• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

"AMD drivers require a faster CPU" - truth to this?

chickadee

chickadee

chickadee

Associate
Joined
14 Feb 2015
Posts
474
Location
Scotland
On my long search for a graphics card I keep finding this as advice from people that AMD cards need a faster CPU and Nvidias are a lot less demanding on the CPU.

I use an i7 920 so my CPU is sort of lacking and had planned to get an r9 380......but this is putting me off.

Is there truth to this and if so would a 960 be a better purchase due to the better Nvidia drivers?
 
Its all junk fanboi will say.. No drivers are perfect AMD and Nvidia both have there fair shares of issues..

For me personally I am yet to have a driver issue! I have had other hardware issues crash drivers from failing Memory to failing Overclocks but not the drivers themselves.

To the other question I think you mean Draw calls on some games Nvidia improved this a lot and give bit extra performance in CPU bound games. The good news AMDs drivers from this year all have the Draw Call improvements..

Never let drivers make or break your choice on buying a GPU.. Look what else the GPUs will give.
 
Rubbish as said above, as i ran a 290X on an i7 920, was only clocked from the stock 2.66GHz to 2.90GHz, and it cut through everything (@ 1080p) :)
 
Last edited:
I have a great time gaming with a single gpu and AMD drivers, If you had two cards they can be slow with profiles but for a single card gamer there's nothing to worry about.
 
Martini1991 said:
I thought factually Nvidia had less driver overhead......
Click to expand...

I thought this was true also, but to be honest the difference is suppose to be minimal, certainly not one worth making an AMD or NVidia decision over. If it is gaming your worried about, the performance difference from different games favouring either AMD or NVidia in a much bigger way than any difference the driver overhead would make.

On the whole it's nothing to worry about.
 
I wouldn't mind seeing how they both stack up now days on the DX11 Draw Calls. AMD has made a lot of driver changes this year.
Guys on Guru3D have done a lot of testing on the AMD driver sets.
 
I've seen reviews showing driver overhead is higher on AMD but it was only visible on i3 systems so I doubt a 920 would have a problem...
 
I use a 290x on my i7 920 system and at 1200p it runs through everything I play easy. My cpu is at 4ghz though so it's still pretty fast comparing to today's i7 4 cores.
 
Last edited:
On that digital foundry article he's talking about really slow CPUs though, specifically a 2 core i3 processor.

A 920 is an i7 with 4 cores and hyperthreading and won't have any problem.
 
Yeah although it's fairly old now a 920 is still not a slow cpu and shouldn't have any trouble running a 380. The supposed extra overhead of the AMD drivers only really comes into play on very low end cpus, i3's and AMD Athlons etc.
 
AMD do have issues with driver overhead compared to Nvidia, but it is only something that should be of concern to people with slower dual core CPU's or those with CPU's that have poor single threaded performance. A 920 is not going to be a problem.
 
Martini1991 said:
I thought factually Nvidia had less driver overhead......
Click to expand...

Indeed, it's been common knowledge for years that NVidia performed better in heavily CPU limited games, it's less of an issue these days with multithreaded games and CPU's that are generally not a cause of bottleneck (most people run high resolutions/graphics so games are GPU limited most of the time).
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom