[PcGameshardware] The Witcher 3 Benchmark

[Final8ty]

The HD 5000/6000 series did continue to get bug fixes and Crossfire profiles

And my 5970s was nearly 4 years old by then.

 

[escrow4]

Maxwell is a brand new arch, tess performance is more than double Kepler minimum. Compute is rejigged too. Sure you spent a $1K last year and its useless. Welcome to high end GPUs.

 

[SimianR]

If you were able to snag an R9 290 when they were first released for $400 (it was a very small window), you'd be feeling pretty good right now with how the $699 780 Ti is performing.

 

[Ranulf]

Member call out is against the rules on this forum. But the answer should be really obvious: NVIDIA will prioritize and optimize for Maxwell as it's the current and best selling architecture. Furthermore, Kepler most likely has already maxed out and there's not much more to extract from it without a lot of dedicated resources. AMD on the other hand continues to optimize for it's current GCN because it's all they have available. What else are they going to optimize for in their drivers?

I'd expect Nvidia to favor their new products but to cut off their older customers so much? Tis not very faith inducing in the brand, especially given their new 970 has memory issues that needs special drivers. This has been one of my main hangups with the 970, how long will they have driver support for the card? How far will my $350 go? At least now they're offering $100 or so worth of games.

As for pcper... I can't deny anymore they favor nvidia. About the only guy I trust there is Josh Walrath when it comes to gpus and cpus.

 

[x3sphere]

Maybe there's nothing Nvidia can do. It could be that newer games are stressing the hardware in areas where Kepler falls short. Really we've only just started seeing true 'next-gen' games this year, last year was mostly all ports of games that originally started development on PS3/360.

Edit: Also, the idea that Nvidia would deliberately avoid optimizing Kepler drivers to push Maxwell seems ridiculous to me. They are not that desperate to sell cards after all. More likely that GCN was just the more forward-thinking architecture and is coping better with recent games as a result.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

looks like the game released an hour early

 

[Stuka87]

Maybe there's nothing Nvidia can do. It could be that newer games are stressing the hardware in areas where Kepler falls short. Really we've only just started seeing true 'next-gen' games this year, last year was mostly all ports of games that originally started development on PS3/360.

Edit: Also, the idea that Nvidia would deliberately avoid optimizing Kepler drivers to push Maxwell seems ridiculous to me. They are not that desperate to sell cards after all. More likely that GCN was just the more forward-thinking architecture and is coping better with recent games as a result.

This can be true of little Kepler cards, but not the 780/780Ti/Titan. Those cards all have good compute that should allow them to out perform a lowly GTX960 by a large margin. But they do not.

 

[x3sphere]

This can be true of little Kepler cards, but not the 780/780Ti/Titan. Those cards all have good compute that should allow them to out perform a lowly GTX960 by a large margin. But they do not.

Well, Maxwell has some significant compute enhancements:

http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallel...ould-know-about-new-maxwell-gpu-architecture/

Benchmarks here from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/20

The only thing it doesn't excel at is double precision (unlike GK110/Titan), but that's not the type of compute workloads you see in games.

 

[AnandThenMan]

Either Nvidia is not bothering with drivers on Kepler or Kepler itself was simply not a forward thinking architecture. Whatever the reason it would not be unreasonable to think that the same thing will happen with their current hardware, and given AMD's GCN is looking to be with us for some time it seems like a smarter purchase to me.

 

[Alatar]

No one has caught on to the fact that pcgameshardware.de always disables or at the very least locks GPU boost and that in this case it's resulting in an almost 50% clock advantage for the GM204 chips compared to old GK110 ones?

no?

I mean I don't know about you but I've got 56% OCing potential from 900MHz while I doubt the 1300MHz clocked 970 here is going to reach the same OC at 2.1GHz...

 

[3DVagabond]

Thats the problem. Unless you upgrade every 1-2 year and keep buying Nvidia's latest hardware you are going to get a raw deal. There are many people for whom buying a GPU is not a expensive hobby and such users will see this kind of incidents as Nvidia's arrogance and utter disregard for the consumer.

Actually Kepler was still current just a few months ago, never mind a year or two. The GM104 wasn't released until the 18th of Sept. Barely 8 months and it's not like they just started doing this.

 

[3DVagabond]

I totally agree when it comes to small Kepler cards, they have crap compute. But the 780/Ti are big Kepler, and have ok compute. It seems like they should not be neutered the way they are in this one specific title.

This^^^

The compute angle is pure FUD. I question whoever spreads it. The Tesla K80 is Kepler and it's nVidia's latest and greatest compute card. The Titan is far superior to the Titan X as well.

 

[x3sphere]

This^^^

The compute angle is pure FUD. I question whoever spreads it. The Tesla K80 is Kepler and it's nVidia's latest and greatest compute card. The Titan is far superior to the Titan X as well.

For double precision workloads. Maxwell is superior for compute in other categories...

Anyway, I wasn't suggesting compute was the reason Kepler is falling behind in games. There has got to be a reason other than 'NV isn't optimizing Kepler drivers' though. The blowback they face from this doesn't seem to be worth selling some more Maxwell cards and losing tons of goodwill from consumers in the process.

