Is driver degradation a thing or just made up?

[humbug]

Love this bit...

We used to test it with PhysX On, but now there is no performance difference between On or Off in the benchmark.

Ha! WTF are they thinking running is with Physics on? on AMD it runs on the CPU and kills performance, on Nvidia it doesn't.

 

[bfar]

It wasn't so much the lack of optimisation for Kepler that was disappointing, it was the speed. We had to wait weeks in some cases to get driver optimisations for new AAA titles. It was all very unNvidia like. In the meantime even older GCN cards were seeing improvements across the board.

 

[nashathedog]

It was never about gimping drivers for old games.

+1

From what I've seen it's about them not putting as much effort into keeping older cards performance as good as it could be in new game releases,
And to be honest it's a smart strategy from a business perspective.
If they ensure they get 100% of the theoretical performance available every time a new game releases there will be less people feeling the need to upgrade.

I think all this rubbish about purposely gimping performance became big news when the Kepler cards had performance droop in the Witcher 3 and needed a hot fix, They don't purposely gimp they just prioritise cards differently once there are newer ranges available.

 

[nashathedog]

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.

AMD took a long time to respond leaving the Titan as the King for quite a while, Nothing came close and at the time it was offering unheard of levels of performance at an unheard of price
We are still seeing the effects of that first Halo product on the market.

 

[Marine-RX179]

AMD took a long time to respond leaving the Titan as the King for quite a while, Nothing came close and at the time it was offering unheard of levels of performance at an unheard of price
We are still seeing the effects of that first Halo product on the market.

Sorry, but I still can't see how the Titan being only around 30-40% faster than the 680 and released around a year later at almost double the price being a big deal, especially for those of us whom have been through the Radeon 9800/8800GTX era

 

[nashathedog]

Sorry, but I still can't see how the Titan being only around 30-40% faster than the 680 and released around a year later at almost double the price being a big deal, especially for those of us whom have been through the 8800GTX era

It was a Halo product that sat there untouched with no competition for 7 months which is a long time in the computer world. 30 to 40 percent over the current flagships is a big deal when it can't be answered to by the competition..

 

[Marine-RX179]

It was a Halo product that sat there untouched with no competition for 7 months which is a long time in the computer world. 30 to 40 percent over the current flagships is a big deal when it can't be answered to by the competition..

I get what you are saying, but even bit-tech raised their eyebrow and said at the price and only that amount of increase in gaming performance, the Titan should really have had been released in the same gen as the 600 series, not a year down the line.

But yea thanks to the Titan crazy pricing, now even gaming grade Nvidia cards got shot up to extortionate pricing level.

 

[David Bisset]

Lol I thought that was too good to be true

ANyway here is the best comparison I have ever come across on the Keplar performance as to whether it was gimped or not.

a 780ti tested with 21 driver versions

http://www.bytemedev.com/the-gtx-780-ti-sli-end-of-life-driver-performance-analysis/

As you can see, occasionally there is a "bad" driver which has slightly worse performance than the previous one but overall its a steady climb upwards.

But interesting to see that it only improved 3-4% over 21 driver updates.

Like I said, Nvidia cards tend to be maxxed out driver wise on launch. You will get the odd massive improvement is certain games but thats mainly to the old driver under performing, not a "gain" as such.

By comparison the 290x and hence all AMD cards gained 10-20% during the same time.

The occasional bad driver does happen as you say, then gets fixed. A lot of people yelled gimping as a bad driver happened to the 7xx series around the 9xx series launch, which made it look deliberate... though looking back on it now the most likely time for a poor release for one architecture is when the focus has been on getting another architecture ready to go I'd have thought. Was fixed soon enough anyway though it did make some of the launch reviews a bit odd.

 

[DragonQ]

Shame I can't use modern AMD drivers because they still haven't fixed the deinterlacing settings. Still on 12.something beta I think.

 

[melmac]

AMD took a long time to respond leaving the Titan as the King for quite a while, Nothing came close and at the time it was offering unheard of levels of performance at an unheard of price
We are still seeing the effects of that first Halo product on the market.

Untouched? The 780 was nearly as fast when it was released. Less than 10% between them, in most cases less than 5fps.

 

[Catanonia]

Or you can look at this this way. AMD struggles to release decent drivers and "eventually" gets it right in a few years, whereas nVidia generally get it right the 1st time around and hence not much improvement over time.

I know that I would rather get what I paid for on day one than be drip fed it over 2 years. Am I supposed to be grateful for that from AMD ?

 

[Klo]

Or you can look at this this way. AMD struggles to release decent drivers and "eventually" gets it right in a few years, whereas nVidia generally get it right the 1st time around and hence not much improvement over time.

I know that I would rather get what I paid for on day one than be drip fed it over 2 years. Am I supposed to be grateful for that from AMD ?

Depends if you replace cards often or not.

I keep my cards for 4/5 years, so AMD is a better longer term investment than Nvidia as they tend to outperform later on.

 

[nashathedog]

Untouched? The 780 was nearly as fast when it was released. Less than 10% between them, in most cases less than 5fps.

Untouched by the competition, The 780 was the poor mans Titan, I know as I had one and wished it was a Titan

 

[nashathedog]

Or you can look at this this way. AMD struggles to release decent drivers and "eventually" gets it right in a few years, whereas nVidia generally get it right the 1st time around and hence not much improvement over time.

I know that I would rather get what I paid for on day one than be drip fed it over 2 years. Am I supposed to be grateful for that from AMD ?

You know how a graphics card performs before you buy it, or at least you should do through research & reviews etc so presumably you think it is worth getting as it is on day one, If not why get it?
Then when the additional improvements turn up they are a bonus.
You don't buy a card for theoretical performance you buy it for what it is at the time so if you're happy with how a card runs get it and if you're not don't.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Or you can look at this this way. AMD struggles to release decent drivers and "eventually" gets it right in a few years, whereas nVidia generally get it right the 1st time around and hence not much improvement over time.

I know that I would rather get what I paid for on day one than be drip fed it over 2 years. Am I supposed to be grateful for that from AMD ?

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.

 

[bru]

Or you can look at this this way. AMD struggles to release decent drivers and "eventually" gets it right in a few years, whereas nVidia generally get it right the 1st time around and hence not much improvement over time.

I know that I would rather get what I paid for on day one than be drip fed it over 2 years. Am I supposed to be grateful for that from AMD ?

That is interesting, kinda like a glass half full, or a glass half empty.

Many people will say that AMD improve over time, with better drivers.

But you are quite right, you could look at it, saying AMD underperform and it will take at least a year before you actually get the full performance of the card.


(Disclaimer: this will be unpopular I'm sure, but it is just showing that you can look at it from both sides of the fence.)

 

[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.

 

[Skribla]

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.

Every card has a best before date regardless of manufacturer eventually the GPU grunt isn't going to cut it regardless of how many software improvements you chuck at it. And as you've seen from the graphs there has been improvements for new drivers with Nvidia so its not they have full performance they just have better performance than AMD on release typically.

 

[Glanza]

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.

 

[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.