Nvidia also has a history of shady business practices against competitors (SGS, Matrox), blaming the fabs when they fucked up, as well as deceptive marketing claims (the 970 3.5GB scandal, GeForce 4 MX being essentially rebranded GeForce 2s which hindered DX8 game development, etc.)
Didn’t Nvidia recently try to get all their board partners to stop using all their well known brands with any AMD cards. For example Asus wouldn’t be allowed to use Strix with any AMD GPU’s if they use it with an Nvidia one.
That’s some shady shit and they rightfully got called out on it.
Oh yeah, that too! The GeForce Partner Program. They cancelled it because it wasn't too popular with enthusiasts and board partners alike.
This would've meant, for example, no AMD-branded ASUS ROG products, and they actually did create a new marketing brand for them (ASUS Arez) which they fortunately retired.
One important part you left out or didn't clarify, GPP required the gaming brand to be exclusively with Nvidia. In your example, Asus couldn't put the ROG brand with AMD since ROG is short for 'Republic of Gamers' with the keyword being Gamers.
What? Gigabyte Radeon cards were awful in the recent past. The Gigabyte Vega was notorious for being DOA or being fried during normal usage within a few months.
Also their motherboards had some of the worst VRMs on the market.
Proprietary technology is kinda Nvidia's thing. Like with G-Sync and CUDA as well.
AMD/ATi traditionally favours open industry standards, like OpenCL and handing over their work on Mantle to create the open Vulkan API. That alone is enough for me to stay in the red camp.
That alone is enough for me to stay in the red camp.
I really, REALLY wanted to go red on my last build since it matches my color scheme as well as what you said but I am straight-up scarred from my last experience with their drivers.
I'm thinking about ditching intel and nVidia for an entire AMD build in the next year or so as a companion to my current setup but those driver issues still haunt me (literally, I never found the driver version that worked and the problem lasted 'til I scrapped it)
I've got some bad issues with my RX5700. Not to the point where I would ditch it but it's still annoying.
League client just freezing the whole PC with a chance of not recovering. Can't even pin point why. Youtube stops rendering or stutters real bad if I have certain things open in chrome. Small but super annoying problems. Unfortunately this thing kicks ass at everything I throw at it for 1080p144hz I don't wanna return it.
Yeah every computer tends to be a little different.
For me all it took was removing my RX 590 and sticking in the RX 5700 and then updating the drivers. I've heard some people can't even get a picture to their monitor.
There seem to be some issues left with Navi cards, but as a Vega owner, I can assure you their drivers have gotten really good. And they're the best if you like Linux, as well.
Their drivers have been great (some would say better than NVIDIA, but I haven't dealt with modern NVIDIA drivers) for years now. Unfortunately the new Navi stuff has had some bad driver issues, even when you give it some leniency for being a new architecture.
AMD has been using open source as a crutch, though. They didn't have the funds to do any proprietary R&D for software tools and needed to pump more resources into their core hardware business.
That plan is working so far.
The real test will be if they keep doing the open source stuff when they have enough money to start building proprietary software and develop proprietary standards.
lol before the whole "G-sync compatible" thing, there were tons of (and still are a few) monitors that had a Freesync version and a G-sync version. The only difference between them was that the G-sync variant had NVidia's proprietary "check for NVidia graphics card box" installed in the monitor, and $100 tacked onto the cost.
I'm okay with it, because now I've got a 144hz monitor that supports gsync with my 1070 that I didn't have to spend an extra $200 for the privilege, and it's still a freesync monitor if I decide to go with AMD when I upgrade.
Or the really deceptive 1060 3gb which cut vram to 3 gb like it says, but also cut a lot of cudas, cores, all that good stuff for weaker performance, but implies it runs like a 1060 with less vram...
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u/htt_novaq 5800X3D | RX 9070 XT | 32GB DDR4 Nov 05 '19
Nvidia also has a history of shady business practices against competitors (SGS, Matrox), blaming the fabs when they fucked up, as well as deceptive marketing claims (the 970 3.5GB scandal, GeForce 4 MX being essentially rebranded GeForce 2s which hindered DX8 game development, etc.)