Ethic-wise, has AMD done anything wrong?

OK, thanks...

 

DirectCompute is part of DirectX.

NVidia does support OpenCL in their drivers.

 

did not amd drop support for hybrid physx with newer drivers?

 

Is there sense at all to discuss ethic of two business companies?



Edit: And what is

 

I realize this. The point I was trying to make though is that AMD tends to use less-restrictive tech that works on a variety of hardware I suppose, as opposed to NVIDIA's our-tech-our-GPUs-only approach.

Lets take Tegra for example. It's advertised as being able to do better "effects" in games on Android. Games designed for Tegra offer things such as sparks, "jello water", and shadows, but note that none of that is innovative in any way. Other hardware that surpasses the processing power of a Tegra chip can't (by-default) do these effects either (you know; "Tegra is obviously the only chip that can handle additional effects" speech). File modifications can allow the use of Tegra effects on non-Tegra hardware though, which further proves how bs that tech is.

Everything I read points at NVIDIA disabling it intentionally on their drivers only, not AMD.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

Google "intel cripple amd" for more results about it though.

 

Not really....but since when has that stopped us? Most companies lack any real ethics anyway. Every company, in it's quest to generate profit, will do what they deem necessary to meet that goal. Some are just better at hiding it than others.

AMD never actually supported "hybrid PhysX"...they just didn't actively prevent it from working.

I'm actually surprised you didn't point out the issue with the OP's claim of NVidia gimping CPU PhysX....

Tegra....is NVidia hardware. Or, to be more precise, Tegra is NVidia's ARM based microprocessor.

 

I meant Tegra-optimized effects (like PhysX almost).

 

what does tegra have to do with amd cpus and gpus and amd`s shaddy business practices? as per the OP?

 

All mentioned here companies are business giants. You never prove to me, and I never believe, that they are not proprietary ones. Innovations have nothing to do with "open".

 

How will you response to "AMD gaming evolved" titles?

 

Only 990X and 990FX support SLI 970 does not. Does no one actually pay attention any more to what they have in regards to mother boards or do they just look at the price?

 

It's hardly revolutionary. A company known as 3DFX had their own proprietary API. I'm sure you've heard of it (Glide). Now of course back then with so many competitors in the market, making it open would have been worthless at best. But it's still the same idea.

 

Mantle is only open as AMD know there likely isn't a realistic way Nvidia could use it and not have issues compared to competing AMD cards.

The fact AMD don't even support it for pre GCN cards doesn't exactly suggest Nvidia will ever use it, not that i would care if it was propriety, i save my ethical decisions on the far more important things in life.

Ironically, the reason i have been using Nvidia/Intel for years now is because of their business practices.
I had no reason to go near an AMD product if all the work they done on software was also available for me on Nvidia cards, but not the other way round.

Recently AMD have been much more pro-active and has started to win me round again, Mantle obviously is a huge selling point, of course it could arrive and be buggy, causing system instability and people end up falling back to DX until it eventually fades away, but on the other hand it could be what we have all been looking for in a graphics api.

 

He never mentioned SLI. Take a chill pill, then read his post again.

 

Having owned a laptop with AMD Switchable Graphics for 2 years, I can say I will never ever buy anything with an AMD logo on it. Gaming on this thing has been nothing but misery for quite a while (thanks to people out there for raising the Enduro issue, even though my laptop uses pre-Enduro switchable graphics, it shares all its problems, and even more). Oh, and it took them a very long time to even acknowledge the problem, let alone provide a solution. Until very recently I wasn't even able to use the latest official drivers because my system simply wasn't supported by them. For nVIDIA, there has been a reference driver that works with Optimus systems, why couldn't AMD do the same? I also hate how they blame the OEMs for this, but OEMs blame AMD instead.
I don't care a single bit for Mantle because it isn't supported on my GPU, even though those newer mobile GCN cards that support it are just renamed versions of HD6000 series.

I used to be a big fan of AMD and ATI, but this switchable graphics thing is simply unacceptable.

 

AMD is guilty of "guessing" the performance of there chips with the BS + at the end of there speed. That was a big reason why I never went AMD. They couldn't ever really compete with the speed numbers so they more or less came up with there own. Huge scam if you ask me... Sure we can all argue this one for days and days but at the end of the day AMD could not compete with Intel at that time in speed numbers. They more or less lost the GHz race ironically after beating Intel to 1GHz first. Kind of ironic how GHz numbers matter to AMD when they were in front, but when Intel was in front all of a sudden IPC matters and not GHz. I was a big advocate that GHz has in fact always matters and still does to this very day. If it really never matters not a single one of you would ever over clock your speeds now would you?

Another thing AMD is guilty for if memory serves me correct is AMD was bad for locking there chips and some had to bypass that with the "pencil trick” which was basically altering the CPU to by-pass this lock. If AMD was so pro gamer why do that in the first place?

I am sure I can come up with some more because I have been around PC gaming since quake2 back in 1996. Some of you guys were in grade school back then...

 

Afaik, they're titles with more work to assure a good experience on AMD hardware, without downgrading the experience on other hardware.

I don't care about SLI nor do I need it. Was just stating that my board does not have it...

The way I see it, AMD has worked with and fine-tuned Mantle on GCN hardware, but not non-GCN hardware. The reasoning for excluding non-GCN hardware could be that the platforms are too different to implement the same low-level calls, and would require a whole new project (and since the future with AMD is apparently GCN... this doesn't seem too profitable). As for how much the platforms really differ, I don't know exactly, but judging by the whole radeonsi situation on Linux, it seems pretty different (6xxx and older cards work great with the open-source driver; GCN hardware on the other hand...). I of course don't know if this is the real reasoning or not (I imagine AMD only knows their own reasoning).

I have an AMD switchable graphics laptop in front of me right now (had it for a few months now), and my experience is quite the opposite of yours... Drivers (both Beta and WHQL; Windows and Linux) install without problem. I'm not aware of the Enduro problem specifically though; what is this?

As far as I know, there's only three laptop vendors that could be problematic with AMD's drivers (Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony), and from my understanding, it's because these vendors do some device ID modifications that's rather unnecessary to begin with. My laptop is Acer, and has had no problem.

 

Actually he did, his response was directly related to me saying that AMD does support SLI. By saying his board didn't and others have reported SLI not being supported on his board. My comment was justified as if you do a simple search about the 900 chipsets this info is readily avalible.

 

Hmm, guessing numbers isn't too good, but generally speaking, basing purchase decisions off benchmarks isn't that smart of an idea imo (plenty of cheating on Android benchmarks; probably a few biased PC benchmarks too, especially ones used on AMD processors with Intel's compiler).

As for the pencil trick, I've heard of this, but I'm curious about an actual reasoning behind this (I don't know what hardware this was required with, but surely there was some reason for it). As for an Intel-equivalent, how about those $50 unlock cards?

 

Lol but the 970 doesn't support SLI. And if it makes you feel better I know every AMD chipset revision made inside out...... if that helps. The 970 only has a x16 and x4 PCI-E slot....

What made you think it was SLI capable?