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Nvidia Has a Driver Overhead Problem, GeForce vs Radeon on Low-End CPUs

Leave it Desktop Colour Settings page and it opens instantly, how often do you need to open it anyhow?

Instead of all these "Sky is Falling Threads" from "Experts" I just play my games on my 3090...

Rarely thankfully :), on desktop colour it opens in about 4secs so a little faster on that setting.
 
there's absolutely no doubt that 3000 series experiences heavy CPU bottlenecking on anything below latest gen i7/Ryzen 7, I've been banging that drum when people ask for system quotes since these GPUs launched. The thing is, in my mind, if it was specifically a driver issue then why does the 2080Ti not suffer the same behaviour? That suggests something architecture/bandwidth specific to me.

There's also an argument that if you are spending 1/4 of what you spend on a graphics card on your CPU, then is it really the GPU/Driver's fault?

Whilst I've not yet been able to explain the precise reason for the bottlenecking, I'm not sold on it being a driver issue per se. So far I know that DLSS isn't the issue and overall performance is heavily related to single core performance, as apparent from only minute differences in performance between 5800X/5900X and 5950X (extra cores don't seem to help - which if it was an overhead issue I'd expect to be the opposite).

I might be wrong but that's my view.

If only people could upgrade to the newer CPUS @ MSRP prices.....
 
there's absolutely no doubt that 3000 series experiences heavy CPU bottlenecking on anything below latest gen i7/Ryzen 7, I've been banging that drum when people ask for system quotes since these GPUs launched. The thing is, in my mind, if it was specifically a driver issue then why does the 2080Ti not suffer the same behaviour? That suggests something architecture/bandwidth specific to me.

There's also an argument that if you are spending 1/4 of what you spend on a graphics card on your CPU, then is it really the GPU/Driver's fault?

Whilst I've not yet been able to explain the precise reason for the bottlenecking, I'm not sold on it being a driver issue per se. So far I know that DLSS isn't the issue and overall performance is heavily related to single core performance, as apparent from only minute differences in performance between 5800X/5900X and 5950X (extra cores don't seem to help - which if it was an overhead issue I'd expect to be the opposite).

I might be wrong but that's my view.

Well @ltron's idea makes some sense:
It might also be a problem that the Ampere architecture is a very wide Vega-like architecture with many compute units and it's tough to keep them all occupied with work.
It is possible that since Ampere doubled the FP32 cores, it is now a major thing to keep them fed and the driver has to schedule that.
As for it being a single core performance thing, well it may be that the feeding / scheduling is all done in one thread. If that is the case, Nvidia may be able to improve this with updates.
Is there any way of knowing where any specific game or other workload is feeding all cores fully? Maybe power consumption as the W1zzard quote @Gzero found implies:

In the end it is yet another complicating factor in deciding on hardware and makes those post and posters who ask 'what is best' even harder to answer as like display technology there is no single thing which is "best" at everything going all the way back to CRTs and everything in-between.
 
If only people could upgrade to the newer CPUS @ MSRP prices.....
If only it wasn't four months since we got a delivery of official stock from AMD! If only Intel hadn't dried up production of tenth gen in preparation for 11th!
We've been buying most of our CPU stock from traders since before Xmas...we have to pay more so we have to charge more.
 
A similar test was done years ago where it was AMD drivers that had a higher overhead than Nvidia's.

It seems AMD listened and put the work in, now the tables have turned.

Now its your turn to sort this mess out Nvidia, 20 to 30% of my CPU just to drive your bloated mess drivers is bloody ridiculous, it was only about 5% when AMD had the higher overhead years ago.
 
Sell your Nvidia GPU and buy an AMD GPU then you will be happy, but probably will not stop you spamming every Intel/Nvidia thread with charts.
 
A similar test was done years ago where it was AMD drivers that had a higher overhead than Nvidia's.

It seems AMD listened and put the work in, now the tables have turned.

Now its your turn to sort this mess out Nvidia, 20 to 30% of my CPU just to drive your bloated mess drivers is bloody ridiculous, it was only about 5% when AMD had the higher overhead years ago.

20 to 30% on Dave's old 6700k maybe, more like 1% on my 5950x :p
 
Leave it Desktop Colour Settings page and it opens instantly, how often do you need to open it anyhow?

