nVidia GameWorks in Evolve - Sweclockers bench

[humbug]

Some think that Nvidia are deliberately gimping Kepler cards with the latest drivers so that Maxwell looks better, and people upgrade..

I don't have an opinion on this, just saying.

I don't know about deliberately gimping Kepler but if i was to have an opinion on it i would say Kepler isn't enjoying the natural progression of Driver performance improvements.

Add to that it depends on how games are reviewed.

Personally i think the 780 series is the stronger card while Maxwell is more target optimized.

IMO the 970 is is little more than a supper clocked GTX 770 with software optimization to help it along.

Great for 1080P and average rendering stresses, better perhaps than the 780 series and AMD's 290 series.

But put them all under real stress i think Maxwell starts to cave in much more easily than the 780 and 290 series card which have real muscle to do the heavy lifting.

Reviews are a snap shot of something very specific, they are not even close to representing reality. they certainly do not reflect the differences is how the card's behave under differing stress levels

I know this may get me more hate around here, I think Maxwell is cut down and cheap compared with KG110 and Hawaii.
Just more Nvidia cut-downs to increase margins with clever marketing to make people think it's an improvement rather than the step back that it actually is.

 

[bru]

I don't know about deliberately gimping Kepler but if i was to have an opinion on it i would say Kepler isn't enjoying the natural progression of Driver performance improvements.

Yes I would agree, that seems quite likely.

Add to that it depends on how games are reviewed.

Personally i think the 780 series is the stronger card while Maxwell is more target optimized.

IMO the 970 is is little more than a supper clocked GTX 770 with software optimization to help it along.

Great for 1080P and average rendering stresses, better perhaps than the 780 series and AMD's 290 series.

But put them all under real stress i think Maxwell starts to cave in much more easily than the 780 and 290 series card which have real muscle to do the heavy lifting.

Reviews are a snap shot of something very specific, they are not even close to representing reality. they certainly do not reflect the differences is how the card's behave under differing stress levels

Yup, the currant 900 series are definitely aimed at a set market.

I know this may get me more hate around here, I think Maxwell is cut down and cheap compared with KG110 and Hawaii.
Just more Nvidia cut-downs to increase margins with clever marketing to make people think it's an improvement rather than the step back that it actually is.

Again yes I agree, ( I bet you thought you would get flak for your post ) it would seem that Nvidia have looked at the market and at what is needed and tailored the new cards just for that market. As you say removing the unnecessary parts and abilities of more well rounded cards to give us pure gaming cards.
Maybe the success of the Titan cards last time out actually hurt Nvidia's sales of the true workstation cards a little too much, so this time round they have made sure that the gaming cards are used for gaming only. The latest GM200 FP64 rumour could also point in this direction.
The way AMD reduced the 290/x to 1/8 FP64 over the workstations 1/2 FP64 could also be an indication of the how things will be in future.

 

[humbug]

Thanks Bru ^^

 

[drunkenmaster]

The desktop card having cut down FP64 ability vs professional is standard across pretty much all Nvidia/AMD cards across the past decade.

I honestly can't remember if Titan was still cut down or just less cut down FP64 than normal and thus was attempting to justify it's price though it was obviously still squarely aimed at gamers. But the majority of for instance Geforce vs Quadro/Tesla cards and Radeon vs Firepro have the FP64 capability reduced by software only. There is a very large difference between having the 1/2 DP compute ability in hardware and limiting it in software and not having it in hardware at all.

 

[humbug]

It's not just GPGPU, which of course is useful for DX Direct Compute, usually Shading, Lighting and some Physics.

The reduced Bus width it seems to me is a bottleneck for large Texture Mapping through-put, that is not so good for higher resolutions and high sampling AA.

I don't think the GPU it's self has the same muscle for high polygon count rendering.

I don't know but i suspect the reason DICE reduced the foliage in BF4 is because lower end GPU's just couldn't handle the polygon count, you can't remove that by reducing quality settings, polygon count is something developers are constantly having to moderate themselves with, lots of them would love to have lush, dense, beautiful 3D texture facing but just can't do it because the rendering muscle thats needed grinds even the most powerful of modern GPU's to a halt.

Reducing the (Raw Foot-Pounds of Torque) like this to reduce power consumption as well as component and production costs for me is a point of aggravation.

