TPU Performance Summaries with newer games

[escrow4]

No. Overhead myth gotta go. If that was the case then 780Ti would be distancing itself from 290X but the reverse is happening. Open your eyes

Oh? You mean like Watch Dogs:

Look at more recent benches too. There is a difference.

 

[BFG10K]

The updated performance charts more or less mean that 980 has no chance whatsoever to keep the performance crown against the 390X in high resolution gaming,

Are you basing this off insider information, or the leaked "Captain Jack" benchmarks?

In any case I think it's a given the 390X will be faster than the 980 given it'll be released after. There would be a serious problem if it wasn't, so we don't need these benchmarks to tell us that.

The real question is how will the 390X compete against the "980 Ti".

 

[3DVagabond]

They do offer superior performance. Look at recent GameGPU tests - Nvidia has way less driver overhead. Meanwhile, still waiting for a 980 Ti or Titan II.

Look at 290X on release drivers and today compared to GK110. It's still status quo. Actually there will be less difference in performance.

current

release

You try and tell me that nVidia drivers have increased relative performance or that AMD drivers are worse. The 290X has increase it's performance advantage over Titan. All of this BS about superior nVidia drivers is pure marketing. They switch AMD having an advantage @ HiRes to somehow AMD has inferior drivers. It's pure forum stealth marketing.

Are you basing this off insider information, or the leaked "Captain Jack" benchmarks?

In any case I think it's a given the 390X will be faster than the 980 given it'll be released after. There would be a serious problem if it wasn't, so we don't need these benchmarks to tell us that.

The real question is how will the 390X compete against the "980 Ti".

But when Maxwell was faster than Hawaii (a year later) it meant that AMD could no longer compete and was going out of business.

 

[lavaheadache]

I look at those graphs and wonder wth happened to Kepler? the 680 is getting smoked by Tahiti and the 290 is beating down the Titan.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Oh? You mean like Watch Dogs:

Look at more recent benches too. There is a difference.

More recent bench below shows AMD multicard solution putting a hurt on Titan and 780 Ti SLI at high resolution and single card solutions the 290x and 780 Ti were very close. They did not test SLI/Crossfire at 1080p but even at 1600p a single card is approaching the numbers of the bench you posted with the 290x hitting 33 minimum and 43 average and this is at ULTRA quality not Very High like in the graph you posted.

Highest 4k settings
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/08/18/watch_dogs_performance_image_quality_review/4#.VIFMIYvF_wk

The 290x Crossfire solution is able to run 4k at significantly better settings than 780ti SLI.
Apples to apples
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/08/18/watch_dogs_performance_image_quality_review/7#.VIFMXovF_wk

The 290x Crossfire solution is almost 50% faster than 780ti SLI.

1600p Highest playable

I think their drivers are ok.

 

[raghu78]

Guys this just came in. The performance gap with GTX 980 is shrinking even further as we speak.

http://www.techspot.com/news/59074-amd-unveils-major-gpu-driver-update-catalyst-omega.html

"AMD has announced a major overhaul of their Catalyst graphics card driver software today, adding new features, improving performance and fixing a large number of bugs. The 'special edition' driver, which is the result of months of work, is one of the biggest AMD has released. The Catalyst Omega driver boasts some serious performance improvements in many hardware configurations due to a more efficient design"

"In our own testing, performed by our resident hardware reviewer Steve, we noted significant gains on high-end GPUs in a number of titles including BioShock Infinite and Metro Redux. However in some games, even those in AMD's Gaming Evolved program, there was no performance improvement at all: Watch Dogs, Battlefield 4, Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider and Crysis 3 are regularly seen in our hardware benchmarks, and recorded the same performance as the previous driver."

 

[RussianSensation]

Are you basing this off insider information, or the leaked "Captain Jack" benchmarks?

In any case I think it's a given the 390X will be faster than the 980 given it'll be released after. There would be a serious problem if it wasn't, so we don't need these benchmarks to tell us that.

The real question is how will the 390X compete against the "980 Ti".

