What's up with NVIDIA lately?

Matias N. Goldberg · 2010-11-24T13:25:32

Hi all!I'm a big fan of NVIDIA, but I can't keep feeling things are going down lately, regarding it's competitors, and I wanted to know if you share my thoughts:With the last GeForce 400 series, OpenGL read back transfers are insanely slow (affecting mainly top 3D modelling applications), also with some other weird problems.Also NVPerfSDK is stuck at version 6.5 and doesn't work properly with latest 2xx.xx generation drivers. NVPerfHUD still has some BSODs that have been in there for ages. Meanwhile ATI's redesigned GPU PerfStudio 2.13 (shame it doesn't have DX9 support) and Intel's GPA look superbThey've launched DX11 hardware like 4 months after ATI.Not to mention that latest cards are drawing insane amounts of energy and producing heat compared to it's competitors.NVIDIA's OpenGL drivers used to be the best out there. Currently, their GLSL parser is so permissive, I am better off compiling GLSL shaders in my mobile ATI card and looking at the warnings and errors they produce.Also I almost forgot to mention NVIDIA drivers prevent PhysX from running in GPU mode if they detect a non-NVIDIA GPU is the primary graphics device; that can only be achieved with patched drivers. They've quoted business and stability issues, but including a time bomb is lame and disloyal, both to customers and competitors.Speaking of driver disasters, watch out for version ForceWare 196.75 which burns your GPU. Nice QA department...Besides another reason NVIDIA cards were preferred over the other, was their excellent Linux support. Today Intel and specially ATI have catched up (NVIDIA is still a bit ahead IMO though), and at least ATI has the choice to use either the open source drivers (for which ATI releases extensive documentation of their hardware, unlike NVIDIA), or their proprietary one.NVIDIA on the other side, has opted to kill the open source 2D-only NV driver. NV Driver wasn't great, but was a light in the dark when you use distros like Debian where the only way to get something preinstalled and done automatically is if it is fully compliant with their philosophy.Plus, a nice fallback to have the 'nv' driver when the proprietary one failed to load unexpectedly.Last, but not least, a year, two years ago; I used to read a lot of 3D whitepapers from their developer site. Currently it's all about GPGPU (which has it's market, my respect for them), and I often found myself reading more and more whitepapers from ATI and Microsoft (plus the usual GDC & SIGGRAPH papers published by other companies or individuals).I have to admit some benefits. NVIDIA has made a lot of effort in the HPC (High performance computing) area, for those who can afford it, nsight looks great, and Cg is awesome.Soooooooooo, all things considered, I still use NVPerfHUD which still a keeper for me (which btw I have to stick to older drivers) and it's a shame ATI's GPU PerfStudio doesn't support D3D9.But I'm finding less and less reasons to go for GeForce cards, probably one of the few things left is brand loyalty (which is starting to fade away with these many issues I'm commenting), and more attracted for Radeon GPUs.Probably as a gamer, brand loyalty and good performance is enough to keep me choosing their products, but as a developer, I need a company which cares about my needs. And within those needs are tools that support and ease my work, drivers that guarantee that those tools don't get broken or may kill may card, commitment to their user preferences (i.e the time bomb) and research papers that incentive my creativity and motivate people to share knowledge about graphics programming, etc.I don't want to start a flame war. I'm trying to point out some facts that have emerging lately and can no longer ignore. I had to share this.Am I alone in this line of thought? What do you have to say? Am I missing something?[Edited by - Matias Goldberg on November 21, 2010 10:20:59 PM]

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Started by Matias Goldberg November 21, 2010 07:21 PM

30 comments, last by zedz 14 years, 3 months ago

Mantear

251

November 24, 2010 11:09 AM

Quote:
Original post by dpadam450
Where are all the cheap ATI GL 4 cards though. I was about to go ATI as well.

How cheap do you want? You can get a Radeon 5450 for $30 and it supports OpenGL 4. Or a 5750 for under $100. Maybe I don't understand what you're looking for.

dpadam450

2,414

November 24, 2010 11:22 AM

I didnt see that one, I saw some of the higher up 5000 series cards that only had 3.0 support and the 6000 series has support for 4.0. I just assumed non of the 5 series had it.

NBA2K, Madden, Maneater, Killing Floor, Sims

zedz

291

November 24, 2010 01:25 PM

Quote:
Original post by dave j
I also like quiet PCs, I'm looking for a passively cooled alternative to my current GeForce 8600GTS.

AMD seem to have got much better at this Linux drivers recently, has anybody got any practical experience of their Linux OpenGL support. I'm looking for a card that will support OpenGL 4.1 stuff.

mirrors my experiences, my last 3 cards including my current nv9500gt have all been fanless. though i have no desire to upgrade since the 9500gt is already fast enuf for everything i do.
card speeds are quite ridiculous nowadays

What's up with NVIDIA lately?

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What's up with NVIDIA lately?

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