'Need For Speed' PC Performance Review

[SirGCal]

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.

Wait... What??? See the bold... You mean Nvidia supports GSync via hardware better then AMD supports FSync? Which would be another discussion as both are good viable options but... You said AMD vs AMD and that lost me. Or are you talking about something else all together and then which one is which?

 

[10tacle]

Wait... What??? See the bold... You mean Nvidia supports GSync via hardware better then AMD supports FSync?

G-sync and Free-sync are specific monitor technologies (chips in the monitor). Asynchronous tech is API software for video cards (like Nvidia's Gameworks or AMD's Vulkan). So far, AMD supports A-Sync better than Nvidia, we all know that. He just made a typo.

What we do not know is how the Pascal and Polaris will actually support it when games roll out. The test done last year that revealed Nvidia's apparent weakness in A-sync and DX12 happened to be an AMD-favoring game.

In any event, it is no secret that AMD GPUs have long been stronger performers when it comes to raw computing power than Nvidia GPUs (like for bitcoin mining). When it comes to gaming though which most people buy GPUs for however, that advantage AMD has in raw processing power rapidly disappears.

 

[blppt]

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.

True, but its pretty obvious that by dishing out a set of development libraries that only really work well on your latest and greatest (9xx series) that Nvidia is prodding people to upgrade to get playable framerates with Gameworks enabled. The problem here is that the Titan Blacks are still very good performers in just about every other area EXCEPT the tessellation heavy Gameworks features.

 

[razor512]

The game's performance is unexpectedly low given how it looks.

 

[ohim]

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...

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.

Some features can`t be turned off, and other are stressed out without reason by Nvidia, some guy on youtube explained the hairworks in Withcher 3, When AMD released TressFX they gave access to everybody to the code, Nvidia did bad at start but with access to the code came fast around, and TressFX was quite light on the performance hit compared to Hairworks.

Nvidia doesn`t give access to the code so AMD has to guess what they must do, also Nvidia uses a tesselation of x64 instead of something like x8 that looks just about the same without having the performance hit of the x64 but combine this with the lack of code access by AMD and the frame rate dips even higher .. and most of the time these features only work at good frame rates for the GTX 980ti .. a card like GTX 960 has no chance to use the so called advertised gameworks and a GTX 970 would probably hit the 3.5 GB ram mark or just not have the power do drive all those effects.

I`ve been an Nvidia user since TNT2 till GTX 760 and a happy one.. but i cannot support a company that does this .. i don`t want to see AMD go out of bussiness and then have to buy a 500 $ GTX 950.

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.

Project Cars is the worst possible example to give as a benchmark, they implemented the PhysX code into the core of the game, when you don`t have an Nvidia GPU all the PhysX is put into software mode overwhelming the CPU, this is why AMD GPUs do bad on Project Cars, not because the GPUs are bad but because of Nvidia`s PhysX that it`s embeded into the core of the game.

 

[blppt]

"I`ve been an Nvidia user since TNT2 till GTX 760 and a happy one.. but i cannot support a company that does this .. i don`t want to see AMD go out of bussiness and then have to buy a 500 $ GTX 950."

Not that I would want AMD to go away either, but if they did and Nvidia offered the only real dGPU options on the market, you would reap the benefits of game coders optimizing their games for only one architecture. So, being stuck with a 950 might not be as bad in some situations rather than waiting for months and months of code patching for buggy graphics engines.

And yes, I do really miss the days of the near Glide-monopoly. While it stunk that 3dfx was able to charge lots of money, it was great to load up a Glide game and be nearly assured of solid graphics performance. I'm hoping that DX12 will be somewhat better at being agnostic of what brand of GPU you have running, so we can get closer to that Glide experience, BUT, with competing vendors.

 

[-Fran-]

"I`ve been an Nvidia user since TNT2 till GTX 760 and a happy one.. but i cannot support a company that does this .. i don`t want to see AMD go out of bussiness and then have to buy a 500 $ GTX 950."

Not that I would want AMD to go away either, but if they did and Nvidia offered the only real dGPU options on the market, you would reap the benefits of game coders optimizing their games for only one architecture. So, being stuck with a 950 might not be as bad in some situations rather than waiting for months and months of code patching for buggy graphics engines.