You are right that the real battle is 390X vs. GM200 derivatives. I was not basing my estimates on Captain Jack leak since we don't even kno wig it's real. I was basing it on how little performance advantage 980 has at high rez gaming today. If AMD wanted to raise performance by 10%, they could have just released a revision 2 of Hawaii with water cooling and higher clocks, but they didn't. The move from 6970 to 7970 brought more than a 30% gain, and 290X is about 30-35% faster than 7970Ghz. I think 390X should end up at least 30% faster than 290X. This is probably not enough to match GM200. They will need 50% faster but not sure that's doable without a follow-up refresh.

@raghu,

"For those Eyefinity fans out there, Catalyst Omega now supports 24 monitor arrays on systems with four GPUs."

That's insane. Also, they introduced a version of DSR, called VSR, but its only limited to 285/290 series. Wondering why cards like 7990/7970 can't so VSR through the control panel. Sounds like they are strapped for resources and could only focus on the latest cards.

 

[RussianSensation]

Why do you keep comapring GTX980 with 290X. When the graph you link show it should be compared to the GTX970.

After-market 290 = 290X in performance, and costs less than 970. Compare 290 to 970 if you want and 970 comes off not looking much better for a next gen part, apart from power usage. But power usage doesn't get me more IQ or FPS by switching from a 7970 to a 970 as opposed to a 1 year old 290. 290 came out at just $399 and 970 barely undercut that by $70 1 year later. The opportunity cost of waiting 1 full year for 680/7970 owners to get more or less the same performance is not worth it imo. Don't forget that 290 was in a massive sale for $210-250 for weeks now, including Black Friday and last weekend's sales. There have been countless times when it undercut 970 by $100 in the US with similar performance at high rez gaming.

All AMD needs to do now is raise the performance of 290X by 5%, release it as a 380X with lower power usage, price it at $349, and its history for the 980 @ $550. We will see in 2015 just how overpriced 980 was. I mean the fact that you can now buy nearly 2X 290Xs for the price of a single 980 already cements this point. For high rez gaming a single 980 makes no sense against 290Xs or 970 SLI.

 

[raghu78]

I think 390X should end up at least 30% faster than 290X. This is probably not enough to match GM200. They will need 50% faster but not sure that's doable without a follow-up refresh.

dude you are way too pessimistic. R9 290X with 37.5% more shaders than R9 280X is 35% faster. btw this is without major increase in bandwidth (320 GB/s for R9 290X vs 288 GB/s for R9 280X). No major architectural enhancements. Just doubling the number of shader engines,geometry and raster engines with no architectural enhancements.

With GCN 2.0, I am sure AMD will definitely improve perf/sp, perf/CU, perf/ transistor and perf/sq mm significantly over GCN 1.1 Hawaii and GCN 1.2 Tonga. AMD improved tesselation perf, raster output performance and memory bandwidth efficiency with Tonga. But fundamentally AMD has not improved the shader/CU architecture for better perf/shader, perf/CU and perf/watt. I expect that to happen with GCN 2.0 aka R9 3xx series.

HBM brings massive bandwidth increase and combined with improved bandwidth efficiency (found in Tonga due to lossless colour compression) will bring a 50% bandwidth increase per sp or per CU. Add to it the improvements seen in Tonga and other architectural enhancements we will see in GCN 2.0 and I am confident that AMD can increase perf/sp or perf/shader by 10 - 20%. With 45% more shaders and so many factors at work don't be surprised if the actual perf gain is close to 60%. In that chiphell chart a 60% gain would put R9 390X at 82 (close to R9 290X CF).

btw with these new drivers that TPU chart will reflect a <= 10% lead for GTX 980 over R9 290X at 1440p and even lesser at 4k as Bioshock Infinite is one of the titles where AMD cards have lagged Nvidia badly. techspot saw significant improvements with Omega drivers in Bioshock Infinite and Metro Redux.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Colorful/iGame_GTX_970/11.html

@raghu,
"For those Eyefinity fans out there, Catalyst Omega now supports 24 monitor arrays on systems with four GPUs."

