Nvidia Kepler performance driver fix released.

[xthetenth]

I'm going to be watching to see what comes of this relatively keenly. If something seriously good doesn't happen for Kepler owners, I'm really going to be looking to do something about my 970 before it's an old arch.

 

[KentState]

Not really expecting too much. I'm more upset that I overspent on a card that was quickly outclassed.

 

[swilli89]

Damn, so now with my 960 I cant post in AMD GPU threads, what a shame.... Oh, wait.



The "fix soon" is just an option that will let the game detect if you have a Kepler card, downgrade Tess to x16, and be done with it. "Fixes" from NV these days, you know...

Except that, you have been posting negative remarks in the 390X pictured thread as well as posting in the AMD Witcher 3 thread. So I guess it really is a shame?

 

[Red Hawk]

Interesting. The Nvidia person quoted doesn't give any detail about what "couple of issues" are and how much performance benefit to expect, and that's probably for the best. I honestly hope that Nvidia improves performance with Kepler in TW3 back to a point where it's more properly competitive with Maxwell and GCN cards. ^_^

So in other words, Kepler was neglected

I hope my 880M sees an increase, looking forward to it. Get to work Nvidia

Either Kepler was neglected, or The Witcher 3 has features that just play to Maxwell's strengths and hits weaknesses of Kepler. Hopefully for Kepler owners it's the former, and Nvidia is able to improve performance for them. I'm not in the tinfoil hat camp of thinking that Nvidia actively crippled Kepler performance for TW3.

 

[badb0y]

Interesting. The Nvidia person quoted doesn't give any detail about what "couple of issues" are and how much performance benefit to expect, and that's probably for the best. I honestly hope that Nvidia improves performance with Kepler in TW3 back to a point where it's more properly competitive with Maxwell and GCN cards. ^_^



Either Kepler was neglected, or The Witcher 3 has features that just play to Maxwell's strengths and hits weaknesses of Kepler. Hopefully for Kepler owners it's the former, and Nvidia is able to improve performance for them. I'm not in the tinfoil hat camp of thinking that Nvidia actively crippled Kepler performance for TW3.

So there's something that Maxwell cards can do better than Kepler cards. Ok, I can believe that, now explain the Hawaii performance.

 

[RussianSensation]

There is some kind of driver fix coming.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd8EPeMUaEs&feature=youtu.be

He does make some very great points. If NV worked on the game so closely with the developer for more than 2 years, and it knows the entire GW source code, shouldn't they have been able to catch the issues of Kepler GPU performance throughout testing? I wonder if it wasn't for all those fans complaining on various forums/GeForce that NV would have even bothered. This is very reminiscent of NV re-enabling mobile GPU overclocking (temporarily) but only after thousands of fans complained online. Hopefully the new drivers are out from both AMD and NV and there is a nice showdown comparison between 980Ti, 780Ti and Fiji come next month.

 

[futurefields]

Nvidia outta include quality levels on hairworx, or be able to force them in control panel.

What if I only want 16x tessellation on my 970 to save some frames. I read an article that states it would look exactly the same and 64x tessellation is redundant.

 

[Red Hawk]

He does make some very great points. If NV worked on the game so closely with the developer for more than 2 years, and it knows the entire GW source code, shouldn't they have been able to catch the issues of Kepler GPU performance throughout testing? I wonder if it wasn't for all those fans complaining on various forums/GeForce that NV would have even bothered. This is very reminiscent of NV re-enabling mobile GPU overclocking (temporarily) but only after thousands of fans complained online. Hopefully the new drivers are out from both AMD and NV and there is a nice showdown comparison between 980Ti, 780Ti and Fiji come next month.

Negligence. Even if Nvidia noticed the Kepler performance issues, they just may have not cared to put the resources in to fixing it. It's bad, yes, but not the same as actively choosing to crippling Kepler performance.

 

[Prefix-NA]

Nvidia outta include quality levels on hairworx, or be able to force them in control panel.

What if I only want 16x tessellation on my 970 to save some frames. I read an article that states it would look exactly the same and 64x tessellation is redundant.

If they add that then Kepler cards are able to use Hairworks and they cannot have that.

