Kepler performance

[APU_Fusion]

Originally Posted by xeizo

Seems to be big problems in the US, here in Sweden it looks like anyone that really cares already is running a GTX680, GTX690 or now GTX670. For myself, I have been running my GTX680 for weeks now, I bought it right over disk. Great chip, I'm very satisfied

Virtually no talk about the HD7970 on Swedish forums now, Nvidia is all there is, and that is not because the chip itself is superior in any way. It's because Nvidias drivers are superior in every way. I would choose Nvidia even if it were slower ....

(I'm no stranger to ATI hardware as I currently run a HD6870, a HD5670 and a HD4850 in different rigs, it's just that my Nvidia boxes runs better and more reliably - because of drivers!)

Ahh yes the Nvidia Drivers are the l33t argument again. Anytime AMD has a good product out come the familiar 2002 arguments especially with the single GPU cards. Please back up your "subjective" analysis with facts, not "I owned both cards and Nvidia drivers are superior." I have never had a single problem with AMD video drivers (or Nvidia for that matter) so that means AMD drivers are every bit as good as Nvidia's right? Personal anecdotes don't really mean anything.

Now, will come the AMD fans talking about how Nvidia drivers have actually killed video cards.

[xeizo]

It's not that Nvidia drivers are free of bugs or something. There is quite a few of them, but they are of a different dignity than AMD-bugs.
More like slightly annoying rather than a difficulty to play certain games, and yes forums are full of posts from struggling AMD users. Most often concerning the latest gen cards, as AMD too eventually rules out the most critical bugs, but way slower than Nvidia. ***Flamebait removed***

(for myself just a few; ie HD6870: AA-bug in Skyrim WELL-known, spontaneous restarts in WoW below 12.4 release-driver, WELL-known etc etc Nvida - nothing. And of course, the ever annoying habit of running driver cleaner to be able to fully install a new AMD-driver, Nvida - just install, won't even have to reboot)

[Guild]

680 is stuttering unplayably in all games with Vsync on and there are quite a few reports of BSODing as well.

PS: Looks like it will be fixed after June: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GeF...l#xtor=RSS-181.

[xeizo]

Originally Posted by Guild

680 is stuttering unplayably in all games with Vsync on and there are quite a few reports of BSODing as well.

It may be so, but I have yet to see stuttering as well as BSOD, it's boring stable :P

[distinctively]

I thought this was a Kepler thread, not a drivers thread. I'd love it if someone would start a new drivers thread though. I've got some complaints.

it seems that rumours are pointing to a mobile GTX 680 that is GK104 based buy still slower than the mobile 7970. I think I read it at fudzilla.

[xeizo]

Originally Posted by distinctively

I thought this was a Kepler thread, not a drivers thread. I'd love it if someone would start a new drivers thread though. I've got some complaints.

it seems that rumours are pointing to a mobile GTX 680 that is GK104 based buy still slower than the mobile 7970. I think I read it at fudzilla.

It's a "Kepler performance"-thread and ultimately any gpu is worthless without the software backing it up ...
I don't think we'll see a full GK104 in a laptop, it's rather GK107-territory, but they could call it anything as they usually do with laptop-gpus and one never knows ...

[vain]

Originally Posted by xeizo

Start the flamefest!

Hello. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.

Originally Posted by Guild

680 is stuttering unplayably in all games with Vsync on and there are quite a few reports of BSODing as well.

PS: Looks like a scheduled attempt for it to be fixed after June: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GeF...l#xtor=RSS-181.

Fixed, no pun intended.

Who knows what testing will bring.

[Grandma Guillotine]

Please do not allow this thread turn into a drivers flamewar. Many threads have been closed for this reason. I would suggest avoiding the topic entirely unless specific performance related information is offered.

[sdlvx]

Originally Posted by raghu78

I think you are underestimating enthusiasts. They know their trade. They know the HD 7970 has clock headroom , scalability and is available in volume from AMD partners. Only the naive lot or pure Nvidia fanbois are going to wait for the GTX 600 series if its not in stock. The rest know that a HD 7970 at 1250 Mhz will be the clear winner when compared across a wide range of games and aren't going to care a damn for Nvidia. There are people who prefer the HD 7900 cards' memory bandwidth and large framebuffer which helps them shine in demanding games at high resolutions like 1600p and multi monitor with max AA.



You are underestimating business pragmatism. AMD Tahiti was the first 28nm chip for AMD. They set conservative clocks. They learnt a lot from Tahiti and improved with that on Pitcairn and Cape Verde. Read this statement from Dave Baumann of AMD.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...postcount=3100

AMD now is going to up the clocks as they have 2 quarters of 28nm ramp learning and the 28nm process has improved.

http://www.techpowerup.com/165559/AM...z-Edition.html

message - "better yields, lower voltage required, chips easily hitting 1250 Mhz".

I expect AMD to have have partners showcasing at Computex the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition. My guess is they will clock HD 7970 at 1050 Mhz. AMD will allow its partners to come up with their HD 7970 Ghz Edition OC cards at speeds upto 1200 Mhz. Also I expect AMD to up clocks on HD 7950 to 900 Mhz and HD 7950 OC editions to 1 Ghz. And all of this will be in real volume. No tricks. Just good old engineering. And you can bet they will make noise about the cards

I used to think like you until I started hanging around places like [H] and OCN, and most of those people are complete idiots who would buy NV and Intel if both cost 3 times as much as AMD and gave a tenth of the performance. A lot of them really don't grasp any technical issues at all. I gave up on the enthusiasts on [H] after they sat around speculating that GTX 670 was faster because it was a revision of GK104, even though there are pictures everywhere of GPUz showing they are both A2 silicone.

