NVIDIA might have to double up on the Maxwell plans

Dec 9, 2014 15:04 GMT  ·  By

Back in April, it seemed as though NVIDIA had struck a serious blow to AMD's Mantle API, releasing a driver that promised up to 64% benefit in video performance in DirectX. Later tests showed 40% frame rate improvements in some games, which was still a lot.

Now, Advanced Micro Devices has more than turned the table, releasing a driver that boosts performance of not only games running under the Mantle API (instead of DirectX) but all video tasks as a whole.

Performance of Radeon graphics add-in adapters is expected to go up by 19%, while the GPUs integrated in APUs could see up to 29% improvement.

All this in addition to a host of other features. The AMD Catalyst Omega Driver isn't playing around, and it's the new baseline for future software releases.

The AMD-NVIDIA relationship has been becoming quite queer lately, and the Omega driver is just the latest episode in the increasingly unstable rivalry.

The heightened competitiveness

The AMD Radeon graphics series and the NVIDIA GeForce line of video boards continue to fight over the customer market. This, at least, hasn't changed.

However, this is also such a normal part of the GPU landscape that it doesn't affect general consumer perception or stock prices as much as it used to.

The “relation” between NVIDIA and AMD on the other layers of the market has shifted considerably though.

For one thing, AMD has secured a fair few supercomputing contracts, despite NVIDIA's Tesla series of GPU compute accelerators getting arguably more media coverage.

Needless to say, tensions are heavy there. They barely existed back when AMD still tried to pull the FireStream brand by the teeth. Now, though, FireStream accelerators are barely talked about, with FirePro having extended from being just a professional workstation brand to also encompass the HPC front. Even the world's most efficient supercomputer is powered by them.

How AMD punk'd NVIDIA

The new Omega driver is the obvious method. I'm sure that NVIDIA will release some update or other to its GeForce driver, or the Geforce Experience software. But I can't see how it will persuade people that it's really the driver doing it, instead of the new/upcoming Maxwell graphics processing units.

Which brings us to the second, some might say more important thing that has mostly been overlooked: AMD is no longer using the same GPU supplier.

Advanced Micro Devices has been paying TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) to make its GPUs since basically forever, as has NVIDIA.

However, this has caused no small amount of friction throughout the years, especially when TSMC had trouble with chip yields and couldn't meet demand for either of them, let alone both at once. Instances like this have been more frequent since the 40nm process.

It didn't help that TSMC said it would move from 28nm to 20nm this year, only to drop those plans completely and leave both NVIDIA and AMD with over-engineered chips they have since had to redesign.

Now, AMD has decided to cut ties with TSMC completely, choosing to make its CPUs, GPUs and APUs at Globalfoundries instead.

If Globalfoundries manages to produce sufficient shipments from the start, AMD will be unaffected by the chip quota shortages that are likely to hit TSMC (again). This would mean its GPU-based products would be in abundance (and, thus, not overpriced).

It's true that AMD could decide to make 20nm GPUs instead of 16nm like NVIDIA, but there are ways to mitigate the efficiency drawbacks, and abundance in the retail channel could very well offset the rest.

All in all, I'm pretty certain that 2015 will be a year even more interesting and amusing than the others.

AMD got one up on NVIDIA (5 Images)

AMD Radeon R9 290X
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980AMD RadeoN R9 390X (probably)
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