Another game blowing up NVIDIA GPUS?? Here we go again!

[KompuKare]

Anyone still remember how the GTX780 and GTX780Ti were running like turd after Nvidia released the GTX 900 series, and got better for a little bit after 9 months of waiting, and then performance fell of the cliff once again and never recovered afterward?

Can't say I remember but I do remember looking recent(ish) benchmarks of 780/Ti vs 290X and had concluded that Hawaii aged really well (and was the last time AMD beat Nvidia in perf/transistor and perf/area as Hawaii vs GK110 was 438mm² vs 561mm² both on 28nm).

Obviously 3GB on GK110 was too little but you are telling me that there might be more going?

 

[Ormy1]

In 20+ years of PC building the only nvidia GPU that has been DOA for me was a gigabyte 3080Ti 2 years ago. Never touching gigabyte GPUs again. I wanted to stick with EVGA, only had good experiences with their GPUs, but they are gone. So who are the go-to for premium quality nvidia GPUs these days? MSI?

 

[gbgt2]

In 20+ years of PC building the only nvidia GPU that has been DOA for me was a gigabyte 3080Ti 2 years ago. Never touching gigabyte GPUs again. I wanted to stick with EVGA, only had good experiences with their GPUs, but they are gone. So who are the go-to for premium quality nvidia GPUs these days? MSI?

I used to buy Asus by default but I've become a bit of an MSI fanboy. I think their top end stuff is very good across the board (Suprim GPU's, MEG PSU's, Tomahawk/Carbon/MEG mobo's)

 

[SpudMaster]

Anyone still remember how the GTX780 and GTX780Ti were running like turd after Nvidia released the GTX 900 series, and got better for a little bit after 9 months of waiting, and then performance fell of the cliff once again and never recovered afterward?

yeah I remember, Nvidia crippled them good and proper with their drivers.

 

[Haz123]

In 20+ years of PC building the only nvidia GPU that has been DOA for me was a gigabyte 3080Ti 2 years ago. Never touching gigabyte GPUs again. I wanted to stick with EVGA, only had good experiences with their GPUs, but they are gone. So who are the go-to for premium quality nvidia GPUs these days? MSI?

Asus and Msi both use higher quality components and capacitors than the other manufacturers such as Giga, Zotac , Inno3D etc. Unfortunately these 2 brands suffer more with coil whine than the cards with lesser quality components , I do not know why this is happening. With Asus and Msi being substantially more expensive than the other brands it is a bitter pill to take when they are more likely to make your ears bleed.

For this generation of Nv cards I would say Zotac have done a decent job. Good performance , decent prices in comparison to the competition , good warranty if registered, anecdotal evidence says they not too bad with coil whine and the cooler is not the most hideous although this is a subjective matter.

I do not think there is a default choice anymore and it is best to wait and see what is a good card and/or use your consumer rights to send a card back if you are not happy with the quality.

 

[Alt0153]

Asus and Msi both use higher quality components and capacitors than the other manufacturers such as Giga, Zotac , Inno3D etc. Unfortunately these 2 brands suffer more with coil whine than the cards with lesser quality components , I do not know why this is happening. With Asus and Msi being substantially more expensive than the other brands it is a bitter pill to take when they are more likely to make your ears bleed.

For this generation of Nv cards I would say Zotac have done a decent job. Good performance , decent prices in comparison to the competition , good warranty if registered, anecdotal evidence says they not too bad with coil whine and the cooler is not the most hideous although this is a subjective matter.

I do not think there is a default choice anymore and it is best to wait and see what is a good card and/or use your consumer rights to send a card back if you are not happy with the quality.

the only thing you get extra by going asus/msi is paying more brand tax, they dont use better parts and cut corners just as much as the rest to keep their profits up as much as possible

 

[D1craig]

Yea but but but amd drivers...

 

[iron_monkey]

What is it exactly that's causing the cards to blow up and which cards is it I have a 2080 and I've been sat at the login screen queue with my GPU maxed out for the last hour or so, am I gonna die?

 

[Thekwango]

What is it exactly that's causing the cards to blow up and which cards is it I have a 2080 and I've been sat at the login screen queue with my GPU maxed out for the last hour or so, am I gonna die?

I’d be more concerned why you’re sat at the login screen queue for the last hour or so!?

 

[adidan]

For this generation of Nv cards I would say Zotac have done a decent job. Good performance , decent prices in comparison to the competition , good warranty if registered, anecdotal evidence says they not too bad with coil whine and the cooler is not the most hideous although this is a subjective matter.

FWIW, just my anecdote, I bought my first Zotac when I picked up a GTX 1080 way back when. It's still going strong,I had to replace one of the two fans but that's all.

I'd certainly not rule them out unless review feedback heavily suggested I should.

 

[iron_monkey]

I’d be more concerned why you’re sat at the login screen queue for the last hour or so!?

