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Is driver degradation a thing or just made up?

Caporegime
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Seems a few keep saying that NVidia gimp drivers etc and I thought I would do some searching to see what is what and found a very good piece over at babeltechreviews, who tested older drivers for both AMD and NVidia on the 290X and 780Ti and then retested on newer drivers and here is what they found.



Even though we are comparing 2013 with 2016 using a slightly upgraded platform, we generally see small improvements in 2016 over 2013 for the GTX 780 Ti. What is surprising is that the Titan may appear neglected, but not the GTX 780 Ti. Titan’s performance has regressed in a few games. We also generally see larger performance improvements for the 290X than the GTXes, with a big improvement for the 290X in Metro Last Light. Unfortunately for this game, it just means that AMD has optimized for the benchmark. We used to test it with PhysX On, but now there is no performance difference between On or Off in the benchmark. In actually playing the game, the 290X still runs at about 35fps at 2560×1600 as it always has, and PhysX cannot be set in-game or the framerates would still tank completely. We also see that a recent driver or patch broke 290X performance in the Secret World.

However, generally, both the 780 Ti and the R9 290X have had improvements since 2013, even for the old games. What we have seen is that AMD has continued to optimize for newer games for the 290X as it reuses the same architecture for the 390X.

There is no doubt that the R9 290X with its 4GB of vRAM, is a generally faster GPU for today’s games than the 3GB vRAM-equipped GTX 780 Ti although they are still competing in the same class. There are only a few of the games that run poorly on the GTX 780 Ti because of its 3GB of vRAM compared with either 4GB or 6GB, and this is only at the highest resolution. In these cases, tweaking a few settings downward generally make the newest games run decently.

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/nvidia-forgotten-kepler-gtx-780-ti-vs-290x-revisited/3/

A great article with some good testing methods and well worth a look. Well done babeltech and I appreciate the effort :)
 

Klo

Klo

Soldato
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Just eyeballing the numbers, it looks like AMD's drivers have improved performance on average a lot more than Nvidia, whose performance has barely got better or decreased in some cases.
 
Soldato
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You do not need special benchmarks. Just look at a current one for eg gtx 1080 and compare it for when the gx980ti came out. 90% of the sites have same cpu and games tested so is easy to compare where a card was and where is now. If some times the cpu is more poweful can still extrapolate from it.

(Gave the example above since they include all the last two gens)

You will see that even on DX11 the 290x is pulling ahead of the 780ti. Something that wasnt the case in 2013 when both came out. Nor 2014 when the AIB cards appeared.
 
Soldato
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I'm not sure about that I think you have picked up the wrong argument. Nvidia don't make older games run worse the argument has been from the likes of myself is Nvidia doesn't always optimise drivers on older cards for newer games or they don't bother enabling features that are present on the latest generation of cards that could be turned with a small software update (DX12 on the 500 series anyone? Async shaders on Fermi?).
 
Man of Honour
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I've never seen any evidence of gimping but there is the argument that Kepler doesn't get as optimised for newer stuff so comparing i.e. the 980 and 780ti on older and newer drivers in a range of games could be more revealing.

But there is also the problem that Maxwell is just more efficient for some types of shader processing than Kepler ever will be so in some newer games it simply will run faster than an otherwise equivalent Maxwell card.
 
Associate
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I'm not sure about that I think you have picked up the wrong argument. Nvidia don't make older games run worse the argument has been from the likes of myself is Nvidia doesn't always optimise drivers on older cards for newer games or they don't bother enabling features that are present on the latest generation of cards that could be turned with a small software update (DX12 on the 500 series anyone? Async shaders on Fermi?).

That's is exactly it. It was never about gimping the drivers it was more about just letting old architecture crumble and fade, whereas AMD improves upon old and existing architecture in equal measure bringing better results and in the end overtaking their Nvidia counterparts. This is a thread created by Gregster in retaliation for something I said in the other thread... Good to see most people here agreeing. Good try though Gregster!
 
Don
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It may not even be a case of deliberate gimping - occasionally there are going to be drivers that fix issues where things weren't being rendered correctly (and therefore provided an unintended speed up).
Other than specifically mentioning fixes for certain games, neither party will mention that a certain fix has resulted in across the board reduction in performance in their release notes.
 
