> The industry is making games that traditional gamers are frequently less interested in playing.
The problem is that the only thing distinguishing the AAA studios from the teaming masses of indies is their ability to invest massive amounts of money into development. But once you dump that much money into development, it becomes unacceptable to have it flop. Which leads to risk aversion, and attempting to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which leads to releasing the same game over and over again with slight tweaks, or worse, making slop that nobody loves, but enough people buy.
This situation was created by the industry growing beyond its means by capitalizing on untapped demographics for the last 30-odd years. Videogames went from being only for kids, to marketing to kids and men, to marketing to all adults, then expanding into the mobile market and then unlocking the whale economy with microtransactions.
They've run out of new market segments to sell to, and they've discovered the absolute limits of what people are willing to pay. All the AAAs know there's too many of them for the market, they're just all hoping to outlive the other ones.
AMD's utter incompetence when it comes to the software side of things is truly, truly baffling to me. It's not like you need a mountain of developers, a team or two on the right project would do wonders for their market share.
For example: Implement the CUDA. CUDA's won, hands down, that toothpaste is solidly outside the tube. Luckily, to the outside observer CUDA is just an API, and API's aren't copyrightable. Literally nothing is stopping AMD from hiring a relatively small team of developers to make AMD GPUs CUDA-compatible.
AMD's entire software development strategy is insane. OpenCL was doing reasonably well, and then AMD have just fully dropped support for some reason. For the - albeit not huge - but actual cross platform API that people were using to develop for their GPUs. For a while, a few cross platform tools had OpenCL backends, but nobody has been able to get AMD to fix any of the damn bugs. In my testing, bug latency for even the most trivial but important bugfixes is often 4+ years, which is utterly mad. Some parts of their compute stack is so broken its clear that nobody has ever used it. There are exploitable privilege escalation vulnerabilities caused by threaded race conditions that are wontfix
They could support OpenCL 3.0. Nvidia do. AMD just chooses not to, even though they're the ones that desperately needs to support it most
Instead, we got ROCm which has been a disaster from start to end. It barely supports windows or consumer GPUs, for some reason. Its a buggy mess, for some reason. HIP/ROCm has worse performance than OpenCL, because they downgraded their compiler and stopped extracting read/write information on variables leading to a massive loss of parallelism and utilisation on their GPUs.. for some reason. Why? What are they doing? How is this so rubbish?
Literally ALL of this is WONTFIX, and I don't have a clue why. I've filed bugs, was part of their vanguard supporter program, have tried to reach out to AMD people to (gently) explain why good support is important. Or even just figure out what technology they're even intending to support for GPU development. Is ROCm deprecated? What should we be using on windows for GPU compute on consumer hardware AMD? For the love of god amd I want to make you money
As of 2026, the best cross platform cross vendor API for doing GPU compute is.. drumroll.. OpenCL 1.2. Vulkan is getting there, but its still missing a bunch of stuff. And this is literally AMDs direct fault at this point
my suspicion is that it is the company culture: the hardware engineers are the real engineers. software is a triviality left for the lesser minds. the consequence is they mess up every product... everything they do needs software.
The argument I have read here on HN, is that CUDA is made for NVidia hardware, and the AMD hardware is not the best fit.
Essentially it forces AMD to play by NVidias rules, exactly like how they were forced to follow Intel rules. (Ignore for a second that the API / ISA boundary is different.)
But despite that, I also believe AMD would be better off just implementing CUDA.
They did, apparently, at one point pay someone to build that glue, and then threw it out and wouldn't let the author release it so he's been reimplementing it out of...spite? Burning desire? Unclear. [1]
I can't imagine the logic involved in "this is implemented, let's toss it in the dumpster" for that.
HIP tries to be like this, almost API compatible with CUDA such that you just need to do find and replace. I think they even had a script to do this for you.
But the issue remains that the actual support and debugging tools remain so atrocious that it doesn't help to combat the CUDA monopoly. They've further burned a lot of trust by never really delivering on their promises to do better unless you're a customer large enough to get personalized attention from their engineers.
This ends up being a double whammy because not only are you pushing away smaller businesses, you're also pushing away single developers that go on to influence purchasing/development decisions.
HIP was such a self-own and clear demonstration of AMD software capabilities... well, the lack of software capabilities. HIP was hard-coded for one GPU architecture. CUDA did it right, it has a intermediate virtual assembly PTX and driver compiles it to whatever actual instruction set card actually uses.