And yes while both Green and Red are guilty of it i do think Maxwell is taking this to a whole new level.

 

[whyscotty]

Some think that Nvidia are deliberately gimping Kepler cards with the latest drivers so that Maxwell looks better, and people upgrade..

I don't have an opinion on this, just saying.

I don't think they are wrong

I don't know about deliberately gimping Kepler but if i was to have an opinion on it i would say Kepler isn't enjoying the natural progression of Driver performance improvements.

Agreed

 

[triss]

I don't know about deliberately gimping Kepler but if i was to have an opinion on it i would say Kepler isn't enjoying the natural progression of Driver performance improvements.

Add to that it depends on how games are reviewed.

Personally i think the 780 series is the stronger card while Maxwell is more target optimized.

IMO the 970 is is little more than a supper clocked GTX 770 with software optimization to help it along.

Great for 1080P and average rendering stresses, better perhaps than the 780 series and AMD's 290 series.

But put them all under real stress i think Maxwell starts to cave in much more easily than the 780 and 290 series card which have real muscle to do the heavy lifting.

Reviews are a snap shot of something very specific, they are not even close to representing reality. they certainly do not reflect the differences is how the card's behave under differing stress levels

I know this may get me more hate around here, I think Maxwell is cut down and cheap compared with KG110 and Hawaii.
Just more Nvidia cut-downs to increase margins with clever marketing to make people think it's an improvement rather than the step back that it actually is.

Well put Humbug
I' agree the 970's/980s are replacements for the 670/770's and are a great increase over them , But IMO Nvidia priced them nearer to what we would expect for the top tier, which is to me a bit of a worry as i do wonder what they will charge for full fat maxwell (780/ti/titan) replacements

 

[TheRealDeal]

Thanks, I shall have a look around when I get chance, would be interesting to see for both manufacturers.

Maybe worth starting a thread for people with 7950/70 and 780/ti's who have older benchmark results who are able to re-run again with newer driver revisions to see if performance is dropping to the latest generation.

Here's a more recent review from the gtx960 release. The 290x is now faster than the gtx780ti at 1440p. Another thing to look at is the performance of the 290x compared to the gtx690 which now appear around equal. Kepler performance has either stayed the same and AMD moved on or there is some gimping going on.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_960_STRIX_OC/29.html

 

[humbug]

Here's a more recent review from the gtx960 release. The 290x is now faster than the gtx780ti at 1440p. Another thing to look at is the performance of the 290x compared to the gtx690 which now appear around equal. Kepler performance has either stayed the same and AMD moved on or there is some gimping going on.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_960_STRIX_OC/29.html

Tech' wrote an article somewhere about the Omega Drivers, saying they have pushed AMD's overall performance up quite a lot, even cited the fact that the 290X is now faster than the 780TI.

Which would make sense as the Omega Drivers have improved performance by more than 20% in a couple of Games with marginal increases in most others.

But it is strange that Kepler seems to be standing still while Maxwell keeps creeping up.

 

[TheRealDeal]

Tech' wrote an article somewhere about the Omega Drivers, saying they have pushed AMD's overall performance up quite a lot, even cited the fact that the 290X is now faster than the 780TI.

Which would make sense as the Omega Drivers have improved performance by more than 20% in a couple of Games with marginal increases in most others.

Yea maybe GK110 is tapped out with nothing more to give hence why they appear to be going backwards. At 1440p the 7970ghz is only 10% behind the gtx780 now which suggest even older GCN cards are seeing benefits.

 

[humbug]

Yea maybe GK110 is tapped out with nothing more to give hence why they appear to be going backwards. At 1440p the 7970ghz is only 10% behind the gtx780 now which suggest even older GCN cards are seeing benefits.

I edited my post, to expand on it i don't remember the 970 beating the Titan at all not so long ago, now it mullers it and looks set to overtake the 780TI in about 2 minutes.

Clearly Kepler is being completely ignored by Driver updates.

 

[Gregster]

I edited my post, to expand on it i don't remember the 970 beating the Titan at all not so long ago, now it mullers it and looks set to overtake the 780TI in about 2 minutes.

Clearly Kepler is being completely ignored by Driver updates.

The 970 has always beaten the Titan at 1080P anyway.