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Carmack on AMD vs Nvidia

martinmsj

martinmsj

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 3, 2005
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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/11/id-softwares-john-carmack-picks-a-side-in-the-nvidiaamd-gpu-war/

PCG: If you were to buy a graphics card right now, what would you get?

John Carmack: Let me caution this by saying that this is not necessarily a benchmarked result. We’ve had closer relationships with Nvidia over the years, and my systems have had Nvidia cards in them for generations. We have more personal ties with Nvidia. As I understand it, ATI/AMD cards are winning a lot of the benchmarks right now for when you straight-out make synthetic benchmarks for things like that, but our games do get more hands-on polish time on the Nvidia side of things.
Click to expand...

Nothing new I guess. The more interesting part is what the bit on the on die GPU's (Sandy Bridge, Fusion.)
 
^ My guess is "personal ties" means bags of "the way it's meant to be played" money sent their way.
 
As I understand it, ATI/AMD cards are winning a lot of the benchmarks right now for when you straight-out make synthetic benchmarks for things like that
Click to expand...

AMD is winning in more than just synthetic benchmarks, that is probably something an nvidia rep told him.
 
When i first heard about him showing enough interest in mobile games as to stard developing for it in his own time, first thing that came to mind was "OMG! He's gone senile!"

Now tho, i wonder what Bethesda has for mobiles with him onboard.

Is there an article on him regarding Tegra?
 
All I read there was blah blah blah they give me money blah blah. And from experience my franken 6970s are the best bang for the buck cards I've owned since I got my 8800 GTX many years ago. They definitely are getting amazing performance in more than synthetic benchmarks too.

Don't get me wrong, I like NVIDIA but they're cards haven't been doing really good on the bang for buck front. I COULD go with a 570 but that would've been significantly more expensive for 2 of those than it was for 2 of my 6950s.
 
well.... lots of RTFAs :p

anyhow, the reason he stayed with nVidia is their dev support team, which AMD apparently is still in the early stages of. It's in the line right after the end of the quote the OP has.
 
Yeap yeap, not directly $$, but such personalized on-call support team might as well be those huge bags of gold due to how much time they can save him.

Heck, he himself says that such a support team is what could potentially turn an inferior hardware into decent or superior performance, which is a hint that AMD needs to take <.<
 
jeremyshaw said:
well.... lots of RTFAs :p

anyhow, the reason he stayed with nVidia is their dev support team, which AMD apparently is still in the early stages of. It's in the line right after the end of the quote the OP has.
Click to expand...

Makes sense, good article, makes ya wonder what cpu's will have onboard in 5 years (end of article)
 
Revdarian said:
Yeap yeap, not directly $$, but such personalized on-call support team might as well be those huge bags of gold due to how much time they can save him.

Heck, he himself says that such a support team is what could potentially turn an inferior hardware into decent or superior performance, which is a hint that AMD needs to take <.<
Click to expand...

Yeah. AMD needs to step up their dev support. Nvidia has been supporting developers for years now and AMD/ATI has kind of sat in their ass only working with a few studios here and there. It's something that really really needs to change.
 
PRIME1 said:
It sounds like, bottom line NVIDIA supports games better.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but AMD cards are best bong for buck out there,
Also you can twak them. Like there are plenty of good torrents with older Catalyst versions, so you find a best hotfix and CAP, and install which ever driver works best for your game.

And if you still have any problems with gfx there are plenty of helpful threads out there.
Like on AMD forum these two experts will tell you there's nothing wrong with Cata and they didn't have a single prob. with Crossfire in 10 years.

Later you can tweak further with Radeon Pro and combine games with different profiles to kill some more free time
( if there's any left)

--
People saying it is impossible to play a rts with a tiny lag window in the corner are idiots. Use cursors or move 2 mm to the side of that lag square in the corner and stop being a douche.
 
