[GTALUG] I guess I should buy a new video card

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 1:08 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:


> I guess they have gotten a bit better since.  But it has been a lot of really
> bad work to get over.  They have made good hardware, but wow their driver
> team has been terrible for a very long time.  Maybe they finally got that
> part right too.


In this decade, focusing solely on OS hardware drivers is a mistake when
evaluating current GPU offerings ... depending on your intended use.

For gaming and video manipulation these are still a factor (and in general
pretty solid for both companies, Wayland issues notwithstanding). If that's
all you want, there are many good Internet sites that will help you find
the current (and ever-changing) sweet spot that balances budget and
performance. (Here's my favourite pricing site
<https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/>, and a good at-a-glance
comparison of benchmarks
<https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html>.) However,
nVidia hasn't become one of the world's most valuable companies because its
cards run Davinci Resolve so well. GPUs these days are increasingly being
used directly for apps from crypto mining to AI and beyond, to the point
where some of the most expensive GPU cards are sold without display
connectors.

Increasingly, apps use direct access to GPUs using toolkits such as AMD's
ROCm and nVidia's CUDA, and in this realm nVidia has a massive head start.
AMD is making good progress, but if you're buying a card based on possible
future AI and non-raster-video uses, it's still way behind. I have one
system with an RX6600 and another with an RTX3060; they're pretty similar
for day-to-day use but I have encountered many apps and platforms that just
don't support AMD GPUs the way they do the nVideas ... if at all.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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