 

[escrow4]

Didn't Maxwell rejig the architecture to be more forward thinking for compute or something? Even then, 2880 cores and 48 ROPs in a 780 Ti surely can't be THAT rubbish. It still has some grunt. I was all for upgrading to a 980 Ti, but now with the Witcher III on high (and graphically its nothing special anyway on Ultra) what else is there AAA and single player this year that is actually worth upgrading to a 980 Ti or 390X?

 

[hawtdawg]

We're in uncharted waters here. Nvidia released 2 new architectures on 28nm. Of course they were going to do everything they could to make Maxwell look appealing. Either that, or Kepler was a shit architecture and AMD are the ones who know what they are doing.

 

[ocre]

Damn, so now with my 960 I cant post in AMD GPU threads, what a shame.... Oh, wait.



The "fix soon" is just an option that will let the game detect if you have a Kepler card, downgrade Tess to x16, and be done with it. "Fixes" from NV these days, you know...

He does make some very great points. If NV worked on the game so closely with the developer for more than 2 years, and it knows the entire GW source code, shouldn't they have been able to catch the issues of Kepler GPU performance throughout testing? I wonder if it wasn't for all those fans complaining on various forums/GeForce that NV would have even bothered. This is very reminiscent of NV re-enabling mobile GPU overclocking (temporarily) but only after thousands of fans complained online. Hopefully the new drivers are out from both AMD and NV and there is a nice showdown comparison between 980Ti, 780Ti and Fiji come next month.

This all started in a Witcher 3 thread on the nvidia forums. Kepler performance in witcher 3.

It is not the GW features, already debunked on page one

Here->

The poor Kepler performance has nothing to do with tesellation. In fact the performance hit from enabling Hairworks + HBAO+ is actually a bit lower on Kepler GPUs. A lot of people seem to be overlooking this...

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...e_Witcher_3_Wild_Hunt-game-new-2560_u_off.jpg

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...2_Assassins_of_Kings-test-witcher3_2560_u.jpg

780 Ti - 34 FPS avg with GW off, 26 with it on - ~26% difference
980 - 46 FPS avg with GW off, 33 with it on - ~32% difference

So as you see, Kepler takes less of a perf hit from enabling GW features...

I believe Maxwell (because of its 128core SM layout) is just better suited when it comes to game engines built around the GCN architectures that are in the consoles. I believe it to be a scheduling issue, the 192cores of the kepler SMX all use the same cache/L1. Maxwell divides more evenly with its 128SM which is made up of two 64core blocks that share resources (cache/L1). If you know the GCN architecture, look at maxwell and kepler.....
Kepler and its 192core SMX is the odd ball. I believe it is just a matter of scheduling.

Obviously there can be improvements. I dont know how much can be done on a driver level. But i believe the best results will only come from a lot of work. It seems like to truly fix this it would take not only drivers but game patches. The game engines that are not kepler friendly, they need overhauled. I just dont see this as a simple fix at all.

But that is not saying nothing can be done.

 

[bystander36]

We're in uncharted waters here. Nvidia released 2 new architectures on 28nm. Of course they were going to do everything they could to make Maxwell look appealing. Either that, or Kepler was a shit architecture and AMD are the ones who know what they are doing.

All these chips are designed around what they think is going to be needed, but they can't always know what is going to be used by the dev's when they come up with these chips. AMD didn't know their early DX11 chips would suck at tessellation, because they did not know how much was going to be needed when they were designed. Nvidia didn't know how much compute was going to be needed when Kepler was designed, and now that they see the results, have been pushing it on newer architectures.

They aren't bad designs, they just predicted what would be important poorly. There is a lot of guess work on these things.

 

[bryanW1995]

So in other words, Kepler was neglected

I hope my 880M sees an increase, looking forward to it. Get to work Nvidia

I admit that I was ambivalent about buying 7970 b/c of the greater noise/power draw vs gtx 770. However, 18 months later, it's (surprisingly) nice to see that I might have made the right decision. I wish that NV would pay more attention to their older-generation cards, though the lack of competition from AMD makes this seem like a faint hope going forward.

780ti owner remaining skeptical... Bought nvidia due to perceived good drivers support, should have stuck with my 7970!

