'Need For Speed' PC Performance Review

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I'm not sure the lack of memory size matters as much as the memory bandwidth and other considerations, as my Titan Blacks (6GB onboard) still get beaten pretty badly by 4GB boards at 4K. If the game was saturating the VRAM and having to go over the PCI-E bus to get some system memory, you can bet the minimum framerates would be at the very least lower than the Titan Blacks for some of the 4GB cards, like the 980 or the Furys.
 
This line: "When a 10-year-old game is more realistic, that's not something to be proud of".

There are only 2 games in the entirety of the NFS franchise that wanted to be "realistic" or "simulation", and that is Shift. Even they were arcade as hell, no matter how you sliced it.

Anyone playing a NFS game does not look for "realism" in it. They look for fun and fast cars; some fun cop chases and great tuning.

Sorry about the rant, but I think the game does not deserve that line, because it has never painted itself as a Gran Turismo wannabe. You have great games that play to realism and they do it pretty darn well. NFS is just not one of them.

In any case, nice tech review. I would have liked some screenshots on how it looks in the different settings though.

Cheers!
 
I find it so funny how AMD cards age much better than Nvidia cards.

Take the 780Ti for example, it was totally superior even to 290X at launch .. now it just struggles to compeat with 380x that is practically a refreshed 280x ...
 


The 290x at launch is a bad example of a GPU to look at for comparison. At launch the 290 series had heat issues and throttled all the time, they couldn't even run at maximum speed all the time which gave nVidia an advantage.

The 900 series is more the 200/300 series competition, even the 970 at launch was close to the 780Ti and with time and driver improvements the 970 is still with or better than the 780Ti.

And the 380X is a bit more than a refresh of the 280X/7970. It has a 256bit buss vs the 384bit memory buss, faster VRAM, newer iteration of GCN and power enhancements.
 


Not nearly as funny as the suckers who spent $650 on an R9 Fury X thinking they had a 980Ti beater.

 


Bad translation. The tuning options in NFS:UG2 were better (more realistic) but this doesn't mean that NFS is a realistic racing game. It's simple Arcade but the influence of different options was in UG2 simply better balanced.

I wrote a few trainers and savegame tools for NFS:UG2 and I also extracted a lot of car models to understand the system of this different values. And I've played with the car settings in the files and had finally a lot of fun. :)

This was 6 years ago 😀
http://gamebanana.com/tools/5380


 


Not nearly as funny as the suckers who spent $650 on an R9 Fury X thinking they had a 980Ti beater.
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The cards are just fine, the games running Gameworks are the main problem...and i`m willing to bet that the 980ti will end up like the 780Ti in time ... there`s a thing called planned obsolescence that Nvidia seem to have got the taste of it lately.
 
"The 290x at launch is a bad example of a GPU to look at for comparison. At launch the 290 series had heat issues and throttled all the time, they couldn't even run at maximum speed all the time which gave nVidia an advantage."

Agreed. I was one of those dumb early adopters---I got a Sapphire 290x shortly after they were available at Newegg, and holy hell--that card got loud if you even looked at it odd.

Eventually I couldnt take it anymore and I bought 2 8GB Sapphire 290x Toxics later on to replace it.
 
The cards are just fine, the games running Gameworks are the main problem...and i`m willing to bet that the 980ti will end up like the 780Ti in time ... there`s a thing called planned obsolescence that Nvidia seem to have got the taste of it lately.
Click to expand...

Its pretty much always seemed that way. AMD usually seems to have the better hardware on paper, but it takes them forever to get the drivers optimized to exploit the advantage over their Nvidia competitors. Nvidia's strength pretty much always lies in their drivers.

Its hard to say one approach is better than the other absolutely---often, by the time AMD's drivers have gotten to the level where they have eclipsed the inferior Nvidia hardware they were competing with, the 'next big thing' is either there or coming shortly. Whereas, like you said, you get the standard "planned obsolescence" on the Nvidia side.
 


Uhm, no they are not. They run 10% slower than a reference 980Ti and a factory overclocked 980Ti like Gigabyte's Windforce leaves it in the dust...and uses less power to do it. Gameworks has nothing to do with it. Just a little memory refresher:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review/13
 


Ah, thanks for clearing it up. Now I fully get what you mean. I haven't played the new NFS yet and I don't think I will either (I hate Origin and EA, sorry!), so I won't be able to agree or disagree with you, but I do understand what you mean. NFS:U2 had, if I remember the slogan/promo correctly, 2 billion combinations in mods (or tuning parts) for the car chassis, plus what you could use for the engine.

And nice that you got to mod the game. I am more of a "vanilla experience" type of person, so I only use mods when they improve little things in games (currently American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2; previously WoW) that don't affect gameplay.

Cheers!
 
This savegame mods were very interesting. I worked in the past many years as lead programmer in the German industry and this hacking/cracking of files was a kind of mental relaxation. I remember the NFS:Most Wanted profiles. They used the ZLIB compression with a malformed header and a special checksum to prevent the savegames before modification. And around a lot of binary waste to kidding ppl like me. 5 hours of work, not more. We were also specialized in reverse engineering 😀
 
I tried Crossfire and SLI - no chance to get an usable improvement. No really working profiles yet.
Multi-GPU is dead. Newer block busters mostly doesn't support it and the drivers are another story.
This was the reason why I also passed the R9 295X2 and Titan Z.