And yes, I do really miss the days of the near Glide-monopoly. While it stunk that 3dfx was able to charge lots of money, it was great to load up a Glide game and be nearly assured of solid graphics performance. I'm hoping that DX12 will be somewhat better at being agnostic of what brand of GPU you have running, so we can get closer to that Glide experience, BUT, with competing vendors.

You have it wrong.

A Monopoly does not have economical incentive to produce new things. That "optimization" you are talking about is because of the young age of nVidia and ATI at the time. That same "let keep the monopoly" made 3DFX almost bankrupt and then bought by nVidia.

Cheers!

 

[jimmysmitty]

"I`ve been an Nvidia user since TNT2 till GTX 760 and a happy one.. but i cannot support a company that does this .. i don`t want to see AMD go out of bussiness and then have to buy a 500 $ GTX 950."

Not that I would want AMD to go away either, but if they did and Nvidia offered the only real dGPU options on the market, you would reap the benefits of game coders optimizing their games for only one architecture. So, being stuck with a 950 might not be as bad in some situations rather than waiting for months and months of code patching for buggy graphics engines.

And yes, I do really miss the days of the near Glide-monopoly. While it stunk that 3dfx was able to charge lots of money, it was great to load up a Glide game and be nearly assured of solid graphics performance. I'm hoping that DX12 will be somewhat better at being agnostic of what brand of GPU you have running, so we can get closer to that Glide experience, BUT, with competing vendors.

You have it wrong.

A Monopoly does not have economical incentive to produce new things. That "optimization" you are talking about is because of the young age of nVidia and ATI at the time. That same "let keep the monopoly" made 3DFX almost bankrupt and then bought by nVidia.

Cheers!

He is also not wrong. The reason why games almost always work well on consoles is because the devs have one set of hardware and software to code for. That was the idea behind APIs such as DirectX but it isn't working obviously.

@ohim,

That is all up to the devs. nVidia is not forcing a dev to use Gameworks or to use all the features or build them into the core of the game. Much like AMD did not force DICE to use Mantle.

 

[-Fran-]

He is also not wrong. The reason why games almost always work well on consoles is because the devs have one set of hardware and software to code for. That was the idea behind APIs such as DirectX but it isn't working obviously.

@ohim,

That is all up to the devs. nVidia is not forcing a dev to use Gameworks or to use all the features or build them into the core of the game. Much like AMD did not force DICE to use Mantle.

But that is another subject completely. Target optimizations are a different beast. In this case, the "console market" is not a monopoly and it never has been. I don't think it will ever be, because it's too lucrative.

In any case, my point still stands: Monopolies do not mean progress. You are a captive audience, so the Stockholm effect applies (sort of speaking). In his own example, 3DFX did not want to add 32bit depth support for games and kept that status quo for a couple of years, until nVidia and ATI added it and then OGL (Open Glide) was created along with DirectX expanding the API greatly. Even when 3DFX opened it, it was not enough.

My bottom line here is that nVidia is pulling a 3DFX again, but AMD doesn't have the strength to combat it. That in the long run will cause stagnation. It's the same idea behind DirectX vs OGL/Vulkan now thanks to Mantle (in part).

Cheers!

 

[10tacle]

Project Cars is the worst possible example to give as a benchmark, they implemented the PhysX code into the core of the game, when you don`t have an Nvidia GPU all the PhysX is put into software mode overwhelming the CPU, this is why AMD GPUs do bad on Project Cars, not because the GPUs are bad but because of Nvidia`s PhysX that it`s embeded into the core of the game.

Wrong. It has nothing to do with "PhysX" on the GPU. If it did, people with a second or third Nvidia card dedicated to PhysX would see the improvement with lower end GPUs. Also the PS4 version of PCars with an AMD APU would be having issues. It was about draw call on the GPU, and AMD GPUs in DX11 are known to have weak spots unlike Nvidia GPUs (that will change with DX12). I have two PCars versions, one on the PC as early development access, and one on the PS4 in retail release. It worked perfectly on the PS4 on the day of release (read: 60FPS smoothness even in rain and heavy traffic and no stuttering). Now why is that?