That "in generation upgrade" can work out if you execute it properly. One time, I went from 3870 to 8800 gt. It was great b/c it only cost me a few $$ ($30-40 iirc after shipping/tax/everything net) and gave me a good performance upgrade.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_970_Gaming/27.html

From looking at that gtx 970 review from 5 months ago, it looks like gtx 780 ti is ~ 47.8% faster than 7970 at 2560x1440. That's a pretty sizable upgrade...how much did you pay net after selling the 7970?

Damn, so now with my 960 I cant post in AMD GPU threads, what a shame.... Oh, wait.

You should just be like me and rotate roughly every other generation between cards. Here's a brief history for the past ~ 15 years:

7970
gtx 460 -768
gtx 280
8800 gt
3870
9800 gso (??)
x1900xt
7600 gt
6600 gt
9800 pro


Plus, numerous other random low/mid end cards from both camps that I put in SETI rigs or mom's computer over the years. And I probably missed one or 2 in there somewhere.

Oh, crap...that's one card every 1.5 yrs...and I've had the 7970 for 18 mos. MUST...FIGHT...URGE...TO UPGRADE...

 

[RussianSensation]

This all started in a Witcher 3 thread on the nvidia forums. Kepler performance in witcher 3.

It is not the GW features, already debunked on page one

Here->

1. No one says it's all 100% all related to GW's source code. The point is NV knows the GW source code and the other source code in the game. Between that, NV has the entire game's source code which means they should have noticed that Kepler wasn't performing well over the last 2 years of development.

2. Sorry, but Kepler bombing in modern games began last year, not since The Witcher 3. Just because Kepler users are up in arms over it right now, means they were asleep at the wheel for the last 8 months and just ignorant to the facts. Silverforce11, raghu78, myself, AnandThenMan, Chimaxi83, etc. many other posters have pointed out that Kepler started tanking a long time ago. There were threads on Reddit that showed Kepler bombing relative to both Maxwell and GCN, 5 months before The Witcher 3 came out.

There have been other AAA games where Kepler performs much worse than expected, well before The Witcher 3 came out. If NV fixes Kepler performance in TW3, what about all these other games released in the last 8 months?

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2432594

From looking at that gtx 970 review from 5 months ago, it looks like gtx 780 ti is ~ 47.8% faster than 7970 at 2560x1440.
Oh, crap...that's one card every 1.5 yrs...and I've had the 7970 for 18 mos. MUST...FIGHT...URGE...TO UPGRADE...

You've only had your 7970 for 18 months? I guess you got it at a very good price! I've had mine for 3 years and I am still shocked I can't buy a $549 card with 2X the performance and 6GB of VRAM. The other thing about 7970 is its overclocking - peace of cake. A lot of after-market cards have little problem hitting 1150-1175mhz overclocks on stock voltage of 1.175V. 1200mhz is doable a lot of times with 1.225-1.25V, still safe voltage for Tahiti XT. It's crazy to think that in just 7 months HD7970 will turn 4 years old.

Tahiti XT aged incredibly well. In modern titles today, a 280X is a whopping 71% faster than a GTX580, and 84% faster than an HD6970! In contrast, Kepler is aging incredibly poorly and 780Ti is just 27% faster than a 280X at 1080P now. Horrible.
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-05/...ergleich/2/#abschnitt_leistungsratings_spiele

This also means that R9 290/290X/970 OC are mild upgrades from an overclockded 7970. You'd get about a 35-40% increase. A good upgrade is a 980 but for $550+, 3.5 years later, one would want 100% faster imo. 980 is nowhere near that. The GPU market is really in a bad state when 3.5 years since 7970 launched, there isn't a card 2X faster for $549. 14nm-16nm and HBM2 should finally resolve that next year.

 

[Silverforce11]

I believe Maxwell (because of its 128core SM layout) is just better suited when it comes to game engines built around the GCN architectures that are in the consoles. I believe it to be a scheduling issue, the 192cores of the kepler SMX all use the same cache/L1. Maxwell divides more evenly with its 128SM which is made up of two 64core blocks that share resources (cache/L1). If you know the GCN architecture, look at maxwell and kepler.....
Kepler and its 192core SMX is the odd ball. I believe it is just a matter of scheduling.

I still have an old gtx670 @ 1.2ghz and 7950 @ 1.1ghz and back then they were pretty much equal, but now the 7950 has a major lead in most of the recent games.