May be the situation has been changed now (the original review is from the launch date). I finished NFS few weeks ago and played it in 21:9. It's the same torture like Ultra-HD 😀

11228123_1194258867275442_747237277198097464_o.jpg
Try this: win Eddies Challenge with an old Mustang 😛

 
The cards are just fine, the games running Gameworks are the main problem...and i`m willing to bet that the 980ti will end up like the 780Ti in time ... there`s a thing called planned obsolescence that Nvidia seem to have got the taste of it lately.
Click to expand...

Its pretty much always seemed that way. AMD usually seems to have the better hardware on paper, but it takes them forever to get the drivers optimized to exploit the advantage over their Nvidia competitors. Nvidia's strength pretty much always lies in their drivers.

Its hard to say one approach is better than the other absolutely---often, by the time AMD's drivers have gotten to the level where they have eclipsed the inferior Nvidia hardware they were competing with, the 'next big thing' is either there or coming shortly. Whereas, like you said, you get the standard "planned obsolescence" on the Nvidia side.
Click to expand...
There are lots of people who value their investment, having a card that does 10% slower, than the competition, at startand in the end does 10% better is very good for people not willing to change their cards with each new series.
Many people jump a series or two.

My GTX 465 kept me going till my GTX 760 but got quickly replaced by the 290 Vapor-x. Never had any issues with any of them, but i do hate (like most of the people) Nvidia`s Gameworks crap that blocks AMD from optimizing the drivers ... it takes time to fix stuff blindly ... and like most of the Youtube reviews pointed out Gameworks only works fine on GTX 980Ti.. the rest of the cards are usually to slow to have all those options on and have a decent frame rate anyway .. but gimping the competition is better than anything.

Nvidia trough Gameworks hurts badly the competition in GPU department and this is not good for any of us.. the users...
 


Not nearly as funny as the suckers who spent $650 on an R9 Fury X thinking they had a 980Ti beater.
Click to expand...

I don't think people did think that, and ironicly later on with driver updates (you cray AMD) Fury cards performed just as well at lower resolutions and a fair margin better at 4K. But in certain games AMD does seam to struggle where Nvidia does well in all. I'm not getting into the whole game works debate, that fixes nothing when I can't personally help other than with my $$ mula cash money denero.

Long->Short; Nvidia does well in all games, AMD either does better or struggles to keep up :/
 
I will use this NFS as benchmark app... but as a racing game... it sucks... The Crew (specially after the engine upgrade) is a much better arcade racing title than this POS.
 
There are lots of people who value their investment, having a card that does 10% slower, than the competition, at startand in the end does 10% better is very good for people not willing to change their cards with each new series.
Many people jump a series or two.

My GTX 465 kept me going till my GTX 760 but got quickly replaced by the 290 Vapor-x. Never had any issues with any of them, but i do hate (like most of the people) Nvidia`s Gameworks crap that blocks AMD from optimizing the drivers ... it takes time to fix stuff blindly ... and like most of the Youtube reviews pointed out Gameworks only works fine on GTX 980Ti.. the rest of the cards are usually to slow to have all those options on and have a decent frame rate anyway .. but gimping the competition is better than anything.

Nvidia trough Gameworks hurts badly the competition in GPU department and this is not good for any of us.. the users...
Click to expand...

Dont get me wrong, it makes me quite annoyed that I spent $2k on titan blacks only to find out the new Gameworks stuff stresses the parts of my cards not considered strong (heavy tessellation is not a strength of the 7xx series, titan black is basically 780ti with 6GB of ram). That bugs me quite a bit about Nvidia's recent practices with Gameworks.

Still, I wish AMD would come anywheres near Nvidia with multi-gpu support, and that they dont irks me even more than the above situation. Maybe things are changing; they have been quite active with driver releases lately, which is unusual.
 


Gameworks is just a feature set and can normally be turned off. It is much like Tesselation. At first only AMD supported it and when nVidia implemented theirs, AMD was faster but as time went by nVidia got better. But it can be turned off to improve performance or work on a GPU that did not support it.

I have no issue with Gameworks nor would I have an issue with anything AMD did. A company has to have something the other does not to stand out. Without that then it is literally just two GPUs and one is 1-3FPS faster.

Lets think of it in terms of DX12. Both AMD and nVidia has support. AMD supports ASYNC via hardware better than AMD but nVidia supports a higher tier of DX12 with certain features AMD does not. It does not mean AMD or nVidia is gimping the other but rather that a developer has options to optimize for and some will benefit nVidia and others will benefit AMD.
 


^^Exactly. Project Cars runs better on Nvidia cards than AMD cards and AMD users were pitching fits of some conspiracy because there are Nvidia billboards in the racing sim. On the flip side with an example of DiRT Rally, some Nvidia users were complaining that that game ran better on AMD cards and that AMD billboards are in the game. I have both racing sims and have had them since their early release development stages.

Slightly Mad Studios for Project Cars gave both Nvidia and AMD equal access and copies of their early release Beta for driver support and development. I assume Codemasters did the same for Rally. I'm not sure about Rally, but I do know that AMD did not give nearly the same level of feedback to SMS on Project Cars as Nvidia did.

 
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