Instead of all these "Sky is Falling Threads" from "Experts" I just play my games on my 3090...

Dunno why nVidia doesn't add something but if it really bothers people then you can open to the home page every time via this (has to be done that way each time):

Code:
@echo off

reg add "HKCU\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\NVControlPanel2\Client" /v LastPage /t REG_BINARY /d ec8881f1672555488bae2766f5ec54fc /f

start "" "%programfiles%\NVIDIA Corporation\Control Panel Client\nvcplui.exe"

Only the "Manage 3D settings" pane has any delayed loading for me and it is only 2 seconds - the rest open instantly.

Alternatively you can edit the command registry entry for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0bbca823-e77d-419e-9a44-5adec2c8eeb0}
 
Last edited:
I've not messed about with it but I guess you could set LastPage in the registry to ec8881f1672555488bae2766f5ec54fc then alter permissions to allow read only on the key - I've not tested it though it might cause problems.

It also might cause issues if a later nVidia driver update changed things around and/or tried to write that key.

On another note I've not seen any significant bottlenecking on my fairly old setup with my 3070FE at higher resolution - 1080P shows more of a difference but I game at 1440p (mostly) or 2160p. I have noticed before though that nVidia drivers seem to love RAM bandwidth and the quad channel helps a bit there.
 
This is getting a lot of heat on all the main sub-reddits, AMD, nvidia, pgaming, pcmaster race etc.

Just need likes of gamer nexus etc. to do a video now and nvidia will have to do something, surely......
 
nvidia need to address this quickly, most users still game at 1080p/1440p and lots of users are on Zen 2 CPU's which don't have the greatest single thread performance.

Lots of performance likely being left on the table due to this, disappointing but not surprising, explains a lot of the weird performance results which I assumed was the developers optimising for AMD cards.

This may push me towards the 6800XT or better, if they're ever in stock. :p
 
This is getting a lot of heat on all the main sub-reddits, AMD, nvidia, pgaming, pcmaster race etc.

Just need likes of gamer nexus etc. to do a video now and nvidia will have to do something, surely......
Yeah, nvidia will do some PR...

This is very pertinent to me as a 3080 + 5820K user who loves high frame rates above all else.
 
nvidia need to address this quickly, most users still game at 1080p/1440p and lots of users are on Zen 2 CPU's which don't have the greatest single thread performance.

Lots of performance likely being left on the table due to this, disappointing but not surprising, explains a lot of the weird performance results which I assumed was the developers optimising for AMD cards.

This may push me towards the 6800XT or better, if they're ever in stock. :p
I don't think this effects zen 2 much as HW unboxed earlier did a comparison of a 3600 vs 5600X with a 3090 and while there was some difference at 1080p at 1440p or higher there was practically no difference.
 
I don't think this effects zen 2 much as HW unboxed earlier did a comparison of a 3600 vs 5600X with a 3090 and while there was some difference at 1080p at 1440p or higher there was practically no difference.

It's possible, but like it was mentioned in the video, 5700XT to 3070 should be around 40%, not 16% that could be seen at 1440p with a 3600. Maybe it's a combination of the two but this raises a lot of questions.
 
nvidia need to address this quickly, most users still game at 1080p/1440p and lots of users are on Zen 2 CPU's which don't have the greatest single thread performance.

Lots of performance likely being left on the table due to this, disappointing but not surprising, explains a lot of the weird performance results which I assumed was the developers optimising for AMD cards.

This may push me towards the 6800XT or better, if they're ever in stock. :p


HU tested at 1080p low didn't they, do most people with a 3070+ play on low settings? I wasn't aware. As for the Zen vs 3 thing, it's not just about single performance, they said in the video Nvidia DX12 drivers like Cores, throw more cpu cores at it the better it performs, so likely a 1800x runs perfectly fine, it's the low core county entry CPUs that get hit hard - not like people weren't warned that they'd need more cores in the future, times a changing even consoles have 8 minimum
 
This seems more negative on AMD than Nvidia to me.

Bad drivers can be fixed, but if AMD cards are only where they are in comparison to 30 series cards because of a driver advantage, then by the time Nvidia have rolled out Resizable BAR support and fixed drivers, they are going to be miles ahead, surely?
 
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