That's insane. Also, they introduced a version of DSR, called VSR, but its only limited to 285/290 series. Wondering why cards like 7990/7970 can't so VSR through the control panel. Sounds like they are strapped for resources and could only focus on the latest cards.

You have to remember the HD 7970 was released in Jan 2012 and Hawaii was released in late Oct 2013. We don't know if the VSR functionality requires certain hardware logic and not just software.

But given the fact that Nvidia have enabled DSR on Kepler and even Fermi I might agree that its just a software based functionality and that AMD are strapped for resources and thus focussing on R9 285/R9 290/R9 290X cards.

http://techreport.com/news/27251/geforce-344-48-driver-enables-dsr-on-kepler-fermi-gpus

 

[raghu78]

After-market 290 = 290X in performance, and costs less than 970. Compare 290 to 970 if you want and 970 comes off not looking much begger for a next gen part, apart from power usage. But power usage doesn't get me more IQ or FPS by switching from a 7970 to a 970 as opposed to a 1 year old 290. 290 came out at just $399 and 970 barely undercut that by $70 1 year later. The opportunity cost of waiting 1 full year for 680/7970 owners to get more or less the same performance is not worth it imo. Don't forget that 290 was in a massive sale for $210-250 for weeks now, including Black Friday and last weekend's sales. There have been countless times when it undercut 970 by $100 in the US with similar performance at high rez gaming.

All AMD needs to do now is raise the performance of 290X by 5%, release it as a 380X with lower power usage, price it at $349, and its history for the 980 @ $550. We will see in 2015 just how overpriced 980 was. I mean the fact that you can now buy nearly 2X 290Xs for the price of a single 980 already cements this point. For high rez gaming a single 980 makes no sense against 290Xs or 970 SLI.

You will see a GCN 2.0 R9 380x with 3072 sp and 4GB HBM priced at USD 399. That chip with Omega drivers and further improvements which AMD can manage upto launch will put the GTX 980 well behind and definitely force a price cut from Nvidia and launch of GM200. But AMD has the R9 390 (3584) and R9 390X (4096) waiting for GM200. I am quite sure the R9 380X was the chip referred in chiphell leaks. As always you can wait for the confirmation in Feb 2015. :thumbsup:

 

[Carfax83]

Guys this just came in. The performance gap with GTX 980 is shrinking even further as we speak.

While it's great that AMD is improving their driver quality and performance, you're implying that Nvidia is just going to be sitting idle, which is obviously wrong.

There is definitely more performance to be squeezed out of Maxwell, and you can be sure that Nvidia's driver team is on it.

Compared to the launch drivers, the current 334.75 are noticeably faster to me..

 

[raghu78]

While it's great that AMD is improving their driver quality and performance, you're implying that Nvidia is just going to be sitting idle, which is obviously wrong.

There is definitely more performance to be squeezed out of Maxwell, and you can be sure that Nvidia's driver team is on it.

Compared to the launch drivers, the current 334.75 are noticeably faster to me..

I am not saying Nvidia is sitting idle but just that AMD is addressing the games where they lagged considerably behind Nvidia. this is in addition to the better performance in recent games on R9 290X wrt GTX 780 Ti. Thats why the perf gap reduces on avg. that TPU summary shows R9 290X catching up with 780 Ti at 1440p/4k. Nvidia might be doing a good job with Maxwell but they sure as hell are forgetting their loyal customers who are on Kepler. :whiste:

 

[atticus14]

Nvidia might be doing a good job with Maxwell but they sure as hell are forgetting their loyal customers who are on Kepler. :whiste:

Isn't it the same as tahti though, as a 7950 owner I try to somewhat pay attention to patch notes and it appears GCN 1.0 improvements don't exist anymore and haven't for awhile (or at least not reported) and last I heard Mantle was pretty broken on it.

 

[RussianSensation]

I don't kow if one can say nVidia is ignoring Kepler when they quickly added the DSR feature for older hardware, which is very welcomed. Tend to give credit for AMD for improving upon their GCN architectures to remain very competitive, which is very welcomed.