ID has not made a good game since quake 3 team arena......dear mr carmack, pull ur head out of your A$$
 
Well, that's like waking Edison up from the grave and asking him what he thinks about LED lighting.

Seriously.
 
I do not understand why we even care what this guy thinks all the time. Why is he on such a high status that its always "Camack says this ". He hasn't made a good game in forever.
 
Carmack's ability isn't about the games, but about the engines, OpenGL engines that is that end up being licensed.

And say what you will, but Doom3's graphics were quite impressive all around when it came out.
 
loool, i think Carmack just read a prompter from Nvidia representative...:D
 
Revdarian said:
Carmack's ability isn't about the games, but about the engines, OpenGL engines that is that end up being licensed.

And say what you will, but Doom3's graphics were quite impressive all around when it came out.
Click to expand...
Hmm...OpenGL
I think Carmack would be very disappointed with a Fermi card then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_400_Series#OpenGL_Problems

"It has been reported by users as well as developers [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] that nVidia 400-series cards have severe performance problems with 3D content-creation applications such as Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, Blender, Rhinoceros 3D—as well as some OpenGL games—to the extent that video cards two generations older routinely outperform 400-series in such applications and games. The problem, which affects any OpenGL application using textures, involves accessing framebuffer contents or storing data on the GPU. So far, one customer using an OpenGL based application got a response from nVidia support indicating that the behavior is expected in the GeForce 400 line of cards, and no software update is available to improve the performance of the hardware.[21]. "
 
Ati hate brigade is funny ;)

Fermi cards win benchmarks in certain titles against their radeon counter parts and by doing carefull selection of titles and resolutions tested you can prove any conclusion you want.

Also Ati wins on bang for buck front - you forgotten to add at this moment since when i was getting my 470 for 220 euro last summer they could only offer me 200 euro 5830 at that price bracket ;)
 
Spare-Flair said:
^ My guess is "personal ties" means bags of "the way it's meant to be played" money sent their way.
Click to expand...
ATI had the "Get in the Game" program that did the same thing. Money doesn't seem to be involved*, it's the amount of support and help offered to game developers. Developers have always said that nvidia offers more assistance than ATI/AMD does.

I never understood why ATI/AMD never took it more seriously other than lip service. Even a few months ago it was the same rehashed stuff: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18620


* I know the millions ATI gave Valve directly don't count. ;)
 
Well pgaster i guess that THAT explains the other tidbit that Carmack said, about how superior dev support could make inferior hardware look better ;-)

edit to add:
"The problem can be worked around with a hack by using a CUDA memory copy to access the buffer object."
Yup that hack could be counted by Carmack as superior dev support. The actual hardware is crippled, but Nvidia found a way around and tells developers how to properly use it. (or in the case of Quadro cards i bet they have it already on the specialized drivers).


Come onnnnnn AMD get that dev support team on the double :D
 
Sly said:
When i first heard about him showing enough interest in mobile games as to stard developing for it in his own time, first thing that came to mind was "OMG! He's gone senile!"

Now tho, i wonder what Bethesda has for mobiles with him onboard.

Is there an article on him regarding Tegra?
Click to expand...
Looking at his track record, by the time he actually gets something produced everyone else will already be doing it. He's a forward thinker, no doubt, just takes way too long to get something on the table.

And NVIDIA has always been big on supporting developers, but in all honesty it doesn't really matter much. For as many times as it helps it also does jack, and I can see AMD be wary of throwing their money into such endeavors when there might not be a big return. A perfect example is the original Crysis - big NVIDIA funded game that has always performed better on AMD GPUs.
 
He probably uses Nvidia cards to "polish" the games because the ATI drivers don't work lol
 
Spare-Flair said:
^ My guess is "personal ties" means bags of "the way it's meant to be played" money sent their way.
Click to expand...

Back in the day it was because OpenGL wasn't worth a shit on ATI cards. It had nothing to do with a "bag of money." id was just an OpenGL shop and ATI was far from having it's shit together when it came to that API. These days I couldn't say. I believe all the more recent work id has done has all been DirectX based so OpenGL performance is irrelevant.
 