But besides that, PhysX was coded to work on a CPU in the game, not the GPU, no matter which GPU you have. This has widely been shown and proven. So it's a FUD claim. AMD dropped the ball on the drivers for PCars, but newer Catalyst drivers increased the performance substantially for AMD owners. AMD had the same opportunity that Nvidia did on working with Slightly Mad Studios (as I mentioned). AMD dropped the ball. I was an early access "investor" of PCars and saw it unfold first hand. I'm still waiting to hear from someone to explain to me how AMD updating their drivers and increasing the performance of PCars (finally) means it's a PhysX problem. Well, people still don't believe we landed on the moon either, so there you go.

 

[blppt]

"ou have it wrong.

A Monopoly does not have economical incentive to produce new things. That "optimization" you are talking about is because of the young age of nVidia and ATI at the time. That same "let keep the monopoly" made 3DFX almost bankrupt and then bought by nVidia."

Thats why I said *near*-monopoly.

And if you go back to the peak years of Glide/3dfx, often you couldnt even get 3d acceleration in top tier games unless you were using glide, or S3 & PowerVR proprietary APIs (Metal for S3, I forget what the PVR one was). Unreal is the first one that comes to mind, and when Epic finally got around to coding a D3D driver, it took them years to perfect it.

 

[blppt]

Also, its worthy of note that 3dfx failed because the voodoo3 series was underwhelming compared to Nvidia's offerings at the time, in D3D and OGL

. And they took wayyyy too long to get Voodoo5 out the door. At that point, Nvidia had ushered in the Hardware T&L generation, and 3dfx was left pinning their hopes of competing with Geforce with the monstrous niche product known as V5 6000.
Since they also hadnt developed glide as quickly as they should, the "32bit textures and rendering" features (one of the hot buzzwords of the time) werent incorporated into Glide until most developers had moved to OGL or D3D.

Kinda makes sense though---Voodoo3's architecture would not have gained any benefit from Glide getting 32bit rendering---FWIR, it was limited to 16bit 3d rendering internally anyways. So why waste money adding features to Glide that couldnt get used until the next gen of cards (V4/5).

 

[-Fran-]

Even if you want to call it a "near Monopoly", it is not healthy nor good for people. Just add a "near" before "not wanting to develop new tech" and just add "price gouging" to the mix. Monopolies and "near Monopolies" are meant, by definition, to drive profit margins to their maximum level controlling supply. That in turn makes it the highest possible price of any good or service a Company can charge to a customer.

So no; no matter how you want to spin it, Monopolies or "near Monopolies" *DO NOT* play well for consumers. What you're thinking is like saying: "yeah I wanna get shot, but not to the head! Just get one kidney blown". You will get a fully controlled market by 1 engaging actor with the rest just getting the table scraps and the consumers getting, luckily, small improvements. Another good way of viewing it is "good King, bad King".

Cheers!

 

[iPanda]

Those cut scenes were killing me. Returned the game (console). Wish you could completely disable the cut scenes and phone calls. I'd rather just look at the map as a grind fest than deal with those parts of the game. Looked great though.

 

[ohim]

Project Cars is the worst possible example to give as a benchmark, they implemented the PhysX code into the core of the game, when you don`t have an Nvidia GPU all the PhysX is put into software mode overwhelming the CPU, this is why AMD GPUs do bad on Project Cars, not because the GPUs are bad but because of Nvidia`s PhysX that it`s embeded into the core of the game.

Wrong. It has nothing to do with "PhysX" on the GPU. If it did, people with a second or third Nvidia card dedicated to PhysX would see the improvement with lower end GPUs. Also the PS4 version of PCars with an AMD APU would be having issues. It was about draw call on the GPU, and AMD GPUs in DX11 are known to have weak spots unlike Nvidia GPUs (that will change with DX12). I have two PCars versions, one on the PC as early development access, and one on the PS4 in retail release. It worked perfectly on the PS4 on the day of release (read: 60FPS smoothness even in rain and heavy traffic and no stuttering). Now why is that?

But besides that, PhysX was coded to work on a CPU in the game, not the GPU, no matter which GPU you have. This has widely been shown and proven. So it's a FUD claim. AMD dropped the ball on the drivers for PCars, but newer Catalyst drivers increased the performance substantially for AMD owners. AMD had the same opportunity that Nvidia did on working with Slightly Mad Studios (as I mentioned). AMD dropped the ball. I was an early access "investor" of PCars and saw it unfold first hand. I'm still waiting to hear from someone to explain to me how AMD updating their drivers and increasing the performance of PCars (finally) means it's a PhysX problem. Well, people still don't believe we landed on the moon either, so there you go.