Associate
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I should be the better person here, but what rock has Gregster crawled under? Are we going to have a response from the TC? I feel this thread did not go to plan for the poor fella! ;)
 
Soldato
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NVIDIA can do whatever they want - they produce the fastest, quietest, lowest TDP cards on the market. They have no competition.

As AMD continue to descend into nothingness, I expect Maxwell to start regressing in performance over the next few driver updates. GLHF 980ti owners.

Then when Volta releases in May, Pascal will also suffer the nerf bat, though we'll all hand over our cash for a shiny new GPU anyway, cause NVIDIA!

Bear in mind I'm saying this as a 1070 and 980M owner :)
 
Caporegime
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It was never about gimping drivers for old games. :rolleyes:

I'm not sure about that I think you have picked up the wrong argument. Nvidia don't make older games run worse the argument has been from the likes of myself is Nvidia doesn't always optimise drivers on older cards for newer games or they don't bother enabling features that are present on the latest generation of cards that could be turned with a small software update (DX12 on the 500 series anyone? Async shaders on Fermi?).

I've never seen any evidence of gimping but there is the argument that Kepler doesn't get as optimised for newer stuff so comparing i.e. the 980 and 780ti on older and newer drivers in a range of games could be more revealing.

But there is also the problem that Maxwell is just more efficient for some types of shader processing than Kepler ever will be so in some newer games it simply will run faster than an otherwise equivalent Maxwell card.

+1

Simply older nvidia cards take a back seat for optimisation/improvements. Nothing new and this has been done for years in most markets. If you can force people to upgrade every 2 years instead of 3, then why not?

You just have to look at the 290, it was neck in neck with the 780 where as over the last year with the newer titles, the 290 is matching a 780ti now and at times even beating it in a few of the new titles and this is for DX 11 titles only, dx 12/vulkan is a completely different story...

Bit **** for people who don't want to upgrade every 1-2 years but it is a good business move by nvidia as in this case, if I had gone for a 780 instead of the 290 back in June 2014, I would have needed to be upgrading the 780 around about now but with my 290 and the way things are looking for AMD with DX 12, it looks like my 290 might very well last another year.
 
Associate
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NVIDIA can do whatever they want - they produce the fastest, quietest, lowest TDP cards on the market. They have no competition.

As AMD continue to descend into nothingness, I expect Maxwell to start regressing in performance over the next few driver updates. GLHF 980ti owners.

Then when Volta releases in May, Pascal will also suffer the nerf bat, though we'll all hand over our cash for a shiny new GPU anyway, cause NVIDIA!

Bear in mind I'm saying this as a 1070 and 980M owner :)

And I'm a Hydro Copper 980ti owner... doesn't make you any less right:)
 
Caporegime
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I've never seen any evidence of gimping but there is the argument that Kepler doesn't get as optimised for newer stuff so comparing i.e. the 980 and 780ti on older and newer drivers in a range of games could be more revealing.

But there is also the problem that Maxwell is just more efficient for some types of shader processing than Kepler ever will be so in some newer games it simply will run faster than an otherwise equivalent Maxwell card.

Im a believer that you egt pretty much 97% performance from the off with Nvidia and only 80% with AMD which improves with every driver.

If you had told me two years ago my 290x would be running a game like doom in 4k on ultra with 45 fps I would have said you were crazy.
 
Soldato
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Folks also need to remember that NVIDIA's architectures do vary quite a bit from each other, while AMD's GCN ones are evolutions from each version.

So driver performance improvements for GCN cards can benefit the entire range to some degree.

For NV driver improvements made specifically to Maxwell, or Pascal won't really help Kepler that much. We saw that first hand on the Witcher 3 launch where Kepler cards were performing horribly, as the drivers there were mostly for Maxwell and newly released GTX 980Ti. It took them a while to fix performance; and now that Kepler is most certainly EOL by NVIDIA standards they just won't be focussing so much on performance drivers anymore.
 
Caporegime
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|Interesting to see the 290x smashing the titan in 10 games there, sometimes by a huge margin.

I suspect overclocked the titan x would pull a few of those round though.
 
Associate
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Why would Nvidia optimize for old hardware? They business strategy is to sell a new shiny card to you in every generation for a little more. :)

It looks like the 290x produces some great numbers these days, while the Nvidia cards are clearly left in the dust. Thanks for the topic to confirm this.
 
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