[pcper] Interview: AMD's Richard Huddy

[3DVagabond]

Outright lying about both your and your competitors' products ought to be frowned upon, yes.

It is illegal.

 

[f1sherman]

Don't hate the player, hate the game
Huddy has challenged you to question everything, to not trust what he or nvidia says, to hold them (AMD) to account should they act dodgy or underhanded.

That's a good reminder. But I keep this in perspective.
Thats why in the matter I wouldn't use adjectives like immoral and dishonest - its the name of the game.

But scientist just rubs me wrong

 

[ShintaiDK]

It is illegal.

Hidden viral marketing is also illegal, yet AMD does it with its influencer program and gives out gifts to the most effective.

In short, because its illegal doesnt mean they dont do it.

 

[3DVagabond]

Hidden viral marketing is also illegal, yet AMD does it with its influencer program and gives out gifts to the most effective.

In short, because its illegal doesnt mean they dont do it.

In your zest to defame AMD you missed the whole point of the conversation. You can regulate anything. You also need penalties and enforcement.

 

[Mand]

Don't hate the player, hate the game
Huddy has challenged you to question everything, to not trust what he or nvidia says, to hold them (AMD) to account should they act dodgy or underhanded.

And yet when people provide proof that they lied to us, a sizable contingent is dedicated to believing them anyway.

 

[Leadbox]

And yet when people provide proof that they lied to us, a sizable contingent is dedicated to believing them anyway.

He said, she said is not proof.

 

[Mand]

He said, she said is not proof.

Fortunately, that's not what was presented. I'm talking documented, tested, empirical proof, generated by a third party, that what they're saying is wrong.

And the legions of blind defenders will rise to counter, somehow, someway - usually by attempting to discredit those presenting the information, rather than the information itself.

 

[Leadbox]

Fortunately, that's not what was presented. I'm talking documented, tested, empirical proof, generated by a third party, that what they're saying is wrong.

What specifically are you on about here?

 

[Mand]

What specifically are you on about here?

Specifically, the part where he says G-Sync adds a frame of latency.

 

[Leadbox]

Specifically, the part where he says G-Sync adds a frame of latency.

He's said that at least twice now in interviews and went unchallenged in both cases. Shows how much these reviewers know eh? Gsync does have a bit more latency over vsync off though.

 

[BrightCandle]

The proof is the blurbusters detailed latency review:
http://www.blurbusters.com/gsync/preview2/

From that we know that gsync adds no additional latency compared to vsync off. The absolute numbers make it impossible for there to be an entire frame of latency hidden in there, the CS:GO figures just don't allow 8ms to hide in 22ms of total latency when you account for mouse sampling, CPU time and GPU rendering time, there just isn't space in those numbers for the monitor to also be adding 8ms (a frame) in addition to the pixel switch time.

At some point hopefully we will see tftcentral review gsync and do their comparison latency numbers, so far they haven't tested a gsync monitor, but just like the lightboost 2 monitors we should be expecting something around 5ms total for pixel switch and processing time by the looks of the blurbusters numbers.

We have real solid numbers showing the real end to end latency, hard scientific proof. Huddy must have seen this review, everyone talked about it when it came out.

 

[Mand]

He's said that at least twice now in interviews and went unchallenged in both cases. Shows how much these reviewers know eh? Gsync does have a bit more latency over vsync off though.

You and the reviewers are apparently on the same page. Blurbusters specifically measured the latency, as given in the link above.

The absolute numbers make it impossible for there to be an entire frame of latency hidden in there, the CS:GO figures just don't allow 8ms to hide in 22ms of total latency when you account for mouse sampling, CPU time and GPU rendering time, there just isn't space in those numbers for the monitor to also be adding 8ms (a frame) in addition to the pixel switch time.

And that's in the case when 8ms of latency is a frame when you're running at 120 Hz. It's 16ms at 60 Hz, and 33ms at 30 Hz. There's just no way that an entire frame's worth of latency could be hiding, present but unmeasured.

 

[Erenhardt]

I didn't read g-sync review, but looking at the graphs I guess the conclusion is: "the method is not good enough to measure latency with enough precision to say if g-sync have an impact. The differences between two identical runs are higher than 50% of base input lag which makes it impossible to form any conclusion on the matter."

