IS NVIDIA RUINING YOUR PERFORMANCE?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,296 words · ~6 min read
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it feels like every driver update we get
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from NVIDIA prompts a huge spike in
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forum posts and angry tweets saying NVIDIA ruined my FPS in
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game x with driver yyyy.
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it and we're gonna tell you after these messages
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browse privately and securely with tunnelbear the simple vpn app start your
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now before we really get into this i want to clarify that i've been a long
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time skeptic when it comes to NVIDIA and AMD conspiracy theories
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they are almost always half baked fanboy
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purchase decision reinforcing rants and frankly they make my brain hurt
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seriously Jake tried a lot of different search terms all the way from NVIDIA
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driver hertz performance to NVIDIA broken how please
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and not even one post contained concrete
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evidence of a legitimate decrease in performance over time i mean don't get
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me wrong there were a lot of posts about the 375.86
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drivers memory clock issue but no one has gathered sufficient or
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really any evidence showing that NVIDIA has purposely harmed performance of
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older cards to force their users to upgrade through a driver update so
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i decided to painstakingly
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assign Jake the task of testing it ourselves
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first we needed to pick some games we wanted a mix of ones that use only
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standard features of the directx API and at least one example that uses NVIDIA's
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proprietary gameworks then to ensure we weren't missing out on
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a particular architecture that got kneecapped because it was like too good
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compared to the new thing they needed to sell we grabbed a flagship from every
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generation from gtx 680 all the way to
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1080 ti with games and cards selected the next challenge was drivers we can't
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test all of them so we eventually settled on the drivers one release after
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the launch of each card that we used and
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the most recent one available at this time so the idea then was that this
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would show us a clear progression over
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time is NVIDIA improving ignoring or
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outright harming the performance of older cards once the new generation
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comes out so driver by driver
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card by card Jake ran almost 200 rounds
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of benchmarks collecting three metric ass tons of data then he sat down to
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organize it into some charts and the results are astonishingly boring the
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most recent release seems to be a bit of a turret across the board so there's
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that but in general not only did performance not decrease there were
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small but noticeable increases over time in almost every case
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due to the minuscule nature of these improvements
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it's hard to see where they actually start and end so we're not much closer
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to a clear picture of NVIDIA's internal policy with respect to product software
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support but it does at least tell us that NVIDIA has never rolled out a
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sandbag edition driver which doesn't mean they've never rolled
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out a bad driver 375.86 hurt performance and sli issues
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seem to come and go like shadow from final fantasy 6.
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so what is going on then where are
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people getting these ideas we think the perception mostly stems
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from this when a new game launches
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older gpus don't get the full
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optimization treatment the way that the current ones would
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that means that you might run into situations where older cards with more
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raw power might be beat by newer ones
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with less tech spot showcased this in their articles on project cars and
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battlefield 1 performance which are linked down in the video description
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where you can see a gtx 970
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outperforming a 780 ti
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and there's another major factor the tech
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not all graphic solutions are the same the goal with every new generation is to
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tailor it for the features of the game engines that are in wide use or are
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right on the horizon examples would be NVIDIA specific
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features like hair works or general rendering techniques like hbao
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plus ambient occlusion older silicon doesn't handle either of these things as
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well because they either didn't exist
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when it was being designed or NVIDIA guessed it wouldn't be widely
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implemented the work of designing a GPU
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starts years before you'll be able to buy one
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i mean if you were in the pc scene a few years back you might remember this
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happening with tessellation NVIDIA cards were and still seem to be much faster at
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rendering tessellated meshes to such a
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degree that AMD had to add AMD optimized
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tessellation to their drivers basically removing a bunch of it and when crytek
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controversially put an overkill amount of tessellation in crisis too
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it completely tanked the ability of similarly performing AMD cards compared
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to their NVIDIA counterparts so in this case your older hardware
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literally wasn't made for the questionable decisions of game devs
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in newer games so in conclusion then from our testing
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NVIDIA does not appear to be slowing down older cards to encourage upgrades
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the better performance from newer cards probably has more to do with their
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engineers not just sitting on ass all day i mean look at it from their
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perspective if they don't optimize this from generation to generation jensen
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will yell at them what does seem like it's happening is
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that newer game features aren't getting as much optimization for older cards
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but i also think it's a little unreasonable to get too mad at NVIDIA
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for this they support cards as far back as the 8000 series on Windows 10 and
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while they might not perform clock for clock the same as they used to they
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simply weren't built for modern rendering technologies so if you want
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bleeding edge performance you need to be on the bleeding edge in terms of
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hardware whether or not that's worth bleeding your wallet dry
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that one's up to you you know what the funny thing about
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so thanks for watching guys let us know if there are any other brands or
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conspiracy theories like this that you'd like us to investigate if this video
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sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to
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you should totally join 384.76 wait they make my brain hurt
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there were small but no
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i always hate that after these messages these messages
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and now i am these messages damn