Let's talk: AMD Graphics Lack of features

[Vicey]

I thought it would be interesting to make a thread to discuss something I've noticed occurring over the past few years, mostly since AMD purchased ATi.

AMD's lack of software features to accompany their graphics cards.

Now I'm not making this thread to troll I love AMD and their products I'm making this so we can have a civil discussion about the lack of features included with AMD graphics cards and what that means in the grand scheme, is it an issue, does it really matter.

Now you may be wondering what do I mean well let me just give you examples.

NVIDIA has 3D Vision which lets you play games in 3D. It's a free software feature and all you need is a compatible 3D Display and 3D Glasses. It works very well and is baked right in to their driver bundle.

AMD on the other hand requires you to purchase a 3rd party 3D solution and it does not work so well. So you have to buy the software on top of a 3D TV and Glasses and you end up with a less compatible solution to NVIDIA.

PhysX. NVIDIA purchased Ageia many years ago and ever since they've heavily been pushing PhysX. You can use this if you only have AMD graphics but you're confined to running the Physics calculations on your CPU which is much slower. AMD still don't have a competitive solution, most games that use a specific physics technology are leaning towards NVIDIA's PhysX solution.

NVIDIA Surround. AMD does have Eyefinity and while it works fine in games just as NVIDIA Surround does when you're at the desktop it falls apart. Instead of having each screen treated as its own screen it treats them as one giant screen. This is fine in games but at the desktop your task bar is stretched across all three displays, your windows when maximised stretch across all three screens. NVIDIA has fixed this problem, in NVIDIA Surround mode (On Windows 7 only, not Windows 8 yet) you get a single Task Bar on the centre display and maximising a window only maximises it in to the screen it is in.

And there are other examples. We had the CUDA accelerated video transcoder from NVIDIA which was not free but did drastically speed up video transcoding for mobile devices. AMD never had an answer to that product. Then just now with the launch of the GTX 780 series NVIDIA has given us both NVIDIA Experience which tunes your games settings and alerts you to new driver releases and Shadow Play which is a way to record game footage with a minimal 5 to 10% performance penalty. Again AMD has no answer to these products.

Now that Shadow Play feature may not seem like a big deal but when you look at how many gaming videos are posted on youtube daily it becomes a huge deal for a lot of people. FRAPS can sometimes more than half your gaming performance while recording.

So are these types of features important to you when you consider a GPU purchase or is it only the graphical fidelity and price to performance that you care about?

Personally I think AMD is really letting themselves down by not investing more in to their software and for me I'm starting to think that even if AMD had a slightly faster card or a slightly cheaper card I'd still go NVIDIA for the convenience of the software suite they have developed.

Thoughts?

 

[SieB]

To be honest, non of that stuff apart from PhysX interests me. I think AMD should add their own version PhysX to their cards, it's something they may start doing more and more with TressFX though.

For 3D, most modern monitors and TVs do passive 3D now which is getting better and better, so 3D is not much of a worry either. My TV does passive 3D and games look pretty good on it in 3D, it's not perfect but it's not bad either.

As for the Nvidia experience, AMD has Radeaon Pro, which is basically the same thing. For recording gameplay, there are plenty of programs for that, so that's not a problem really either. Dxtory is still the best with the least performance hit if I recall correctly, not really sure as I don't record gameplay to be honest.

For the most of it there are many free programs that will do the job of what Nvidia offers but AMD don't.

The main purpose of a GPU is to play games, it's the performance in games that makes me want to buy a GPU.

It also depends on price, some people think a card that offers next to no performance in most games is worth an extra £100-£200+, I don't. Especially when I can get that extra performance for free by overclocking.

I'd just like to add I don't care about brands, as in AMD or Nvidia. I only care about the best card performance wise that isn't also overpriced.

 

[Vicey]

Thanks for replying SieB! - You bring up some great points, if you don't need any of these features then the difference between the cards software features won't matter.

 

[SieB]

I guess it also come down to personal preference, some people might find the extra Nvidia stuff useful. But looking at it from a just playing games perspective, then I don't think the extra stuff is important to most people. Although, i'm sure a lot of people do find it useful though.

 

[Vicey]

For me I use NVIDIA Surround so the desktop tweaks are beneficial to me. And I do make the odd gameplay video for my Minecraft server so the Shadow Play feature is interesting to me however I've not yet tried it.

I wish AMD had some of this stuff, I wasn't aware of the Radeon Pro thing so excuse my ignorance on that but yeah I'd like them to provide more useful features, 3D would be nice and enhancements to Eyefinity desktop mode at a minimum.

 

[barnsley]

I've had horribly bad luck with Nvidia in the past so I tend to stay away from them unless they can provide superior price/performance which recently they haven't (well, not in a single card set up anyway...). While I do quite like Physx in therory, in reality i've never really notcied the difference with it on/off. It also recently appears to be in every Sh**ty simulator out there (farming simulator has in plastered everywhere for example).

Now that the drivers in AMD 'cards are becoming better and less of a practical joke I think they should fix issues such as crossfire and Physx (new console generation and all...)as opposed to creating new features. Price/performance wise I think that (at time of writing) AMD tend to come out on top. That, at the end of the day, is what it boils down to for me. Price/performance. I never would really make much use of the features that Nvidia offer in day to day gaming/general activities.

 

[AverageNinja]

Best feature for me must be both PhysX and GeForce Experience.
I'm personally quite a fan on NVidia GPUs, though they have some rough competition around the £200 mark (7870 XT, XFX 7950 for £225).
And of course the 7970, quite a beast.

 

[Kei]

Almost all of those features are nvidia locked in. Their version of 3D is totally daft as you have to buy a screen that works with it. My 50" plasma does 3D fine with my 6970 plus i can use it with my bluray player. (can't see me finding a nvidia 3d vision screen to match that) To top that off, a nv 3d vision screen cannot be used with an amd card. (again)

PhysX is my biggest bugbear, especially when they tried to stop users from adding a low end nv card to a radeon system for physx. They know it can be applied to work on an amd gpu and they will not release it. I think the cpu support for physx was a begrudged release.

OpenCL and CUDA are basically the same thing. The difference is that OpenCL is an open standard and supported by more than one company, while CUDA is a proprietary framework from nvidia and only works on nvidia products. (While OpenCL also works across a range including nvidia products) nVidia recently added CUDA backend support for open-source LLVM which allows it to build binary for nvidia GPUs. This is simply nvidia protecting the CUDA monopoly. Otherwise companies which use LLVM would end up using OpenCL which would benefit everybody equally.