Dan_D said:
Back in the day it was because OpenGL wasn't worth a shit on ATI cards. It had nothing to do with a "bag of money." id was just an OpenGL shop and ATI was far from having it's shit together when it came to that API. These days I couldn't say. I believe all the more recent work id has done has all been DirectX based so OpenGL performance is irrelevant.
Click to expand...

QFT

It still isn't that great. For example, the new drivers fix the OpenGL crashing, but performance is poo. Even in a game as old as RTCW there are areas that slow down to 20 FPS, on a 5870 XXX no less.
 
GotNoRice said:
Brink uses the idTech4 engine.
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That doesn't mean id has had anything to do with it beyond providing the engine code to the developer. I also haven't played Brink so I can't say whether or not it's good or terrible.
 
Adam.C said:
He probably uses Nvidia cards to "polish" the games because the ATI drivers don't work lol
Click to expand...

I think most game developers use NVIDIA hardware. Maybe that is the reason. Maybe because they support newer technologies like physics and 3D, things that just don't run on AMD hardware. Although Valve uses code from NVIDIA in the source engine, so that may be another reason.
 
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Revdarian said:
Well pgaster i guess that THAT explains the other tidbit that Carmack said, about how superior dev support could make inferior hardware look better ;-)

edit to add:
"The problem can be worked around with a hack by using a CUDA memory copy to access the buffer object."
Yup that hack could be counted by Carmack as superior dev support. The actual hardware is crippled, but Nvidia found a way around and tells developers how to properly use it. (or in the case of Quadro cards i bet they have it already on the specialized drivers).


Come onnnnnn AMD get that dev support team on the double :D
Click to expand...
I disagree with your conclusion. It seemed to me from what I read that people figured this work around out on their own. Nvidia didn't hand them a work around on a silver platter.
Also note that the Fermi quadro cards have no problem and are fast.
In my opinion this means Nvidia has intentionally crippled certain features in their geforce drivers to try to force people to get a quadro.

ATI probably does something similar in their drivers too, but not to the degree that Nvidia does.

Check these benches out:
GTX 280 vs Quadro 4800 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/quadro-fx-4800,2258-10.html
The Quadro is 10 X faster in the Solidworks test. The GTX 280 only gets about 13 fps where the quadro is around 128 fps

Now to the ATI side: 4870 vs FirePro V8700 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-firepro-v8700,2154-10.html
The Firepro is 3X faster. The 4870 gets 30 fps in solidworks and the V8700 is 90 fps

The Quadro is faster than the V8700 Firepro, but that is to be expected since it has slightly better hardware.

Now look at the GTX 280 vs 4870. The 4870 is between 2X and 3X faster than the GTX 280 in Solidworks. Solidworks is OpenGL. It's clear to me Nvidia cripples their gaming card drivers for pro apps. ATI may also be doing something similar, but they aren't doing it as much as Nvidia. They seem to be giving people a little something to work with if they can't afford a pro card.

I also did some Specviewperf 10 testing with hardware I had on hand. My 785G motherboard's built in 4200 video is faster than a GTX 260 Core 216. Not only that but the GTX 260 didn't render the car properly in the Solidworks portion. The wheels and other objects were just shown as boxes. There is no way this can be easily explained by anything other than drivers, and Nvidia is crippling gaming card drivers for pro apps.
 
It's not like Nvidia is paying him to say that. He just doesn't really care. They just have a business relationship with Nvidia and that's where their cards come from. I don't think he gives a shit what kind of card is in his dev station.
 
Dan_D said:
That doesn't mean id has had anything to do with it beyond providing the engine code to the developer. I also haven't played Brink so I can't say whether or not it's good or terrible.
Click to expand...

The engine is critical, and programmatically it's the hard part. The rest of the game development is all creative - textures, storyline, characters, etc.
 
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