No one said AMD is virtuous. However they work hard to produce and mantain open standards that benefit everyone. The only other GPU producer is anti-competitive and anti-customer, so obviously we'll say "buy from AMD, they're better. " You bet the moment AMD starts bad practices (again?), I'll be putting the same critisisms on them.
With your last sentence, I don't see how meeting the basic "not exclusive" keyword to avoid legal trouble makes this okay? Nvidia doesn't allow the code to be shared or even communication with AMD (correct me if I'm wrong of course). I'm not really sure how AMD is supposed to work with that.
Yes, $240 r9 290s all the time xs down to $260 at times. The former is very near the 970 and the latter overcomes in many games. Both are preferred at 1440+. A $320 970 is definitely worth it.
You may also want to consider that those AMD cards are years old while those are the newest Nvidia offerings (which aren't significantly better than Kepler - which now has poor driver support for because of this). AMDs 300 series coming out in 2 weeks (ish) is the competitor for maxwell. And instead of a minute cash grab update, it's a significant change.
Edit: There is no problem not buying inferior products. Sometimes there really isn't a choice because of the schism in features or performance. And sometimes the morality involved isn't worth fussing over.
In regards to that AMD comment: I honestly don't know what that has to do with this conversation. Amd isn't infallible amd their history had mistakes as well, but right now they're the best option for GPUs. I'll tell someone to buy Intel for performance everyday though. On the other hand, look at how little innovation Intel had brought up while Amd barely competes with them. Lack of competition produces high prices with little progress.
I'm not an evangelical snob, I can forgive transgressons obviously. But we aren't talking about a company that doesn't only attack open standards.
This isn't even really a moral argument anymore. If you buy Nvidia you can't have good faith they'll continue to develop and optimize your card the next year when new cards are out. You can't be sure that when games that push it are released you won't stutter uncontrollably, or your stay doing GPGPU work with specific hardware in mind and its not running right because they lied about specs, etc.
And again - 5% performance difference, $100 more expensive, and not the best available (that would be 980/295x2/titan x).
First of all, AMD does release drivers and fix issues. It takes a couple weeks but it happens. And if you look at benchmarks the r9 290 still trades blows with the 970, there's no huge disparity like Nvidia wants you to believe and your 70% comment is just plain rediculous.
But second, seriously? No logical reason to stick with AMD? You have no moral dilemma here? So you want to continue buYing from the company that lies about their most popular card's specs then refuses to apologize and instead tells you how grateful you should be? A company that intentionally sabotages performance of their last generation of cards because it might make the new one look bad and it may make people buy a new card (then we'll do it again next generation!)? A company that attacks open standards and tries to create schisms in the community? Can you not see what they'd do if they didn't have a competitor? And don't forget - this is all in trade for a 5% performance improvement and some power draw reduction. That's just sad.
I once got a Chem II lab manual, $50. And let me tell you, this was a real piece of work. The entire thing, covers and all, were printed on normal paper. It was (barely) held together by a plastic spiral ring.
I get in the first class, lab manual in front of me. The teacher comes in and... wait... Is that... That's their name... on my manual. Ugh, I see how it is, whatever. "Don't forget your manuals by the first class - they are MANDATORY".
Then comes our first lab - the first thing she tells us? "Oh, your manual is old, so a lot of those directions aren't right. I'll tell you what's changed when need be (every class)."
If you're going to charge us $50 for a shitty lab manual, can you please make sure it at least keeps itself together and has the right freaking instructions!
White kid from the lower middle-class. 4.7 high school with all honors and graduating with an AA. Had to start almsot completely over classes-wise because of the structure of the CS degree so what should have been 3 years is now 4 years at $16k a year. And $24k for the last year because of the new "if you go over X hours in your degree you pay double tuition" rule. So $72k of debt stepping out of that door. Almost all the jobs I've had offered are barely above MW, and the internships are the same or unpaid entirely (which is a scam, of course).
So good for you - you can get your house. Meanwhile the other half of us cannot work off our debt even if we worked full time and put 100% of our income into paying it off.
Wow - my degree lands me a beautiful $8k every year (2 semesters). But it gets better.
I thought about improving myself in high school by going into early college. A free AA degree and at the same time as my HS diploma? Hell yeah! They didn't tell me that almost none of the credits would apply to my degree because 4-year degrees have almost every single course planned - so I still have 4 years to go... Oh and the feds just made a law that says if you take to long your tuition doubles. So for about the last year of my college that's $16k instead. Oh yeah, and we forgot. This state school requires every single student to take 9 credit hours in the summer - where summers aren't covered by any federal loans.
So that's a lovely $40k pile of debt on me by the time I graduate.
EDIT: Oops, included living costs, not just tuition. Living cost is about $8k-$12k a year. So the real total of debt is $72k.
> Similar performance characteristics (or better) than Go.
Nope. It's without a doubt 100% better. The GC is brilliant and realtime with deterministic properties. The community has outperformed C++ in ray tracers and games, Ada in text manipulation, etc. It's absolutely freaking blazing since it compiles to really tight C and takes advantage of the 50 years of C compiler research & design.
> Library situation is a little iffy.
Libraries are hardly iffy. Any C code be called, and most c++ code can be called very, very easily and with little boilerplate. The standard library has a huge pure section, and for almost everything else it has dozens of bindings to C libs. And there are plenty of existing libraries in the babel library manager, such as SFML.
What in the HELL are you talking about? The thread local GC won't even produce anything on the shared heap - it's thread local. Shared memory is manual memory only - Just like C, C++, Ada, and every other manual memory management language. And when the shared GC (which will have to be used explicitly) is implemented - it'll be just like Java, OCaml, and every other shared memory garbage collected language. What in God's does that even mean - segfaults when you use shared memory? It only segfaults if, like in every single other language, you didn't take the time to think out your design and are dereferencing dead memory.
Oh, and I said that it has locks like every other language. I didn't mean shared memory like every other language.
Finally - if you're just being smug at how smart rust is for having lifetime tracking and all those pointer types/restrictions - I don't think it's all that great; Nor did the gaming community when they got their hands on it last; Nor do many others who agree in the opinion that rust is just too complex while being too restricted.
Yes it is. Threads don't share a GC - there's no implicit sharedness. Memory is copied between threads. And of course, it doesn't prevent manual management of shared memory (just not GCd) so you CAN use locks to do so. Just like other languages.
I turn off the cycle collector in my realtime apps. I prefer designing a clean, solid system that isn't reliant on cycles without my direct knowing. I guess that's just my inner control freak though.
And adding onto the other reply - Nimrod's GC has a realtime mode where you can specify when to run, and the maximum time. I made a (small) game in Nimrod and called the GC every frame for the remaining time (it can be used like a blocking high-accuracy timer). Testing the GC I couldn't get it to take longer than a couple microseconds - intentionally smashing my 16GB heap to hell. Why does a 16GB heap take so little time to GC? Because Nimrod's GC doesn't scale - it's deferred reference counting. Only cycle detections scan the whole heap, and you can disable those optionally (I do, I don't like designing cyclic stuff without explicitly knowing it gets broken).
With your last sentence, I don't see how meeting the basic "not exclusive" keyword to avoid legal trouble makes this okay? Nvidia doesn't allow the code to be shared or even communication with AMD (correct me if I'm wrong of course). I'm not really sure how AMD is supposed to work with that.