Nope. In almost all of the newer games Kepler's performance is way below expectations with 970 / 290X > 780Ti, 980 beating 780Ti by 20-35% (!) instead of 5-10%, 7970Ghz ~ 780, and 290 > Titan and 7950 V2 ~ 680 or faster. Sorry, that is not normal.

The Crew is yet another game where NV threw Kepler under the bus:

2560x1600 MSAA:
980 = 51
970 = 47
290X = 46
290 = 42
780Ti = 38 (!)
Titan = 35 (!)
780 = 33
7970Ghz = 32
680 = 26

^ 3 FPS faster for the Titan vs. 7970Ghz!!
http://www.techspot.com/review/925-the-crew-benchmarks/page3.html

Sorry, NV is purposely neglecting Kepler because Unity, DAI, FC4, Mordor, COD:AW, Dead Rising 3 are all new games and Kepler tanks vs. Maxwell/Tahiti/Hawaii for no apparent reason. This is forced obsolescene or complete disregard for your customer base. Are you seeing how much the Titan and 780 aged compared to 7970Ghz/290? Too make matters worse, all these cards from NV cost more than their AMD competitors. It's ridiculous when you pay more and your card ages faster.

 

[SirPauly]

They switch AMD having an advantage @ HiRes to somehow AMD has inferior drivers. It's pure forum stealth marketing.

AMD and ATI usually has strong performance or value/performance at ultra resolutions and a testament to their fine software and hardware engineering.

Nothing has really changed over the years:

A premium priced GTX 580 offering 10 percent more performance over a more value priced HD 6970 at 1600p:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_6970/29.html


A premium priced GTX 980 offering around 10 percent more performance over a more value priced 290x at 1600p:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Colorful/iGame_GTX_970/27.html


The same arguments become circular over the years and the mysterious they are to blame or, the mysterious they do 180's. AMD and nVidia are world class and strong competitors and both bring strong choice to consider for one's subjective tastes, tolerances, thresholds and wallet.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I do admire TPU and their reviews,i know they were the only ones to pretty much keep UT3 in their benchs till the gtx590 arrived.I know i was a avid UT3 player there so having that was pretty nice.Was fun watching certain gpus suddenly go from bottlenecked at their lower resolutions to suddenly gaining a massive fps increase cause of platform changes.They have catered to lower resolution fps numbers too which is great.

 

[Carfax83]

Sorry, NV is purposely neglecting Kepler because Unity, DAI, FC4, Mordor, COD:AW, Dead Rising 3 are all new games and Kepler tanks vs. Maxwell/Tahiti/Hawaii for no apparent reason. This is forced obsolescene or complete disregard for your customer base. Are you seeing how much the Titan and 780 aged compared to 7970Ghz/290? Too make matters worse, all these cards from NV cost more than their AMD competitors. It's ridiculous when you pay more and your card ages faster.

Talk about "the sky is falling" paranoia..

These are all brand new games. It's going to take months before they are running at full performance on ANY architecture, much less Kepler..

A more likely reason is that Nvidia is currently focusing on improving Maxwell's performance, as Maxwell will be their future for some time. It doesn't mean they've neglected Kepler..

Historically speaking, that's not Nvidia's style. Nvidia typically has great support for older cards in their drivers for a long time after market introduction.

 

[SirPauly]

Nope. In almost all of the newer games Kepler's performance is way below expectations with 970 / 290X > 780Ti, 980 beating 780Ti by 20-35% (!) instead of 5-10%, 7970Ghz ~ 780, and 290 > Titan and 7950 V2 ~ 680 or faster. Sorry, that is not normal.

The Crew is yet another game where NV threw Kepler under the bus:

2560x1600 MSAA:
980 = 51
970 = 47
290X = 46
290 = 42
780Ti = 38 (!)
Titan = 35 (!)
780 = 33
7970Ghz = 32
680 = 26

^ 3 FPS faster for the Titan vs. 7970Ghz!!
http://www.techspot.com/review/925-the-crew-benchmarks/page3.html

Sorry, NV is purposely neglecting Kepler because Unity, DAI, FC4, Mordor, COD:AW, Dead Rising 3 are all new games and Kepler tanks vs. Maxwell/Tahiti/Hawaii for no apparent reason. This is forced obsolescene or complete disregard for your customer base. Are you seeing how much the Titan and 780 aged compared to 7970Ghz/290? Too make matters worse, all these cards from NV cost more than their AMD competitors. It's ridiculous when you pay more and your card ages faster.

imho,

It wouldn't make sense to purposely neglect Kepler considering they are still selling Kepler and supporting many gamers with Kepler hardware.

Let's purposely neglect, forced obsolescence and completely disregard --too extreme. If this was true they wouldn't of offered DSR to Kepler. nVidia would of kept DSR for only Maxwell.

 

[96Firebird]

I love how people think Nvidia is "purposely neglecting Kepler" instead of AMD improving their drivers since that's all they have to compete right now.

I think you guys need to give AMD more credit, or you can continue with the conspiracy theories.

 

[SirPauly]

I think you guys need to give AMD more credit,

Indeed! I like what I am seeing with AMD -- rolling up their sleeves and trying to out work nVidia -- creates strong awareness and improving the brand!

 

[Carfax83]

Indeed! I like what I am seeing with AMD -- rolling up their sleeves and trying to out work nVidia -- creates strong awareness and improving the brand!

+ 2

It's good that AMD is trying harder. They may have rolled over and shown their underbelly to Intel, but they don't look like they have any intention of doing so with Nvidia....which is for the betterment of us all.

I wish their CPU department would show the same initiative..

 

[digitaldurandal]

+ 2

It's good that AMD is trying harder. They may have rolled over and shown their underbelly to Intel, but they don't look like they have any intention of doing so with Nvidia....which is for the betterment of us all.

I wish their CPU department would show the same initiative..

(Apologize for OT)

Unfortunately BullDozer really sunk them by being late to market and not offering the performance they hoped for. I think they are smart to push forward with APUs it is the only area they can hope to beat Intel. Once a giant like Intel is ahead of you in nodes, architecture, and feature set.. there is no recovery, not without a sudden large influx of cash. I predict they will not compete on the enthusiast level again but I hope I am wrong.

 

[Silverforce11]

(Apologize for OT)

Unfortunately BullDozer really sunk them by being late to market and not offering the performance they hoped for. I think they are smart to push forward with APUs it is the only area they can hope to beat Intel. Once a giant like Intel is ahead of you in nodes, architecture, and feature set.. there is no recovery, not without a sudden large influx of cash. I predict they will not compete on the enthusiast level again but I hope I am wrong.

AMD ceased to be a relevant CPU company a long time ago, it's all aboard the APU train hoping it takes them someplace with greener pastures...

Re: Poor Kepler performance, I wouldn't say NV is forcing obsolescence by abandoning optimizations, its way too early for that. It's more like their driver team is focused on Maxwell ASAP and later may work on Kepler. What this does hint at is how divergent the architectures are, that NV cannot optimize for both together like what we see with AMD's GCN (which is pretty much still the same so far).

 

[Kenmitch]

AMD ceased to be a relevant CPU company a long time ago, it's all aboard the APU train hoping it takes them someplace with greener pastures...

Re: Poor Kepler performance, I wouldn't say NV is forcing obsolescence by abandoning optimizations, its way too early for that. It's more like their driver team is focused on Maxwell ASAP and later may work on Kepler. What this does hint at is how divergent the architectures are, that NV cannot optimize for both together like what we see with AMD's GCN (which is pretty much still the same so far).

Wasn't the reasoning for AMD switching to GCN the forward looking expandability of the technology?

Love watching the AMD vs NVIDIA chess match

 

[Erenhardt]

I love how people think Nvidia is "purposely neglecting Kepler" instead of AMD improving their drivers since that's all they have to compete right now.

I think you guys need to give AMD more credit, or you can continue with the conspiracy theories.

How does improved amd driver performance lower kepler performance compared to maxwell?