[LinuxBender]

I blocked their telemetry and not I can't even update my drivers. Not through windows update, nor through their installer. It hangs trying to talk back to them.

No harm, no foul, probably time to give AMD cards a chance. Variety is the spice of life and the spice must flow.

[existencebox]

As much as I welcome the capitalistic response, I'm worried it won't be enough.

As much as I'd love true competition in the GPU/CPU space, it doesn't exist. AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios, and even in its basic capacity, often have known heat/perf issues. Now that may be worth it for now to make a statement against the telemetry, but what if (less if and more when IMO) AMD then adds driver telemetry? And then intel?

These domains (Chip manufacture/GPU driver writing) are so advanced at this point that I don't see how competition could reasonably disrupt an incumbent over anything less than a samsung-grade failure (and even then probably not), and I'm concerned about the long-term wherein the producers realize this and through a combination of boiling the frog slowly and leaving consumers no other choices put themselves in the position to have a "pragmatic monopoly" of free reign over our machines. (I've always wondered what would happen from an antitrust sense, if it's "we're the only producer not because we WANT to but because we're the only ones who CAN")

We've certainly seen it happening with OSes, as well as some attempts from PC oems, I've always unfortunately thought it was just a matter of time until the more irreplaceable components got into the game too and I'd love some creative thoughts to actually stop the trend and not stand in its way, because I'm not sure we'll win that latter battle.

EDIT: as a child post points out, I completely forgot to mention drivers as well; as a strong argument to my "we don't have many options" thesis. AMD's linux support has been historically lacking next to NVIDIA which makes it a non starter in many cases.

[giancarlostoro]

Odd, I always bought AMD and only ever had issues if I overclocked them. The one time I have an Nvidia card, all I have is issues with drivers, both on Windows and Linux. The only thing that impresses me that Nvidia has done is the Nvidia Shield Tablet, and they made it less impressive with their K1 rendition of it. There's also the Nintendo Switch but it's yet to be determined if Nintendo is doing something amazing with it, or losing out on another big opportunity. Nvidia does not impress me. I've had AMD for years, and have had a solid investment every time. Of course this is my experience, other people's may vary. My main complaint against AMD is Linux drivers either exist, or they don't, they either work, or they don't. With Nvidia it's the same, some people / distros keep a specific driver version because Nvidia breaks a previous one with their 'fixes'.

[lightedman]

" AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios"

Really? Which brand of GPU pretty much ran Bitcoin during its inception, again?

[existencebox]

You're absolutely right, HOWEVER, I would call that the exception rather than the rule, as IIRC it was largely due to AMD supporting some operators in a more native/optimized form than Nvidia did at the time, than any sort of true general purpose superiority. Given how quickly mining moved to ASICS I wouldn't use that as an advocation that they're (ASICS) superior to Nvidia for GPGPU functionality. (Special-purpose specially-designed, no doubt, but that's not really "General")

Edit: read a sister post later article on the breakdown of the perf differences, and it seems to slightly affirm what I'm saying (re: bitcoin aligning with a functionality AMD performed very strongly in), although I'll admit to have only skimmed it.

I will say though, even despite this, it doesn't address the known heat/power issues even the "heyday" amd cards seemed to suffer from and that were still present when I was comparing them while looking at a 1070 recently.

EDIT: since I can't edit my original post any more, I'd note here that I didn't intend to turn this into a NVIDIA/AMD debate, even if we ignore that for a moment and consider it a duopoly situation instead of monoply, I'd ask readers to consider my core point in that light.

[Coding_Cat]

Per dollar, AMD performs much better than nVidia for a significant number of cases[1] and they have much larger memory. However, this is comparing an equally optimized implementation. Unfortunately nVidia simply has much more optimized content availible.

https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2016-05-06/noticeable-proces...

[roel_v]

Try to write some GPU software on AMD cards, then compare that to the NVidia/CUDA experience. I don't know about the Bitcoin thing (maybe in the end, for very long lived code, the lower cost would be more important than the developer pain and time time required) but for pretty much all the HPC code I see, getting things running sooner and with more polished dev tools beats price/performance ratios every time. If you're spending a few thousand on Titans anyway, getting a few more cycles per watt doesn't matter all that much anymore; except for Bitcoin mining where your main cost is energy (by design).

So I think there's a very clear reason for that specific case.

[fdgdasfadsf]

Bitcoin mining uses lots of integer manipulation. AMD cards are faster for integer operations. Hence bitcoin miners used to use AMD cards.

[KirinDave]

I'm... confused why you'd say this. It's simply true: NVIDIA's consistently ahead on these tasks on performance/energy cost metric.

You can do most any computation on any GPU with the right SDK support (and of course, the CPU hasn't gone anywhere). It's just fantastically less efficient.

[TD-Linux]

It really isn't true - AMD cards utterly crushed nVidia ones during the heydey of mining: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvi...

[andromeduck]

GPU mining is only one of a multitude of GPGPU applications right now and it really isn't even growing.

[ajnin]

AMD are already doing sneaky things with their driver autoupdate on Windows, they put the checkbox below the "upgrade" button, prechecked and with a large spacing so it is likely you don't see it immediately and click "upgrade" before you realize it, and they also present the checkbox at least twice, rechecking it if you unchecked it previously. So I fear that after that move by Nvidia they'll feel empowered to push more things on the user.

I'm worried about the semiconductor industry in general as well, there is a lot of concentration currently all over the place, not sure where it's going to stop, and at some degree competition is going to become less fierce, you don't need to get to a monopoly but an oligopoly is likely and will lead to tacit agreement on market separation and price fixing as in the telecom industry.

[andromeduck]

What was the checkbox for?

[robotresearcher]

Enable auto update.

[vasquez]

Actually, AMD's latest design, the RX 4x0 series, measures up really well to NVidia's mid and low end cards, especially for Vulkan/DX12 apps. They're not a contender in the enthusiast market, but will be releasing high-end cards using a refined design in the first half of 2017.

As for drivers, AMD has pledged to open source their Vulkan and OpenCL implementations. While that release has been pending "legal review" forever now, alternative open source drivers are making great progress thanks to Vulkan's simpler driver model. While NVidia's generally had the "better" driver, both from adhering less strictly to the spec and having the manpower to routinely fix application bugs in their driver, that's all changed with Vulkan/DX12 being significantly closer to the hardware.

I'd say things are looking up for market balance.

[slededit]

On my last box I found the AMD drivers were injecting a DLL into almost every process - including the brand new program I was in the process of developing.

[brokenmachine]

Can someone ELI5 what injecting a DLL does, how they did it, and what they might have been using it for?

I know with my old Nvidia drivers, you can add extra icons for window management to every window (move to next monitor, etc). Would this be using DLL injection?

[0xcde4c3db]

I've seen Nvidia drivers do that too. I think it's mostly done to let the user override graphics settings that are otherwise hardcoded into the application's API calls.

[imtringued]

You can uncheck Plays.tv/Raptr/AMD Gaming Evolved during the installation or uninstall it after the fact. It's seperate from the drivers.