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Nvidia Has a Driver Overhead Problem, GeForce vs Radeon on Low-End CPUs

Soldato
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21 Jan 2016
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Pretty interesting... feeling glad I decided to plop the 5800X in my rig.

I wonder what the Nvidia driver is doing so differently to have such a significant CPU overhead.
 
Caporegime
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4 Jun 2009
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31,017
Yup noticed this too.

Here's hoping more videos call this out so nvidia can have a look at addressing the issue! As it is nigh on impossible to find a 5600x at MSRP right now...
 
Soldato
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26 May 2014
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Essentially a complete switcharound from DX11, where it's the AMD driver that has a lot more CPU overhead. I suppose it's not that surprising, given how long AMD have been laser-focused on low-level APIs, from Mantle onwards. To the detriment of anything else actually, like their completely broken OpenGL performance on Windows, which they refuse to fix because it's been "replaced" by Vulkan. Nvidia seemed to be rather more dragged kicking and screaming away from older APIs, since they were top dog already. I still remember all the arguments about asynchronous compute from years ago when DX12/Vulkan games first started appearing.
 
Caporegime
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4 Jun 2009
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31,017
Essentially a complete switcharound from DX11, where it's the AMD driver that has a lot more CPU overhead. I suppose it's not that surprising, given how long AMD have been laser-focused on low-level APIs, from Mantle onwards. To the detriment of anything else actually, like their completely broken OpenGL performance on Windows, which they refuse to fix because it's been "replaced" by Vulkan. Nvidia seemed to be rather more dragged kicking and screaming away from older APIs, since they were top dog already. I still remember all the arguments about asynchronous compute from years ago when DX12/Vulkan games first started appearing.

Exactly.

Where are the naysayers about dx 12/vulkan and async compute now that most games are using these :p

It was inevitable that these low level apis would take of and become the go to way back when they were first released.

AMD made the right choice to focus on the future rather than old tech.
 
Soldato
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Officially least sunny location -Ronskistats
Essentially a complete switcharound from DX11, where it's the AMD driver that has a lot more CPU overhead. I suppose it's not that surprising, given how long AMD have been laser-focused on low-level APIs, from Mantle onwards. To the detriment of anything else actually, like their completely broken OpenGL performance on Windows, which they refuse to fix because it's been "replaced" by Vulkan. Nvidia seemed to be rather more dragged kicking and screaming away from older APIs, since they were top dog already. I still remember all the arguments about asynchronous compute from years ago when DX12/Vulkan games first started appearing.

Agree. Predominantly owning AMD cards for past ten years you notice these things more than people who stick with nvidia.
 
Man of Honour
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Apologies, haven't got time to watch the video, but where the CPU loading is higher, is that simply completed by one of the spare cores, that most of us now have? In which case, does it matter?
 
Soldato
Joined
1 Jun 2013
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Wasn't there some reports a few years back about Nvidia doing significant stuff in their driver to feed their GPU that AMD was doing in GPU hardware? This would explain why AMD hardware does better when CPU limited, because it doesn't suffer the slowdowns of processing being done on a bottlenecked CPU like Nvidia does.
 
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Soldato
Joined
21 Jan 2016
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Apologies, haven't got time to watch the video, but where the CPU loading is higher, is that simply completed by one of the spare cores, that most of us now have? In which case, does it matter?

Only went up to a 5600X so didn't look at 8 cores or above.

Even on the 5600X there were some interesting results though.
 
Caporegime
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Nvidia drivers work ok but they are in desperate need of a overhaul, as does the Windows XP control panel.


Yeah the control panel works, but it's so dated looking and sluggish compared to what amd have. I can't even recall when nvidia brought that control panel in, must be well over 10 years at this point.
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Aug 2014
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5,961
Essentially a complete switcharound from DX11, where it's the AMD driver that has a lot more CPU overhead. I suppose it's not that surprising, given how long AMD have been laser-focused on low-level APIs, from Mantle onwards. To the detriment of anything else actually, like their completely broken OpenGL performance on Windows, which they refuse to fix because it's been "replaced" by Vulkan. Nvidia seemed to be rather more dragged kicking and screaming away from older APIs, since they were top dog already. I still remember all the arguments about asynchronous compute from years ago when DX12/Vulkan games first started appearing.
True, but Nvidia are much bigger than AMD with a lot more cash and an army of software developers so they have no excuse. I wonder whether this is part of the reason why Assassin's Creed Valhalla performs so much better on AMD as both my Nvidia cards never go above 95% GPU usage in that game whereas AMD are pegged at 99% and it's a DX12 game, all the YouTube videos I've seen show this GPU utilisation problem.

I am very impressed with my 3080's frametime stability and smoothness in games though, it's the best card I've owned in that regard.
 
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Soldato
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30 Aug 2014
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It might also be a problem that the Ampere architecture is a very wide Vega-like architecture with many compute units and it's tough to keep them all occupied with work.

However, that wouldn't explain the GPU utilisation problem in Valhalla because that happens on both my 1080 and my 3080.
 
Associate
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Yeah the control panel works, but it's so dated looking and sluggish compared to what amd have. I can't even recall when nvidia brought that control panel in, must be well over 10 years at this point.

It's ridiculous, it takes about 6 secs to open the nvidia control panel and that's on a 5950x and gen 4 nvme SSD (WD SN850). It's in desperate need of scrapping.
 
Associate
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It might also be a problem that the Ampere architecture is a very wide Vega-like architecture with many compute units and it's tough to keep them all occupied with work.

However, that wouldn't explain the GPU utilisation problem in Valhalla because that happens on both my 1080 and my 3080.

Even Turing has the same overhead issue unfortunately so its not isolated to Ampere, nvidia has some explaining to do. Really hope Gamers Nexus gets in on this :D
 
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