping it closed, except for the licensing/hardware for the G-Sync tech that the monitor manufacturer has to buy from nVidia. Though the 2 Sync techs work differently, so maybe there is some hardware reason that a Freesync capable monitor might still not be able to do what Gsync does... some Monitor engineer would have to answer that. But nVidia probably wants to keep collecting the $$ they get when Gsync monitors are sold. None of this Sync tech stuff is a part of GPP, but it's one more thing people complain about. This one more rightly so imho, even though in the beginning I can see why they wanted it exclusive. I wonder if AMD could make their GPU's compatible with G-Sync... (lol).
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I'm curious if Intel will support Freesync with their future dedicated GPU. It'd be an easy way for them to tap into the freesync market (versus trying to create their own proprietary standard).
 
ChadD said:
There not asking anyone to sign contracts. They have not asked Asus to not release NV powered Arez cards, or perhaps Intel ones down the road.... or tried to make them sign anything in blood saying as such.

They also only use open standards... and any new bits they come up with they make open.

NV is for instance completely 100% free to add Freesync support to their drivers today if they wish. That NV chooses not to is because they don't want you to have a choice... they want you to buy the Gsync product they get kick back ahh I mean licencing fees on.

NV anti choice tactics go well beyond just the GPP.
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NV is not "completely 100% free to add Freesync". NV can add support for the VESA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync standard but Freesync by AMD's own words requires a "AMD Freesync-compatible Radeon graphics card running AMD Freesync-compatible graphics drivers". Also by AMD's own words there is much more to Freesync than just the DP Adaptive-Sync; they even state that it requires specialized hardware that's built-in to their GPUs. Maybe it's marketing fluff but going by this you should be able to see that it's not as simple as NV flipping a switch in their drivers and advertising Freesync support. AMD has gone a long way to trick people into thinking that Freesync is "open" for everyone when in actuality it is a brand that they own and is only open to display manufacturers so I can understand people's confusion. Basically the "Free" in Freesync only applies to the monitor manufacturers. [SOURCE] [SOURCE 2]

NV would either have to support the DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync standard and lose out on the extra Freesync features beyond the bog standard VRR or they'd have to get with monitor manufacturers and have them implement an Nvidia-compatible "FreeNV-Sync" into their entire Freesync monitor range which isn't likely to happen.


I'm sure it's all for the best; NV supporting Freesync would likely be the final nail in AMD's coffin since it would give the "uninformed NV buyers that only care about gaming branding" even less of a reason to purchase an AMD card.

(Edited to fix a handful of the numerous grammar issues and to add an extra snippet of info)
 
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