Imagine a meeting where they signed off on that. So each developer will have to provide a different binary for each of our architectures? Yep. And once we release the new architecture, developer will have to recompile his program for the new architecture? Yep. Sounds good to me.
Yes, that was in part why they've had such a terrible history with GPU support.
They lost me as a customer when they rushed dropping support for the Radeon VII because of the need to ship binaries for every ISA, and didn't deliver proper 5700XT support until it was outdated.
That's fine, until someone charges their cabin up in Truckee and decides to drive down 80 to the central valley (a hour or so drive you can do in neutral).
Regenerative braking also loses a lot of its stopping power at slow speeds. Going from "slowly rolling forward" to "full stopped" takes a lot longer than the instantaneous it is with friction brakes.
This isn't the 90's anymore where browsers behave wildly differently for the same page content. If you're not using absolute, bleeding age web APIs, Firefox and Chrome work identically. In my experience, there are exactly 3 types of websites that work differently between Firefox and Chrome: The Toy Hobby Experiments (who are just demoing some bleeding-edge API feature), The Monopoly-Bootlicking Liars (who reject my request based on UserAgent string alone, and when I spoof a Chrome UA the site works perfectly), and the Evil Monopolist Themselves (a few of Google's own sites run notably slower on Firefox, most notably Google Cloud Console).
You've described all social phenomena. Just because something is socially constructed (i.e., exists only through other's belief in it, e.g., Tinkerbell logic), doesn't mean that the widespread belief in that thing isn't powerful in that it can effect concrete conditions.
Money is socially constructed, in that if everyone decided money was worthless tomorrow then it would be. But today, I still need money to eat, or have housing. The Law and The State are socially constructed, in that if they were not generally accepted by the masses they could not perpetuate, yet if I break the law today I quite likely will be violently thrown in prison.
There is a difference between acknowledging that something exists and granting it power over you. I would be doing myself a disservice if I actively ignored the existence of religion, for example, because even if I reject the notion that God exists, plenty of other people I interact with will not. And their belief in that fixed idea will affect their perception of the world, myself, and my actions.
This a lame cop out, and obviously flawed. There are parents that beat their kids for being gay. There are families that kill their kids for marrying the wrong person. There are families that teach their kids open bigotry. Those people are evil, and I will absolutely prescribe that they shouldn't be doing that.
Putting your kids in a panopticon is abusive. It denies them their autonomy, it cripples their social growth, and there simply is no justifying it with "but it's our culture".
apparently a tight knick family with open / great communication does not exist, and they must be abusive if they like to know where their kids are. LOL.
Yes horrible families exist. the fact that you can’t imagine a family in between those 2 extremes is sad. we’re at an impasse here so let’s just agree to disagree. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is.
additionally this is already possible today. a parent can attach an airtag to their kids backpack or insert it into the sole of their sneakers, and call it a day. evil people will find ways to be evil. that’s nothing new.
I used extreme examples because I was challenging the assertion that "culture" was an acceptable excuse for immoral behavior, not because I can't imagine mediocre families. The fact that damn near everyone reading it would agree that the examples I used were abhorrent was, in fact, the point: culture does not excuse abuse.
The second paragraph established that I think subjecting someone to constant surveillance is abuse, and why: it's an attack not just on their current autonomy, which is bad enough, but also their future autonomy, which I hold as categorically evil.
A justification for that belief, that attacking one's autonomy is a an attack on their person, used to be completely unnecessary in the kinds of circles that would happily associate with the label "Hacker". Sadly the libertarian (left and right) ideals that modern tech world were built on have crumbled under the weight of authoritarian influence.
An odd exception to that trend is dairy products (thanks to the hard work of various US Dairy Councils). Ice Cream, sold as "Ice Cream" in the United States, is vastly superior to most anything you'll find in the rest of the world.
10% milk fat (more exactly 1.6 lb per pre-mixed gallon, but that's simply a bizarre way of phrasing it), no more than half air by volume. 6-10% other dairy solids (lactose, whey).
Compare with the UK: at least 5% fat (no cows need be involved)
France requires 5% milkfat, Germany at least requires the 10% milk fat, but no further requirements.
Canada pretends to be at 10%, but if you add any flavoring at all that can go down to 8%.
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