Because there are several million people trying to log into diablo and my timer keeps getting down and then going back up and then down and then up I'm currently under 6 minutes left to go to this is the lowest I've been so far fingers crossed

 

[Grim5]

400fps on my 4090 no issues

 

[Frenzy]

FWIW, just my anecdote, I bought my first Zotac when I picked up a GTX 1080 way back when. It's still going strong,I had to replace one of the two fans but that's all.

I'd certainly not rule them out unless review feedback heavily suggested I should.

My zotac 980ti amp extreme is fantastic, their 4090s have had build quality issues though

 

[Aretak]

Anyone still remember how the GTX780 and GTX780Ti were running like turd after Nvidia released the GTX 900 series, and got better for a little bit after 9 months of waiting, and then performance fell of the cliff once again and never recovered afterward?

The Witcher 3 was the game which became a big talking point on that front. Kepler severely underperformed in it at launch, which lead to the accusations of driver gimping. So much so that Nvidia released a hotfix driver not long after to improve Kepler performance in that game.

The thing about Kepler as an architecture is that it's actually quite radically different to Maxwell onwards. Is has 192 CUDA cores per SM, yet only four warp schedulers capable of addressing 32 cores per cycle to feed them. Each warp scheduler can actually execute two commands per cycle, but that requires the use of instruction-level parallelism, and that requires driver and software support. The TL;DR about Kepler is that it's an architecture that needs both focused driver support and developer consideration in order to perform well. Without ILP the CUDA cores are starved of work (since only 128 out of 192 are issued work to do), and so sit there doing nothing. Maxwell changed all this, moving to a 128 CUDA core per SM model with the same number of warp schedulers, meaning all 128 cores could be addressed without leaning on ILP. That's why it and subsequent Nvidia architectures have aged much better, relatively speaking. They're not anywhere near as heavily reliant on driver support and developer tricks to perform to their potential.

Ultimately, it wasn't really fair to say Nvidia were intentionally gimping Kepler. They simply dropped it like it was hot and didn't provide driver optimisations for it any more, whilst game developers also moved on and forgot about it. Without that software support it was boned and fell off a cliff.

 

[Grim5]

Because there are several million people trying to log into diablo and my timer keeps getting down and then going back up and then down and then up I'm currently under 6 minutes left to go to this is the lowest I've been so far fingers crossed

When I jumped in earlier there was no queue for me. The main city hub is still laggy despite not seeing many other players

 

[iron_monkey]

Yeah i got back in pretty quick again last night after a break. I had a lot of lag and rubber banding.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Witcher 3 was the game which became a big talking point on that front. Kepler severely underperformed in it at launch, which lead to the accusations of driver gimping. So much so that Nvidia released a hotfix driver not long after to improve Kepler performance in that game.

The thing about Kepler as an architecture is that it's actually quite radically different to Maxwell onwards. Is has 192 CUDA cores per SM, yet only four warp schedulers capable of addressing 32 cores per cycle to feed them. Each warp scheduler can actually execute two commands per cycle, but that requires the use of instruction-level parallelism, and that requires driver and software support. The TL;DR about Kepler is that it's an architecture that needs both focused driver support and developer consideration in order to perform well. Without ILP the CUDA cores are starved of work (since only 128 out of 192 are issued work to do), and so sit there doing nothing. Maxwell changed all this, moving to a 128 CUDA core per SM model with the same number of warp schedulers, meaning all 128 cores could be addressed without leaning on ILP. That's why it and subsequent Nvidia architectures have aged much better, relatively speaking. They're not anywhere near as heavily reliant on driver support and developer tricks to perform to their potential.

Ultimately, it wasn't really fair to say Nvidia were intentionally gimping Kepler. They simply dropped it like it was hot and didn't provide driver optimisations for it any more, whilst game developers also moved on and forgot about it. Without that software support it was boned and fell off a cliff.

They also moved to software scheduling unlike AMD too. Fermi had hardware scheduling.

 

[Rroff]

Anyone still remember how the GTX780 and GTX780Ti were running like turd after Nvidia released the GTX 900 series, and got better for a little bit after 9 months of waiting, and then performance fell of the cliff once again and never recovered afterward?

There was a point Kepler really started to struggle with newer games when as Aretak pointed out the optimisations weren't being done any more (at which point I changed mine for a 1070 - that and the 3GB VRAM started to become a limitation), but up to that point a lot of that was some dodgy benchmarking - some reviewers were still using press release cards on A1 silicon which was ~22% slower than the retail cards on B1 silicon, some reviewers persisted with testing using Kepler 1.0 boost methods with the 700 series unnecessarily which reduced their performance and so on.

 

[D1craig]

I've found this game to run like ****. It's not taxing my gpu or cpu but I am getting huge fps dips pretty frequently. Had no crashes though.

 

[BananaDunka]

Not a game I'm interested in, Diablo = Zzzz