Look at the situation. We have two cards that perform at about the same at the same clock speeds. One was released at conservative clocks and the other at aggressive clocks. The aggressive card won all the benchmarks, so it's the must have card.

A 7970 at 1.2ghz will be extremely close and trade a ton of blows with a GTX 680 at 1.2ghz. Both cards are more than capable of hitting those speeds. Yet, everyone jumps for the GTX 680. Why? It makes no sense. 7970 is cheaper, has 50% more VRAM, 50% more bus width, 37.5% more memory bandwidth (at stock), 50% more memory bandwidth at the same memory clocks, and GPGPU. You get all of that for less money, yet everyone wants a GTX 680. If you want to see marketing fail, this is it right here. The most intelligent and future proof thing you could do right now is buy a 7970 and overclock it, yet forums are full of GTX 680s.

If enthusiasts cared more about technical details and less about pretty graphs and reviews and marketing, no one would give a shit about GTX 680. Clock for clock they are about the same and they're both capable of hitting the same clocks, yet one has significantly more memory and memory bandwidth.

It baffles me. People will say the GTX 680 is great, but sometimes it's bandwidth constrained. So you bought a card that's already memory constrained with current games instead of the card with 50% more bandwidth so you could have 10% better performance at stock clocks and 0% faster at the same clocks. If I'm spending $499 on a video card, it better not already have bottlenecks in the card on the day I buy it.

The fact that people take a card that's marginally faster, more expensive, and is designed to become obsolete much sooner than the competition should be proof that the majority of "enthusiasts" don't understand anything about what they're buying and instead rely in graphs and someone smarter than them to tell them something is good at the end of a review. The fact that review sites are promoting a product with half the memory performance and half the VRAM and no GPGPU over a product that wins by a margin amount at stock clocks is ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of enthusiasts who care about the details of architectures and are interested in how things work. That group of people don't make up the majority of enthusiasts and to target them would leave you with a minority marketshare (which isn't surprising given AMD's market share).

[distinctively]

Originally Posted by sdlvx

I used to think like you until I started hanging around places like [H] and OCN, and most of those people are complete idiots who would buy NV and Intel if both cost 3 times as much as AMD and gave a tenth of the performance. A lot of them really don't grasp any technical issues at all. I gave up on the enthusiasts on [H] after they sat around speculating that GTX 670 was faster because it was a revision of GK104, even though there are pictures everywhere of GPUz showing they are both A2 silicone.

Look at the situation. We have two cards that perform at about the same at the same clock speeds. One was released at conservative clocks and the other at aggressive clocks. The aggressive card won all the benchmarks, so it's the must have card.

A 7970 at 1.2ghz will be extremely close and trade a ton of blows with a GTX 680 at 1.2ghz. Both cards are more than capable of hitting those speeds. Yet, everyone jumps for the GTX 680. Why? It makes no sense. 7970 is cheaper, has 50% more VRAM, 50% more bus width, 37.5% more memory bandwidth (at stock), 50% more memory bandwidth at the same memory clocks, and GPGPU. You get all of that for less money, yet everyone wants a GTX 680. If you want to see marketing fail, this is it right here. The most intelligent and future proof thing you could do right now is buy a 7970 and overclock it, yet forums are full of GTX 680s.

If enthusiasts cared more about technical details and less about pretty graphs and reviews and marketing, no one would give a shit about GTX 680. Clock for clock they are about the same and they're both capable of hitting the same clocks, yet one has significantly more memory and memory bandwidth.

It baffles me. People will say the GTX 680 is great, but sometimes it's bandwidth constrained. So you bought a card that's already memory constrained with current games instead of the card with 50% more bandwidth so you could have 10% better performance at stock clocks and 0% faster at the same clocks. If I'm spending $499 on a video card, it better not already have bottlenecks in the card on the day I buy it.

The fact that people take a card that's marginally faster, more expensive, and is designed to become obsolete much sooner than the competition should be proof that the majority of "enthusiasts" don't understand anything about what they're buying and instead rely in graphs and someone smarter than them to tell them something is good at the end of a review. The fact that review sites are promoting a product with half the memory performance and half the VRAM and no GPGPU over a product that wins by a margin amount at stock clocks is ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of enthusiasts who care about the details of architectures and are interested in how things work. That group of people don't make up the majority of enthusiasts and to target them would leave you with a minority marketshare (which isn't surprising given AMD's market share).

You've elaborated quite well on how well marketing can make all the difference. When in doubt, just look at all the Apple buyers. The 680 has better power consumption than the 7970. After that, I can't find a compelling reason to desire it over the 7970. They are both close but the 7970 seems to have the edge most of the time. I'm pretty sure that the Kepler series will have reduced the horrifying hardware failures that plagued Fermi but I still don't have that much faith in not getting burned again. Then we have the never ending TDR problems that plague the Nvidia cards. Unfortunately, there are multitudes of threads out there related to Kepler continuing the tradition of a black screen awaiting a hardware reset. Have those multi monitor problems been fixed yet? That should be important for such high end cards but many reviews initially dodged those setups since they barely worked.