AMD Cards Not Compatible With DK2 After Oculus Platform Update

[10tacle]

I had more problems with all my Nvidia cards than my AMD cards.

Sounds to me like it's your problem, not Nvidia's. I've had both AMD and Nvidia GPUs in my nearly 20 years of computer building. I never had hardware issues between either other than RMA'ing a blower design EVGA GTX 970 for a bad display port output. Things happen randomly, but the fact you have consistent issues with Nvidia GPUs leads me to believe you are doing something most other users are not because common sense says if Nvidia had a rampant problem among users like you report, it would be well known (same for AMD cards).

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

I had more problems with all my Nvidia cards than my AMD cards.

Sounds to me like it's your problem, not Nvidia's. I've had both AMD and Nvidia GPUs in my nearly 20 years of computer building. I never had hardware issues between either other than RMA'ing a blower design EVGA GTX 970 for a bad display port output. Things happen randomly, but the fact you have consistent issues with Nvidia GPUs leads me to believe you are doing something most other users are not because common sense says if Nvidia had a rampant problem among users like you report, it would be well known (same for AMD cards).

I've seen plenty of problems from either brand of graphics devices. Anybody using or supporting a significant amount of hardware from either brand should be familiar with at least some of the issues. "But don't take my word for it!"

I don't think it helps that you both seem to be addressing each other with anecdotal evidence. If you're actually interested in useful facts, you're welcome to look at the logs Microsoft presented in court years ago pertaining to causes of failure in Windows Vista, and the sources for those problems. The biggest offender by far was NVIDIA, causing a whopping 28%+ of the failures, while ATI was sitting at a 9%+ rate. Even if you factor in the market penetration for each company, NVIDIA was having well more issues than ATI.

Adored TV discusses NVIDIA issues at length in one of his YouTube videos. The mention about the failure rates can be found around 2:22 of the video, followed by discussing of the major hardware failures that NVIDIA dumped into the market.

To make life easier for developers, hardware manufacturers should be supporting an abstraction layer that developers can subscribe to and it should just work... That being said, I've noticed that oculus software has been labeled BETA which basically not done or incomplete software. That being said, oculus is most likely not extensively testing their software on multiple configurations...

There are all sorts of abstraction layers, from drivers to APIs. Code changes made to the Oculus Home software broke something, and Oculus pushed it to market anyway, knowing it was broken under certain configurations. AMD didn't change their driver, which is their contribution to abstraction, and break something, Oculus changed theirs.

 

[alextheblue]

They have a product
They EOL it, but decide to update it anyways.
Update breaks functionality.

It's a prototype, not a consumer product.

That said, it would be nice if people could just pick an older SDK version to stay on.

Prototype? It is NOT a prototype. It is "developer" hardware. That's far from the prototype stages, it's not a beta even - it's fully-functional high-cost dev hardware. Also they didn't require you to actually be a developer to purchase. There were other early adopters, chugging along enjoying VR with their DK2. But since FB bought Oculus the focus is strictly on monetization of Rift and VR... supporting Oculus-era early adopters is low on the list. Even if it actually shouldn't be hard to just NOT push an update that breaks crap to those platforms.

I don't have a stake in the VR wars, but I bet this situation will make DK2 owners think twice about buying another "Oculus" branded piece of hardware.

 

[10tacle]

I don't think it helps that you both seem to be addressing each other with anecdotal evidence. If you're actually interested in useful facts, you're welcome to look at the logs Microsoft presented in court years ago pertaining to causes of failure in Windows Vista, and the sources for those problems. The biggest offender by far was NVIDIA, causing a whopping 28%+ of the failures, while ATI was sitting at a 9%+ rate. Even if you factor in the market penetration for each company, NVIDIA was having well more issues than ATI.

Two points:

1) So that failure rate was (and emphasis on WAS) based on raw numbers and not a per capita card for card comparison. Nvidia sells more GPUs than AMD does, so unless that data is factored in statistically, that report is useless. Steam's user hardware GPU survey report has nearly 70% of its members using Nvidia over AMD GPUs just as a snapshot. Quite interesting that my GTX 680 still works fine in an old Core 2 Duo 2009-era gaming build with Vista and never gave one problem. Anecdotal? Yes. But it is what it is.

2) Vista was crap and a massive memory leaking OS - if you didn't have 4GB memory when using the 64-bit version, you were stuck in mud (bear in mind when it came out the average user had 1 or 2GB memory). Was any of this other hardware information data collected and taken into consideration in comparing Vista failures between Nvidia and AMD? Didn't think so. There's a reason why Microsoft dumped it real quick and moved on to Windows 7 - Vista had the shortest shelf life of any Microsoft OS since Windows 98 ME. I'd like to see the same study done on Windows 7, 8.x, and 10 and see what problems users reported with their Nvidia GPUs over AMD (ATI) users. And going backward, the same with XP, Windows 98, and Windows 95.

When you do direct comparisons, you need direct comparisons. Not factoring in all factors is about as useful in statistics as udders on a bull. And I take any video opinions/reports on Youtube like I take The Onion in getting news. I'll take professional reports and statistics, thank you.

 

[Sakkura]

They have a product
They EOL it, but decide to update it anyways.
Update breaks functionality.

It's a prototype, not a consumer product.

That said, it would be nice if people could just pick an older SDK version to stay on.

Prototype? It is NOT a prototype. It is "developer" hardware. That's far from the prototype stages, it's not a beta even - it's fully-functional high-cost dev hardware. Also they didn't require you to actually be a developer to purchase. There were other early adopters, chugging along enjoying VR with their DK2. But since FB bought Oculus the focus is strictly on monetization of Rift and VR... supporting Oculus-era early adopters is low on the list. Even if it actually shouldn't be hard to just NOT push an update that breaks crap to those platforms.

I don't have a stake in the VR wars, but I bet this situation will make DK2 owners think twice about buying another "Oculus" branded piece of hardware.

It's not consumer hardware. So you should temper your expectations accordingly. It was a prototype for the consumer hardware that came later.