Perhaps @ocre is correct re: uarch differences, it makes sense that this is the cause of the Kepler tanking issues of late, post-Maxwell's launch, particularly the 970/980 series and after the 3.5 + 0.5 segments were discovered, NV's focus(*) has been on Maxwell optimizations. As such, Kepler being the uarch that it is, which would require optimizations to extract peak performance, is suffering due to the shift in driver optimization focus to Maxwell.


(*)The reason this is clear is the moderators on geforce forums have admitted they finally noticed some issues with Kepler, in a title they sponsored and had full access to for years during development. This came out after two massive threads on Reddit, r/pcgaming & pcmasterrace, making it on the front page of reddit due to the insane + votes. NV needs to know that they have a responsibility to Kepler owners as well as Maxwell and driver optimizations need to continue for more than one-generation.

 

[Azix]

Its funny that just a while before witcher was out I was seeing people say that nvidias cards are too reliant on drivers and that AMDs cards age better. Guess there was some truth there. Safer with AMD if you aren't upgrading too often.

Infraction issued for thread crapping.
-- stahlhart

 

[stahlhart]

Damn, so now with my 960 I cant post in AMD GPU threads, what a shame.... Oh, wait.

If you're going to try and be a smart ass about it, at least attempt to make sense.

Owners of hardware should be entitled to have a discussion about an announcement of updated driver support for it amongst themselves and be able to compare notes/results without having to weed through a bunch of irrelevant, inflammatory crap posted by the usual assortment of haters camped out here. It ought to be one of the primary reasons individuals join technical forums and participate in them.

If you own hardware that uses the driver, you are welcome to be a part of that conversation. If you don't, you have no business, and you're derailing it.

Understand now?

-- stahlhart

 

[PPB]

1. There is no Kepler fix yet, so you might just lock this thread till there is one (if it ever).

2. You are the first mod I see that bans discussion subjects entirely, we still remember the mantle talk forumwide ban.

3. Do i even need to argue how stupid is not to let people post in a thread because of their gpu purchase? Your problem is viral posters, not people with actual cards payed with the stuff that usually lurks around our pockets. Wanna do a pitchfork witch hunt? At least do it right and start doing background checks around users, the old and the new and after taking a looong time to process just how many shills the forum you moderate is filled with, proceed with your crusade and get this forum rid of them already.

 

[AnandThenMan]

If you own hardware that uses the driver, you are welcome to be a part of that conversation. If you don't, you have no business, and you're derailing it.

Understand now?

-- stahlhart

Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly but are you saying people must own the hardware being discussed or they are not allowed to participate in said discussion?

 

[master_shake_]

i have maxwell gpus and i would like to participate in this coversation.

i am worried nvidia might stop supporting my cards prematurely.

 

[happy medium]

without having to weed through a bunch of irrelevant, inflammatory crap posted by the usual assortment of haters camped out here. It ought to be one of the primary reasons individuals join technical forums and participate in them.

This is why and I totally agree with him. The same 5 or 6 members over and over again.

 

[richiegore]

Anyway, I have a 780ti which is just over a year old. I think there is nothing much going on other than NVIDIA neglecting Keplar cards, perhaps they've got their hands full with the dx12 driver for windows 10? but I'm not going to make any excuses for them, I am pretty annoyed with them right now to put it mildly. I think NVIDIA should publicly commit to a minimum of 2 years of optimised drivers after a card is discontinued. That way everyone who purchases a graphics card gets two years of well optimised drivers.

 

[Danno21]

I have to admit, I was really annoyed seeing my 780 ti benchmarked to the performance of a 960. The updates made to the Witcher by the developer have really helped, though. Along with pushing my overclock even further. I do hope Nvidia gets this fixed ASAP though. Makes me question buying another Nvidia card when they can cast aside their previous generation card owners that paid $730.

Nvidia has just been leaving a bitter taste in my mouth more and more.

 

[richiegore]

Damn right, I wish I'd kept my 7970 under water, kept the cash and waited for 14nm gpus. Looking back on the anantech review I can see why I bought the 780 ti, it was almost twice as fast as my 7970 and generally beat the 290x by 10%.... How things have changed!