[Techspot] GTX 780 retrospective - How the Mighty Have Fallen!

[IllogicalGlory]

Ahh so it's a click-bait article,it's not "How the Mighty Have Fallen!" but "how a card that was slower in 2013 is still slower today"...big surprise there.

I guarantee you that that aftermarket 780 was not slower than a 290 in 2013.

Also, the premise you're is that being slower does not come in degrees. It's like saying that a GTX 650 is equivalent to a GTX 960 because they're both slower than a 290. One is slower by a lot more; that's what the article is about - the 780 has lost ground relative to AMD cards and other NVIDIA cards, even if it was slower even then, if it's become substantially slower than that now, then it has fallen.

 

[3DVagabond]

Or maybe it's just the obvious...you need the best cpu from 4 years in the future O/C'ed to it's limits to overcome amd's driver overhead.

DX11

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Not really. It got 4 Gb more vram but that mostly doesn't matter. The difference is that 290 reference sucked as in throttled and was loud. This was fixed with custom cards. The 390 does not have a reference. 390s are faster than reference 290s but if you compared aftermarket to aftermarket the difference is pretty much 0.

390's have faster memory which also helps a bit.

 

[Bacon1]

Ahh so it's a click-bait article,it's not "How the Mighty Have Fallen!" but "how a card that was slower in 2013 is still slower today"...big surprise there.

Except it went from slightly slower to 20%+ slower... so yeah, it fell quite a lot.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

That being said, this would be easy to test - just test with old drivers and new drivers and see which is faster.

I could swear I saw one of the major PC hardware youtube channels do this test on old drivers vs new on the 780 Ti and they were pretty much the same.

 

[tential]

DX11

This is the best post I'll read today. I should stop while I'm ahead.

 

[Haserath]

There are rumours that Nvidia deliberately cripples older cards via drivers because it isn't really competing with AMD anymore, it is competing with itself. If a 780 still ran games well today, you might not be tempted to upgrade to a 1070.

That being said, this would be easy to test - just test with old drivers and new drivers and see which is faster.

Crippling is not the same as not optimizing. The whole point of Maxwell was fixing their execution to front end ratio. They basically made 2/3 of the resources get very close to what Kepler had then they made it clock faster along with better memory utilization.

They arent obligated to optimize for something so old anyway.

 

[TheELF]

Except it went from slightly slower to 20%+ slower... so yeah, it fell quite a lot.

Yeah, OR CPUs became faster overcoming AMD's driver overhead by some amount,as I said from the beginning.
Benches at several clock speeds would be interesting.

 

[laamanaator]

Yeah, OR CPUs became faster overcoming AMD's driver overhead by some amount,as I said from the beginning.
Benches at several clock speeds would be interesting.

Back in the day when R290 was released CPUs were already fast enough to overcome AMD's driver overhead. My old X5650 OC'd to 4,4Ghz doesn't bottleneck my R290@1100MHz, and that CPU is old. If you have at least a SB-CPU @ 4GHz or a Haswell CPU@3,8 -4GHz you shouldn't experience CPU-bottlenecking in most cases on AMD cards.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

Yeah, OR CPUs became faster overcoming AMD's driver overhead by some amount,as I said from the beginning.
Benches at several clock speeds would be interesting.

Do you have any compelling reason to believe that or strong evidence for it? All I see is the 780 losing ground, and not just to AMD cards.

You're looking at an aftermarket 780 barely scraping at the heels of 970 in the best case and hanging out with a 1050 Ti in the worst, but it's AMD's drivers?

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Do you have any compelling reason to believe that or strong evidence for it? All I see is the 780 losing ground, and not just to AMD cards.

You're looking at an aftermarket 780 barely scraping at the heels of 970 in the best case and hanging out with a 1050 Ti in the worst, but it's AMD's drivers?

Yeah, I'm constantly surprised by this accusation when the real story behind 'CPU' bottleneck is much more complicated with AMD drivers ...

It's most likely down to Nvidia having a better command processor such as a lower cost of pipeline state change and a fast path for repeated repeated draws but DX12 PSO's and resource binding mostly fixes this so having a multi-threaded user mode drivers is just a bonus to AMD when the D3D11 pipeline state tracking model was already a mismatch for AMD hardware ...

AMD GPU performance will start to get more traction when all GCN GPUs have native support shader model 6.1 ...

 

[2is]

Pity they didn't run benchmarks of the R9 290, which as they said was its closest competitor at the time. I think the R9 390 had some upgrades compared to the 290 - memory bandwidth if I remember correctly.

There are rumours that Nvidia deliberately cripples older cards via drivers because it isn't really competing with AMD anymore, it is competing with itself. If a 780 still ran games well today, you might not be tempted to upgrade to a 1070.

That being said, this would be easy to test - just test with old drivers and new drivers and see which is faster.

Has nothing to do with drivers. There was a review investigating just that a while back and there was no appreciable performance drop with newer drivers, in some instances performance increased in fact. The architecture was simply not very forward thinking. It worked well when it was launched and went downhill fast as games got more demanding and game engines rendered scenes differently.