Nvidia disables PhysX when an AMD GPU is present in the system

 

[10tacle]

Nvidia disables PhysX when an AMD GPU is present in the system

Seriously? You've drunk the Kool-Aid bro. Nvidia does not control the game. Were you an early access investor to PCars and tester or are you just parroting old complaints (excuse making) you read about from AMD users? Here's nearly a year's worth of forum discussion on the topic starting with SMS's response about AMD's initial poor performance in both Steam and official Project Cars forums:

http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?22797-AMD-graphics-bad-optimization

https://steamcommunity.com/app/234630/discussions/0/613957600528900678/#p1

Note the comment in Page 1 from the PCars forum by Ian Bell, lead programmer and developer for SMS:

"It's a driver issue, there's little for us to work on internally in terms of code. The game was 30-40% faster with earlier drivers from AMD. Their latest drivers have caused the issue. We are working with them to remedy this."

Why do you think that AMD GPUs favor some games more than Nvidia GPUs, and Nvidia GPUs favor some games more than AMD GPUs? Does it all boil down to PhysX and GW nonsense or lack thereof, or does the root of the matter go a little deeper like the core programming and the way each GPU reacts to it differently with each having different architecture and their drivers?

All I can do is lead a horse to water....I can't make him drink it.

 

[zthomas]

Sooo how do you all drive? keyboard or controller.. clamp down steering wheel.. those floating pedals must be a bitch.. to get them to stay put.. I use to love playing NFS.. never played on my present machine.. I run what you guys have 980 nvidia and a I5 with g-sync.. i play NFS on orign streaming.. and got a stand alone one.. but dang I played the game to death..

 

[10tacle]

Sooo how do you all drive? keyboard or controller.. clamp down steering wheel.. those floating pedals must be a b***h..

If you are serious about being a wheel user for racing games, you find a way to keep pedals in place. For me, I have my gaming desk up against the wall so my pedals are butted up against the wall underneath it with a piece of wood used as a shim for proper distance spacing for my feet.

You will not have much luck being in the middle of a living room floor sitting on a couch with a table trying to use a wheel and pedal setup. My G27 pedals have retractible carpet grabbers that are supposed to keep it in place on carpet, but when under intense driving, they still move on the carpet.

 

[zthomas]

I'm really a dedicated keyboard person.. when streaming race games the people using steering wheels leave me in the dust.. I have priced the wheels but my setup is like you had said.. center of the room. I face a massive drawing table with 27 monitor on left.. the table faces a 50 inch tv.. I can pick up or push away the keyboard and then do art.. a 40+ year hobby..

 

[blppt]

"So no; no matter how you want to spin it, Monopolies or "near Monopolies" *DO NOT* play well for consumers. What you're thinking is like saying: "yeah I wanna get shot, but not to the head! Just get one kidney blown". You will get a fully controlled market by 1 engaging actor with the rest just getting the table scraps and the consumers getting, luckily, small improvements. Another good way of viewing it is "good King, bad King"."

Yes, we would pay more for incremental increases in hardware, but you'd get the added benefit of a game running the right way as it was designed for one specific API/Architecture. In the end, thats a lot of what I spend money on anyways--trying to get a smooth gaming experience with the newest, graphic-intensive AAA titles. Plus, as a developer for PC games, you generally wouldnt have to spend so much money debugging video performance/optimizing game engines.

Of course, the monopolizing/near monopolizing company could do something like Gameworks where the "old generation" cannot run consistently well at high settings, thereby causing the need to upgrade to a new GPU, but you have to look at it this way: We've spent an awful lot of time and effort (and money) trying to keep up with the latest graphics-intensive games anyways, and even then, there may not be any way to run these games smoothly due to the fragmented nature of the major competing GPU architectures. For example, certain areas of the tesselation-heavy gameworks libraries run better on Nvidia, whereas AMD's GCN arch is very good at async compute in DX12, something that even the most expensive 9xx series Nvidia card does not do well at.

If we had the Glide-like, 3dfx preferred situation, we could count on the game either not having such high tesselation usage, and having async compute (if AMD was this near-monopoly) or exactly the opposite if Nvidia was the company in question. AND we could be more sure than now that the AAA developer tested and found the game to run well on this single platform. Sure, it can be abused, but the situation we are currently in isnt ideal either.