GPU musings. (Not quite AMD versus Nvidia)

Hardware Hub GPU
1

This may be long-winded. So, for those of you who don't like long posts, you may want to look elsewhere. This is also not going to be an advocacy for either brand, I'm just sharing my experiences.

So, I have two rigs: my main rig which I used for gaming and productivity, and my test rig which I occasionally throw money at for experimenting. This test rig is mainly an strange type of HTPC. It is a homunculus; a terrible frankenstein of a PC. How so? It has a Biostar motherboard, but Noctua fans; it started its life as APU-platform, but now sports a GTX 670 FTW. All of this glory is packed into an Enermax Ostrog Pink chassis. (Did I mention that my significant other uses this rig?)

The GPU came to be in my possession when a friend of mine threw down the money for a GTX 980, some months ago, and sold his 670 to me for fairly cheap. And that is when I discovered the wonders of Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR).

Now, my secondary rig "only" has a 1680x1050 monitor. It while there is nothing wrong with it, it is starting to show its age - which I suppose is another way to say that I am starting to notice the pixels. (First world problems!) Anti-aliasing helps, but I think DSR is the superior option. I have been playing Metro: Last Light with high settings, no AA, at what is essentially 1440p resolution. While I realize it is not as good as a true 1440p, it still a noticeable improvement in graphical quality without the same hit to performance as the method of AA that Last Light uses.

I was actually impressed to learn that my old GTX 460, which I had tortured with overclocking experiments, also supported this feature, although it already struggles with modern day 1080p gaming. Meanwhile, my R9 280X lacks AMD's equivalent feature, Virtual Super Resolution (VSR). (Currently, only Tonga and Hawaii support it! Poor Tahiti!)

So, the TL;DR of my first point is that I am glad that both companies have adopted this feature. I would like to try this out on a 1080p monitor, and also with an AMD card, but, alas, I don't quite have that much money to toss about.

That said, let's talk about drivers! Being busy with university, and work, I'm not exactly an up-to-date, cutting-edge gamer. I don't need to play a game on release day, I can wait for it to come down in price - yeah, I am a cheap-ass - and also I like for any bugs the game has on release to get fixed before it may wreck my gameplay experience. (Why has this issue been getting worse since 1999, instead of getting better?) So, while I appreciate Nvidia's game-day-release driver updates, sadly, their efforts are lost on me. I think it's great that they do it, though, and AMD should start doing something similar as soon as possible. Hopefully, AMD's restructuring comes to a closure, soon, so that they can more easily do so. That said, I have never had any serious issues with either set of drivers.
Oddly enough, the only issue I have had with drivers has been with Nvidia while using Linux - sometimes Firefox would bork while Canonical was updating. Nothing major.

I'll stop here, before this becomes too much more of a novel. But, later, I would like to discuss performance, and customer treatment.

2

Something that I would like to point out about the whole driver thing. nVidia is a larger company with more influence in the gaming market because of their large market share. That is part of why we see gameworks and physX getting jammed into so many games that don't really benefit from it too much (I usually see it as a side show sort of thing more than an integral part of the game). Meanwhile, the things that AMD are offering are more casually put forward. For example, Mantle. Anyone could chose to use it, but they didn't try to make them do it (from what I know, but I could be wrong). Anyway, my point here is that nVidia clearly has more influence and because of that likely has better access to things before release (especially in gameworks titles which is a fair number). They can also have a larger driver team working all the time. What I am saying here is that I would expect day one drivers from a larger company like nVidia which has its hands in everyone's pot. But because of that, they also get a sizeable advantage, hence the recent "gameworks sabotaged AMD performance in Witcher 3" thing that is going around (though to be fair, that is a good excuse for poor performance, so it could possibly be that AMD is just making excuses).

As for the DSR and VSR thing, super sampling has long been a thing, and as far as I can tell, neither of them is very far off from well implemented super sampling. It is a nice touch, but not really a big deal imo. Also, people don't pay enough attention to the tone thing that they will literally paying the most attention to with a pc, the monitor. Getting a decent monitor in the first place is the better thing to do imo. A good monitor will last much longer than the rest of a pc build. The gpu et all will get replaced every so often. A decent monitor will last forever. That said, we are on the brink of a new standard resolution in gaming, 4k, so getting a 1080p monitor now and expecting it to last for 5-10 years as a king of the hill is a bit much, but a good 4k monitor definitely will stand the test of time.

3

just wanted to point out;
7970 supports VSR *(but only to 1440p), and even older 6970 does with newer drivers... (its driver thingy, not arch/hardware based)

4

A good UHD monitor might stand the test of time but I don't class a monitor that does only 60hz at UHD as good, Not for "proper" gaming at least.

5

I knew that Intel was larger than AMD, by quite a margin, but I did not know that Nvidia was larger than AMD. This is good to know!

Teach me your secrets, wizard!

6

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/add-in-board-report

7

That second column adds to 100.1 not 100

8

Your monitor has to be up to spec, use dp ports really or dvi-d port - 7970 has only 1, and has to be enabled - its tricky in some cases. If its not - svr option won't even show itself.
(for some reason on 7970's i never got above 1440p at 60Hz on 1080p 144Hz monitor using dvi-d while on 290x i can go up to 4k at 75Hz odd)

Though its pointless, performance is crap (even on 2x7970's)
(Tried it on Crysis 3, but still performs better than 680)

VSR v DSR performance wise depends on title, but sometimes its better and much more efficient to throw some ubersampling and AA for lighter performance hit.

9

Is this with the beta drivers, or...?

Either way, sadly, my monitor must not be up to spec. I can't get it to work with my R9 280X, no matter which port I use. :(

10

Nah normal omega drivers. (but with beta its even better)
you have to enable dvi-d or use dp. *i recommend dp.
enabling dvi-d is a trickery in 7970... i have had feeling as I was struggling with it; that it wasn't meant to exist but before release was hacked to do it (i tried to get my 144Hz ...)

11

I suppose I need a video to see how to do this, exactly.

12

not gonna see it from me anymore; i already gave away my 7970's for free;
but i remember i had to move pin to switch bios; and that would disable 1 other dvi display output - then it worked (you need monitor capable of dvi-d and cable for dvi-d) . But for some reason it didn't work right away... plenty of people had this issue with those cards and not only amd; but nv too.

13

You can blame drivers all day long but if the game's engine and code is shit there is nothing amd or nvidia can do about it. Different teams working on different ports may make the worst pos ever. Look at usf4 on ps4 for example. The developers never even booted the game. Once.

14

Well, that's market share.

AMD, overall, employs more people but Nvidia seems to have a touch more revenue. Since AMD isn't specialized in any silicon market, I think we can say that Nvidia is probably still bigger than AMD's GPU sector.