 

[Silverforce11]

Maybe there's nothing Nvidia can do. It could be that newer games are stressing the hardware in areas where Kepler falls short. Really we've only just started seeing true 'next-gen' games this year, last year was mostly all ports of games that originally started development on PS3/360.

This would be true if its an occurrence in all newer games, but it only happens in NV's own GameWorks titles. As I showed earlier in the thread, GTA V is the other block buster, Rockstar went fully NEUTRAL, taking NV & AMD features onboard and optimized for all hardware.

Result, 780Ti trading blows with 970. Not here where it looks budget PoS compared to a mid-range 970. Just note that the Phantom 780Ti in the charts is pulling off a major OC out of the box like the Gigabyte Ghz 780Ti series. It's easily 20-25% over a reference 780Ti numbers.

With the knowledge that this kind of crap only happens when NV manages to inject GameWorks into games.. it doesn't take a genius to figure out whatever NV is doing with GW severely punishes AMD & Kepler while optimized for Maxwell. The only question to ask, is why?

 

[chimaxi83]

It's utter, laughable crap that AMD won't have an optimized driver for this until next week, according to Roy@AMD. WTF?

 

[SimianR]

It's utter, laughable crap that AMD won't have an optimized driver for this until next week, according to Roy@AMD. WTF?

Does every game require a new driver release? Did you look at the benchmarks? AMD cards are performing right where they should be IMO - the 290/290X around the 970 in performance. Roughly where they are in most titles.

 

[Silverforce11]

It's utter, laughable crap that AMD won't have an optimized driver for this until next week, according to Roy@AMD. WTF?

What did you expect, like every other GameWorks title released, EVER.

 

[Azix]

If they give even better performance, that would be great.

 

[96Firebird]

What did you expect, like every other GameWorks title released, EVER.

Yeah they should really start working on these games earlier...

 

[Silverforce11]

Either Nvidia is not bothering with drivers on Kepler or Kepler itself was simply not a forward thinking architecture. Whatever the reason it would not be unreasonable to think that the same thing will happen with their current hardware, and given AMD's GCN is looking to be with us for some time it seems like a smarter purchase to me.

There's zero evidence to suggest Kepler isn't a good architecture because these issues only arise when NV's blackbox GameWorks is involved in game development.

I have yet to see a neutral game where a 960 is spanking 780 and on the heels of Titan.

The only logical conclusion is GameWorks neuter Kepler. You can argue this is because Kepler is not as good in compute but this also isn't true, big Keplers certainly pull their weight. The next conclusion would have to be along the lines of: Whatever compute NV is using in GameWorks runs poorly in Kepler (& AMD).

So the obvious question is why?

 

[casiofx]

Does CF work in The Witcher 3? I think that's the whole reason people would be mad about slower AMD driver release.

On the other hand, some kepler owners are raging the the Nvidia forum about the performance of their card:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/833016/geforce-700-600-series/gtx-780-possible-fail-as-performance-in-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-/

 

[tg2708]

I was biased towards nvidia since the day I bought the 770 as it performed better at the time than the 7970 I had (still sitting in a box due to some display issues, probably might be fixed with a driver update) but seeing how neglected kelper is now I most likely will be switching back next month. Witcher 3 is just the start as newer games come out and start to favor the maxwell tech the 780 ti at the top end where it once was will be falling short of 960. Plus the 780 ti is not that old. Nvidia is touting some revolutionary features of their cards, the ones that support such tech, falls, crash and burn when that feature is used. Lets hope its some driver issues because for a company that has the most money in the graphics card industry they sure should be able to fix this shortcoming. Out of the two nvidia should have been the more forward thinking company, but I guess when you are the premium brand in almost every gamer's mind, ones that have money mind you, its okay to milk your loyal fanbase year by year.

Cards that can be had for as low as 200-250 is is trading blows with a company's current gen and clearly outperforming last gen. "Get out of here".

 

[96Firebird]

So I guess 347.88 is the last driver that "officially" supports the upper-700 series cards, as seen from the release notes of the latest driver...

I'd like to see if performance is better with these older drivers on TW3 for Kepler cards, and am also wondering why 352.68 shows up as a supported driver on the website when the release notes say otherwise...

 

[chimaxi83]

Does every game require a new driver release? Did you look at the benchmarks? AMD cards are performing right where they should be IMO - the 290/290X around the 970 in performance. Roughly where they are in most titles.

No, every game does not require a new driver release. However, Nvidia has released an optimized driver. TW3 is one of the most anticipated releases this year, and there is nothing from AMD other than talking well deserved crap about GameWorks. Less crap talk, more optimized drivers, especially for multi-GPU users such as myself.

What did you expect, like every other GameWorks title released, EVER.

Yeah, tell me about it. But people will continue to blame AMD, which leads me to...

Yeah they should really start working on these games earlier...

I know there's a group of you that will put the blame on AMD until pigs fly, facts be damned, so I couldn't care less about arguing it.

 

[96Firebird]

And since I know people will say AMD probably never got the game because GameWorks and blah, blah, blah... Unless someone in the know says something like that, I don't believe it.

:biggrin: