Ryzen's poor performance with Nvidia GPU's. Foul play? Did Nvidia know?

[moonbogg]

This question involves both Ryzen CPUs and Nvidia GPU's and there is no possible way to separate the two. I had to choose the Nvidia forum or the CPU forum and since the CPU is the main focus, I posted it here.
I want to use this thread to gauge people's opinion on the Ryzen/Nvidia performance issue. Do you think Nvidia was totally innocent regarding this? I think they stand to benefit a lot by Ryzen performing badly with their GPU's. It takes money and mindshare away from AMD, plain and simple. My opinion is that Nvidia was fully aware of the issue when no one else was and they decided it wasn't their responsibility to fix it. That's what I think. What do you think? There are many nuanced responses that are possible, but I made it simple.

Did Nvidia know about the problem and choose to not fix it. Yes or no.

 

[scannall]

Their driver does poorly on Intel CPU's with more than 4 cores as well. It's a general issue, and one that's a little embarrassing. Since nVidia has supposedly always had better drivers than AMD.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

I would say the truth likely lies somewhere in between. They aren't directly sabotaging amd, but they likely are indifferent to fixing any issues.

 

[moonbogg]

I would say the truth likely lies somewhere in between. They aren't directly sabotaging amd, but they likely are indifferent to fixing any issues.

I agree with this. That seems the most likely. Issues are naturally going to arise with a new CPU like this, but they aren't in any hurry to help their competitor.

 

[Rifter]

The thing is they also suck on intel 6 or greater cores CPU's. Which is extra bad because Nvidia always tried to be the company with the best flagship GPU's, and now they are crippled when paired with a flagship CPU(because nowadays a 4 core is just not a top tier CPU, that would be ryzen of intel HEDT). Chances are good if you are springing for a titan or Ti card you are likely going to pair it with a intel HEDT or Ryzen CPU.

So i guess what Nvidia is trying to accomplish here is cornering the mid range market and giving up the high end to AMD when vega launches. At least thats what it looks like to me as Nvidia has done exactly nothing to improve their performance with high end CPU's and they have had plenty of time.

 

[Dribble]

Standard conspiracy theory that makes no sense at all if you take your red glasses off.

They released new cards in time with Rizen to make sales - i.e. everyone buying high end Rizen was likely to buy high end Nvidia to go with it as there is no high end AMD cards. Being as Nvidia makes plenty sales on new builds, and the trendy new build is Rizen why would they do anything that makes them less likely to sell cards? They wouldn't obviously.

Why are the drivers optimised for 2-4 cores? Well what do nearly all PC owners have - 2-4 cores. Again this is not complex stuff. Pretty obviously as cpu's get more cores they will need to better optimise for more cores.

 

[SPBHM]

I don't see what they would gain, I think it's understandable that they would have more optimization problems with newer/more uncommon configurations.

I find really strange that people would be so keen to think this as intentional

Ryzen is a good opportunity for Nvidia to sell even more GPUs, for people building new PCs, given that AMD doesn't really compete for the $250+ VGA market right now.

 

[LTC8K6]

Nvidia is simultaneously greedy, savvy, and stupid.

 

[Dygaza]

They have absolutely no reason to sabotage Ryzen's paradade for purpose. AMD's cpu department ain't their direct competitior, and Ryzen sells very well without their optimized drivers. If they can't get their drivers working well with Ryzen, it will only mean more Vega sells in the future. No, nvidia's best interest is to fix their drivers asap as they want as many Ryzen platforms paired with their gpu.

 

[LTC8K6]

Both poll options make NV look bad, imo.

 

[beginner99]

Their driver does poorly on Intel CPU's with more than 4 cores as well. It's a general issue, and one that's a little embarrassing. Since nVidia has supposedly always had better drivers than AMD.

Exactly. While I pretty much despise NV and their price hitching, I highly doubt it was intentional. Especially in dx12 their uArch just sucks that's why it stops scaling beyond 4 cores becasue there is a software /Driver (eg CPU) bottleneck.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

The thing is they also suck on intel 6 or greater cores CPU's. Which is extra bad because Nvidia always tried to be the company with the best flagship GPU's, and now they are crippled when paired with a flagship CPU(because nowadays a 4 core is just not a top tier CPU, that would be ryzen of intel HEDT). Chances are good if you are springing for a titan or Ti card you are likely going to pair it with a intel HEDT or Ryzen CPU.

So i guess what Nvidia is trying to accomplish here is cornering the mid range market and giving up the high end to AMD when vega launches. At least thats what it looks like to me as Nvidia has done exactly nothing to improve their performance with high end CPU's and they have had plenty of time.

I don't think there is anything they can do. They need a new architecture that properly supports future apis.

Edit: Well, they could stop sabotaging pc ports. That would help a lot.

Both poll options make NV look bad, imo.

That's how corporations usually work. High ethical and moral standards don't look good on quarterly statements.

 

[guachi]

This wouldn't be the first time that NVidia cards weren't cards that would last a long time. Use it for a year. Discard. Buy another NVidia card.

And there are certainly enough NVidia customers to keep doing this on a yearly or twice yearly basis.

 

[Topweasel]

Not on purpose but I have seen this company time and time again hurry up a beta driver for things like this. The fact that its is still dragging on I think is two fold. A.) it probably cuts into the optimizations they did for pure performance with the 4c8t i7 line. B.) Even though the CPU's are in a market they don't compete the probably don't feel compelled to work that hard to get AMD, as competitor in GPU's, hardware to run faster.

Nvidia did not and I repeat did not sabotage AMD performance on purpose.

 

[Kenmitch]

Not sure so didnt vote.

Reading others comments it looks like nvidia just doesn't have the technical expertise to fix the issue.

Too me at least it would seem somewhat silly to let the issue ride as is. Nothing to gain in the end for them for anybody building Ryzen rigs. Once Vega drops anybody on the fence will see reviews and base gpu purchase decisions on performance at that time.

 

[HurleyBird]

Somewhere in the middle, but closer to the second option. I'd be surprised if we didn't see a massively improved driver irt Ryzen performance in the next six months. If for whatever reason the lack of optimisation is intentional though, a few high profile GPU reviews using a Ryzen test bench will light a fire under their behind.

 

[Despoiler]

I think a third option is viable because Intel 6/8 cores have similar issues. We are probably seeing a limitation of Nvidia's driver strategy. It's almost like their driver is still built with DX11 thinking. Heck maybe DX11 and 12 are going through the the same driver multithreading frontend where DX12 is being choked because their driver multithread implementation cannot keep up with the input pressure of the API. It would require a major shift in how they've been doing things although I'm not sure how building a lightweight driver for DX12 would be more challenging than their DX11 implementation. .

 

[Madpacket]

Given Nvidia's recent track record I voted for the first option. Nvidia knows mainstream gamers don't really buy HEDT systems so the performance issues of 6+ Intel cores wouldn't apply to a wide audience, but with Ryzen bringing HEDT like performance to the mainstream, it's not a stretch to think they didn't optimize their drivers for 6+ cores. The real problem is that most reviewers ignored using the Fury or 480 when comparing CPUs on launch. Now that we know AMD optimizes better for 6+ cores for both Intel and AMD, Anandtech's latest Ryzen 6 review is a good response to this by including multiple cards. Hopefully this trend continues.

 

[Mopetar]

Seems unlikely that NVidia would do it intentionally. More likely a confluence of not having early access to Ryzen, their drivers not doing well with more cores in general, and the problem being very difficult to actually solve.

Given that Ryzen represents a significant price advantage over Intel for 8C chips, a lot of gamers will build new Ryzen rigs and NVidia GPUs run poorly on Ryzen, that's pretty much a lost sale no matter what. It's a potentially lucrative sale at that, as some of those customers will use money saved on the CPU side to splurge for a better GPU. NVidia doesn't have any financial interest in having poor Ryzen performance.

 

[Spjut]

I have a hard time believing Nvidia wouldn't have seen this issue already when testing Intel's HEDT for years. But drivers are complex and I'd guess that Nvidia's driver team just wasn't compelled to fix it for as long as reviewers didn't highlight the issue.
I just hope Nvidia will have this fixed in a few months and that it'll benefit all 6+ core systems.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you are a business, how much effort do you put into supporting the 1% of CPUs selling at $500+?

Look at the value in solid, stable performance with 4 cores and 4-8 threads.

Look at the value in also adding code to optimize for 6-32 cores and 12+ threads.

Pick one to do first.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

 

[Topweasel]

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This.

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

10 votes vs 10 votes
50/50 split huh.
Well, i'll fix that. There, it feels amazing to be the tie breaker. Hehe

 

[JimmiG]

Neither AMD nor Nvidia have anything to gain from GeForce cards performing poorly with Ryzen. There's no foul play here.

-AMD still prefer if you pair your GeForce with a Ryzen rather than an Intel CPU.
-Nvidia will gladly sell you a GTX 10x0 for your new Ryzen build, they're not going to deliberately sabotage performance and steer you away from GeForce just because AMD also happen to make GPUs.

As usual with Ryzen, things tend to get very emotional and overblown. A few games, mostly DX9, seem to not perform optimally with Nvidia cards at the moment. Doesn't mean there's a big controversy or something is "broken" and needs "fixing". It just means Nvidia, like everyone else, will have to profile and optimize for this brand new architecture. I'd expect these few performance anomalies to get fixed and general performance to improve in the next few driver updates.