 

[Mand]

I didn't read g-sync review

But you're going to comment on it anyway?

 

[Erenhardt]

But you're going to comment on it anyway?

I like to form my own conclusion on data provided be reviewer and then confront it with his reasoning. Taking everything mindlessly as granted is not better than being wrong.

 

[Irenicus]

...

Despite everyone here having a brand preference, Both AMD and NV has equally compelling technologies and visual enhancements for games. No one said NV are saints. No one to my knowledge stated that gameworks is the most amazing thing ever. However, I personally find AMD's PR spin to be ludicrous considering their stance on Mantle and how they did not provide other IHVs any information on TressFX when TR was released. And TR with TressFX had a severe performance hit on all non AMD hardware whereas gameworks' HBAO+ has equal performance on AMD and NV. Again, all of these visual enhancements are great. What I don't like is AMD whining and complaining when the REAL PROBLEM IS THAT THEY SPEND TOO MUCH ON MARKETING, and don't hire enough for software development. PERIOD.
...

I'd argue they have not spent enough on marketing. Even when amd has the price/performance edge, nvidia still sells more cards. There is a wide scale perception that amd drivers are radically inferior to nvidia, and nothing has changed in that regard in the perceptions of millions of pc gamers for years. A counter message needs to get out, it's not JUST about the hardware. The best product does not always win. Look at the galaxy S5.

 

[f1sherman]

I'd argue they have not spent enough on marketing. Even when amd has the price/performance edge, nvidia still sells more cards. There is a wide scale perception that amd drivers are radically inferior to nvidia, and nothing has changed in that regard in the perceptions of millions of pc gamers for years. A counter message needs to get out

Can anyone remember being bombarded by Nvidia with messages about how superior their drivers are?

It's not the message that needs to get out. Because it's not the (pro-NV) message that has created that perception in the 1st place.
Are you really going to argue that Nvidia has upper hand because of their supposedly more vocal and better articulated fanbase, marketing... what?

Is it really that far fetched that the user experience has created such perception and not the marketing?
Nvidia has more resources and bigger driver team. So why shouldn't they have better sw support?

There is a wide scale perception that amd drivers are radically inferior to nvidia

No there isn't.
There is a greater recognition of Nvidia/GeForce brand in graphics,
and there is a wide scale perception about AMD drivers/driver team not being quite up to snuff with Nvidia's.
Which dictates that all being equal most will go for NV. And which AMD always counters with better perf/$$.

 

[Irenicus]

Can anyone remember being bombarded by Nvidia with messages about how superior their drivers are?

It's not the message that needs to get out. Because it's not the (pro-NV) message that has created that perception in the 1st place.
Are you really going to argue that Nvidia has upper hand because of their supposedly more vocal and better articulated fanbase, marketing... what?

Is it really that far fetched that the user experience has created such perception and not the marketing?
Nvidia has more resources and bigger driver team. So why shouldn't they have better sw support?



No there isn't.
There is a greater recognition of Nvidia/GeForce brand in graphics,
and there is a wide scale perception about AMD drivers/driver team not being quite up to snuff with Nvidia's.
Which dictates that all being equal most will go for NV. And which AMD always counters with better perf/$$.

One of the most common complaints about amd gpus on forums are about drivers, often from nvidia users who switched years ago from an ati/amd card and have not used anything recent from amd.

There is a lag in perceptions about brands and products. Even if those complaints are no longer true, that perception still lingers in the minds of many gpu buyers, and they are not isolated individuals. Some of their less knowledgeable friends turn to them to ask what gpus to buy for their systems.

Nvidia has around 2/3s of the discreet gpu market, they dominate the steam charts for gpu share, the amazon gpu sales rankings, and that is NOT entirely due to better performance/pricing on the nvidia side.

Product perceptions matter, and nvidia has an edge that cannot simply be countered by having a better product for the money. Some people chose the new athlon 64 cpus because they performed better than intel chips of the time, but many more stuck to intel because of the anti-meritocratic effects of brand perceptions and momentum. It takes awhile for perceptions to change, and marketing must be part of that.

 

[Mand]

One of the most common complaints about amd gpus on forums are about drivers, often from nvidia users who switched years ago from an ati/amd card and have not used anything recent from amd.

There is a lag in perceptions about brands and products. Even if those complaints are no longer true, that perception still lingers in the minds of many gpu buyers, and they are not isolated individuals. Some of their less knowledgeable friends turn to them to ask what gpus to buy for their systems.

Nvidia has around 2/3s of the discreet gpu market, they dominate the steam charts for gpu share, the amazon gpu sales rankings, and that is NOT entirely due to better performance/pricing on the nvidia side.

Product perceptions matter, and nvidia has an edge that cannot simply be countered by having a better product for the money. Some people chose the new athlon 64 cpus because they performed better than intel chips of the time, but many more stuck to intel because of the anti-meritocratic effects of brand perceptions and momentum. It takes awhile for perceptions to change, and marketing must be part of that.

I currently have an AMD GPU, and am in the market to replace it. My perception was that I was strongly turned away from the R9 290 and 290X because of their willingness to throw away power, heat, and noise in the pursuit of performance. My current card, the HD5870, was much better balanced.

I can't speak to driver issues on Nvidia, but I certainly had issues for the first two years or so. I'd have random errors where the display driver would stop responding and then recover, and I eagerly updated every single new driver update as it came out, to no avail. For two years, it persisted, then vanished with a driver update, finally.

Two. Years.

Now tell me, what perception should I have with that experience?

 

[blastingcap]

I currently have an AMD GPU, and am in the market to replace it. My perception was that I was strongly turned away from the R9 290 and 290X because of their willingness to throw away power, heat, and noise in the pursuit of performance. My current card, the HD5870, was much better balanced.

I can't speak to driver issues on Nvidia, but I certainly had issues for the first two years or so. I'd have random errors where the display driver would stop responding and then recover, and I eagerly updated every single new driver update as it came out, to no avail. For two years, it persisted, then vanished with a driver update, finally.

Two. Years.

Now tell me, what perception should I have with that experience?

I've never had a problem with a non-beta AMD Catalyst driver, and I've owned AMD video cards since the HD4000 series.

As for power/heat/noise, you can undervolt and underclock and STILL end up with more price/perf than if you bought a GTX 780. And the GTX 780/Ti aren't much better in terms of power/heat/noise (see Termie's thread comparing them with R290/x in power draw).

As for heat/noise, take a look at aftermarket cards. The R9 290 DirectCUII is the card I wound up with, and it has excellent cooling, slightly less wattage, and less noise than reference 290.

 

[Mand]

As for heat/noise, take a look at aftermarket cards.

I'm aware that aftermarket cards have significantly improved the overall quality of the R9 series. My point, however, is that the decisions made by AMD on the R9 in regards to power/heat/noise, the 95 degree operating temp, the skirt-the-edge throttling, yet with significant parameter space left on the table as evidenced by the effectiveness of aftermarket cooling relative to the reference cooler leaves me very, very skeptical about AMD's design process and decision making.

The HD5870 was a beast of a card when it came out. Very good performance, very good price, very good thermals, very good power usage. A quality card, a well-designed card, a solid card. The R9, by contrast, feels like them cutting corners to catch up.

That's my perception, at least, and it makes me sad. Because I know very well what they used to be - and what they are now seems a pale shadow.

 

[Wall Street]

I've never had a problem with a non-beta AMD Catalyst driver, and I've owned AMD video cards since the HD4000 series.

As for power/heat/noise, you can undervolt and underclock and STILL end up with more price/perf than if you bought a GTX 780. And the GTX 780/Ti aren't much better in terms of power/heat/noise (see Termie's thread comparing them with R290/x in power draw).

As good of a value as it was, I had TDR errors when I had a 5770 (driver crashed and has recovered message while gaming). I also had green screens while in Youtube on some driver versions. I had similar but less frequent errors with a HD 5450. I replaced the 5770 with a GTX 570 and haven't had more than a handful of errors in the two years since (and those were overclock related). I am going to replace the GTX 570 with an HD 7970 in the next week. I know that nVidia also had some cards with TDR errors, but that was not my experience.

There really isn't a price that you can put on stability. You may say that the price/perf is better for the AMD, but how do you measure the performance benefit of not crashing or having errors in games? I know that people on the forums say that AMD drivers are better now, but they were also saying that when I got the HD 5000 series cards which I found to have a lot of bugs. I guess I will figure out if AMD drivers are really fixed this time, but I do think that there is something to the claim that historically, they have lagged in the driver and stability departments even if the price/perf is better when the cards do work.

 

[blastingcap]

As good of a value as it was, I had TDR errors when I had a 5770 (driver crashed and has recovered message while gaming). I also had green screens while in Youtube on some driver versions. I had similar but less frequent errors with a HD 5450. I replaced the 5770 with a GTX 570 and haven't had more than a handful of errors in the two years since (and those were overclock related). I am going to replace the GTX 570 with an HD 7970 in the next week. I know that nVidia also had some cards with TDR errors, but that was not my experience.

There really isn't a price that you can put on stability. You may say that the price/perf is better for the AMD, but how do you measure the performance benefit of not crashing or having errors in games? I know that people on the forums say that AMD drivers are better now, but they were also saying that when I got the HD 5000 series cards which I found to have a lot of bugs. I guess I will figure out if AMD drivers are really fixed this time, but I do think that there is something to the claim that historically, they have lagged in the driver and stability departments even if the price/perf is better when the cards do work.

Sorry you had problems. I have not had any problems since AMD HD4xxx when using non-beta drivers.

 

[Irenicus]

As good of a value as it was, I had TDR errors when I had a 5770 (driver crashed and has recovered message while gaming). I also had green screens while in Youtube on some driver versions. I had similar but less frequent errors with a HD 5450. I replaced the 5770 with a GTX 570 and haven't had more than a handful of errors in the two years since (and those were overclock related). I am going to replace the GTX 570 with an HD 7970 in the next week. I know that nVidia also had some cards with TDR errors, but that was not my experience.

There really isn't a price that you can put on stability. You may say that the price/perf is better for the AMD, but how do you measure the performance benefit of not crashing or having errors in games? I know that people on the forums say that AMD drivers are better now, but they were also saying that when I got the HD 5000 series cards which I found to have a lot of bugs. I guess I will figure out if AMD drivers are really fixed this time, but I do think that there is something to the claim that historically, they have lagged in the driver and stability departments even if the price/perf is better when the cards do work.

Wall street here just confirmed my point. I don't know if his issues were widespread across the entire sampling of 5770 users or if those issues still stand with amd's newer cards.

But whether they were widespread or not, he now has a negative perception about amd cards. Even if current/future AMD cards have NONE of the issues he just described, how long will it take to get him to drive away those impressions? Negative impressions tend to stick around, and there is a larger body of negative impressions for amd cards vs nvidia cards. To combat that, amd needs to not only make sure their current/future cards are up to snuff in both hardware and drivers, they need to get the word out on the improvements as well.

dual gpu scaling used to be superior on sli, now with the 290s amd seems to have scaling that is as good or better than nvidia, but the word on that did not get out to everyone immediately. There is lag where perceptions persist long past reality. Not everyone is constantly checking tech site reviews and forum posts to get the state of the state.

So it is the job, or the duty of a company to highlight the positive changes with their products and if there are potential negative issues, highlight the source of those as well. That seems to be what Huddy is doing with gameworks, blunting the negative perceptions that might be had from day 1 performance deltas between amd/nvidia hardware on gameworks titles.

If amd performance is lower on a dx11 title because they are not as good at optimizing cpu usage as nvidia, that is on amd. If amd performance is lower in a dx11 title because it was gameworks and the developer used a set of dlls that over tesselated something like a cape or water where nvidia has an advantage, then that is NOT on amd. Particularly when amd claims they can't get access to the source code.

Remember, the worst claim against AMD with tressFX was a delay in access to the source code for those effects. The claim against nvidia is a BAN on access to the source code, and many of nvidias defenders here seems to have the attitude of, "Deal with it AMD." Stop complaining about that, ignore the fact that day 1 performance deltas that are out of your control create negative market impressions against your cards. Just stay silent.

It's a ridiculous position for any person to take but you will still find people out here complaining to AMD for having the gall to speak up about it and raise the issue.

 

[Leadbox]

All this talk of bad AMD drivers.....
If I didn't know better I would be left thinking it was all rosie on the other side
There're forums with dedicated driver review threads, with horror stories on both sides.