Is driver degradation a thing or just made up?

[Gregster]

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

 

[Gregster]

I hope this thread isn't a reaction to your dispute with spikerules.

Gregster.

It sort of is and there has been a few saying that NVidia are gimping performance and hence me looking and finding this. I see no evidence myself of any purposeful gimping going on. I thought a thread showing some decent testing over many games was a fair call and Kepler would be the one that suffers the most as it is now 2 generations old.

 

[Gregster]

|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.

Yer, AMD really did well with the performance improvements and nice going for those who still rock those kinds of GPUs.

Just to add - The Titan was launched Feb 2013 and the 290X launched October 2013, so quite a big gap in launches.

 

[Gregster]

Again with this gimping... you seem to not understand the difference between not improving upon older drivers and "gimping"



Changed your tune there bud... it's okay to be wrong...

I am not wrong though. If you read as many threads and posts as me, you will see the term gimping used often by several different people. This thread isn't all about you lol and it was to show that there isn't any gimping going on. You seem to feel that I am going at you, which I am not and look at the bigger picture and you will see where I am coming from. For the record, when the 290X launched, it was +/- in games as to what was the faster, then AMD improved performance and hence you see the 290X ahead. This is typical of AMD and quite often they release a decent driver that gives the users the performance they paid for.

 

[Gregster]

Yes we see that you have disagreed with me on the other thread and are now basically agreeing with what I said on this one... nice one Gregster. Nice one.

No idea how you come to that? Do you even read what I write lol? I can see I am wasting my time though and I won't get dragged in any further, so go with whatever you feel is correct and I will go along with it

 

[Gregster]

You are clearly missing the point here. The subject at hand is nothing to do with AMD, but more to do with Nvidia cards will only have full performance for games that are launched before the cards become EOL, but for games that are released after the cards become EOL won't get the same level of performance, due to the software teams moving onto optimising new gen cards and neglecting optimising old cards for new games . So to put simple, Nvidia cards have a "best before" date.

He isn't though. I started the thread to attempt to show that a 980Ti won't miraculously turn into a 980 (like you have said in previous threads) and I am talking driver degradation and that was the purpose of this thread. There seems to be a few who believe that NVidia have gimped performance and as seen from this thread, that isn't the case. By all means, feel free to start a thread that has NVidia ignoring EOL GPUs but that wasn't what this thread was about.

 

[Gregster]

One thing I remember was the 780ti with Witcher 3, sempt to be having issues with the fps dropping after the 980 / ti? launched then suddenly they found something silly like 20% increase in performance on the 780ti with newer drivers.

Yer, I remember that and NVidia were quick to get on top of it. There was a few tin foil hat wearers saying this and that (they might well have been right) but NVidia did get performance up across Kepler.

 

[Gregster]

Some people still argue the earth is flat.

I get frustrated every time I come on this forum now, the same old tools derail any attempts at decent discussion, mods do nothing, even when it's a topic you want to read, it's usually 5 pages of bile and the useful bits get lost.

Don't know how you have the energy to bother with all this tbh.

You know it. I really enjoy these forums as a rule and apart from the odd guy who spoils it, for the most, people see what is what and can hopefully see above the twisting of the topic at hand.

Cheers Dice and a good watch that