Compute vs mining vs gaming performance

[imrazor]

I may show some ignorance in the post, and if I do, please enlighten me. Last time I checked, AMD GPUs were considered the superior cards for mining. To me that implies that AMD cards have superior compute performance. Yet I have found, and it seems generally accepted, that Nvidia cards are better for gaming. These two facts seem contradictory. I would think the hardware that crunches numbers faster would be better for gaming.

So why do AMD cards generally lag in gaming? Inferior drivers? Developers optimizing for Nvidia and ignoring AMD?

Inquiring minds want to know...?

 

[dontlistentome]

There's more than one way to do something. AMD does it one way, Nvidia another. This would be handling game graphics. Then when you throw something else in there, mining, the way one of them handles data processing might work better than the way the other one does.

Not only that, but each company can and does pay for game developers to optimize games for their cards. So Nvidia cards might perform better on a game because the developer coded the game that way, not necessarily because Nvidia is superior in the way their cards crunch numbers.

 

[Gam3r01]

Mining and gaming are too different to compare directly.
Additionally, people are using 1080s, 1070s, and 1060s to mine right now. It depends more on the currency in question than the brand of the card.

 

[k1114]

Many compute are comparing opencl which nvidia isn't good at. When comparing the same software that has both opencl and cuda, they perform relative to their performance in other areas. Usually anyways, it's still mixed a lot just like games. Nvidia wins some, amd wins some. Performance optimization in highly paralleled workloads is complicated and that goes for all computer work. Cpus don't have as many cores as gpus and it's still complicated to optimize them. Nvidia isn't better than amd at gaming but amd currently doesn't have as high end cards. Before mining, they both had price/performance battles. Even if just talking about current gen, having the crown as the fastest gpu doesn't make the other gpus not compare.