Does Nvidia really hinder performance of old cards with new drivers?

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

I heard a lot of rumors that Nvidia hinders performance of previous generation gpu's and I wanted to ask if anyone here really noticed something shady going on with the performance of their gpu's when a new generation rolled out?

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

nope, perhaps they don't improve performance as much as some people (who may not know what they are talking about) think that they should. I didn't notice performance degradation on my 580 which I kept until i got a 970 9 or so months after launch.

SinxarKnights · May 4, 2016

If that were true they would have been called out on it long ago by reputable sources.

Those rumors are from people with ancient cards that can no longer handle new games built on more demanding engines. While I would love to avoid upgrading and keep using my 8800GT like it was 2008 and blame Nvidia that the drivers are the issue, this simply is not the case.

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

^ the 8800GT and GTX were great in their day, but that day is long long gone.

my GTX retired and went to a new home for £50.

RobCrezz · May 4, 2016

A more likely reason would be that Nvidia got much more optimized performance from their drivers from the beginning meaning there a less improvments with optimizations.

But I suspect they devote less time to older architectures than they would to current ones.

toddybody · May 4, 2016

I think the answer is "sorta"...especially when you look at new gameworks features, disenfranchising AMD users and "old nVidia" users alike. IMO this is a ploy to encourage regular updates. That's far from a driver level gimp though.

On a larger topic of trust, I have to admit shame for supporting nVidia for so long (Ascended in 2010...on my 10th nVidia card). AMD has show to be a leader in FOSS projects and open standards, despite being the market underdog. I hope Polaris really brings the numbers against Pascal, and would love to make my next build an AMD/FreeSync system.

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

13thmonkey :

Nothing weird whatsoever? The thing is that I heard a lot of bad stuff apropos hindering performance of 7xx series when 9xx came out. Like how, for instance, 960 could perform as well as 770 if 770 had much better specs than 960. I don't know much about gpu's and I didn't look into these specs very deeply but even at a glance 770 seems to be much more superior hardwarewise - even core clocks almost the same. I just don't get it - how could be happening unless nvidia somehow hindered performance of 770.

RobCrezz · May 4, 2016

velzelvul :

You cant just look at the specs to get performance, although the 960 could look worse on paper than the 680/770, it has architectural improvements that made it match the performance. This happens with every generation.

A similar comparison could be a Haswell i5 vs a Skylake i3. In many cases the i3 can match performance despite having 2 cores vs 4.

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

velzelvul :

There is a simple way to prove this, and that is to benchmark a 770 on release drivers and benchmark them on latest drivers and see what happens, perhaps even include a pre 970 launch set of drivers, they are all available on the nvidia website, very very easy to get hold of, shouldn't take more than a hour. Has what you heard done that? Is there any proof given how ridiculously simple the test is.

SinxarKnights · May 4, 2016

Nothing weird whatsoever? The thing is that I heard a lot of bad stuff apropos hindering performance of 7xx series when 9xx came out. Like how, for instance, 960 could perform as well as 770 if 770 had much better specs than 960. I don't know much about gpu's and I didn't look into these specs very deeply but even at a glance 770 seems to be much more superior hardwarewise - even core clocks almost the same. I just don't get it - how could be happening unless nvidia somehow hindered performance of 770.

Where is the class action lawsuit? If there was any evidence at all, there would be a lawsuit.

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

I don't have a 770 - I own a 960. Besides, the earliest version of nvidia drivers is of 9th of November - if I had the card and all the drivers I'd definitely try and see what happens. I hope I won't be able to do that with my 960 as I'm planning on selling it and getting a pascal gpu - I just don't know which one to pick yet. I'd probably by 1080 but seeing how irrelevant these gpu's go and how fast it happens makes me think that it'd be foolish to spend more than 350$ or so.
One way or the other (I mean, if nvidia does something shady or it's just the way it is) gpu's become irrelevant quite much faster than cpu's and there's nothing we can do except for being more reasonable buyers.
As to the lawsuit - I think it'd be plain impossible because it's such a complicated matter that there're no experts who can explain why exactly a card with better specs performs the same as a card with quite a bit worse ones - only nvidia's engineers know.

RobCrezz · May 4, 2016

Why does it make them irrelevant? Surely its not a bad thing if a mid-high GPU like the 680/770 from a few years ago can match performance with the modern mid range card?

Getting more for less is just progress.

You refer to specs again, but surely you can see that the specs dont tell the whole story?

SinxarKnights · May 4, 2016

velzelvul :

That is the thing, it is all based on people making assumptions. There are people who know how it works. There are engineers who sit around with nothing better to do than to hack the hardware. There are people who write custom drivers for Nvidia cards. You can't go off the opinion of somebody who installed a driver that didn't work correctly and called foul.

It is such a major accusation that there would be warrants if any shred of evidence was uncovered. It is illegal for them to do that as there are consumer protection laws that specifically cover this scenario (the Federal Trade Commission Act comes to mind). Do you really agree with the rumors that a 11 billion dollar company that is on the leading edge of graphics technology wants to cheat you out of a few dollars with a cheap trick that anybody with any PC knowledge would figure out immediately?

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

driver version for a 770 go back to april 2015 on the site for win 7. Personally I have drivers going back beyond that. You were looking for 960 drivers which didn't exist prior to November.

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

No, I mean that hi-endish cards from x70 to x80 ti become almost mid range the next year. Obviously the reason to get a good gpu is to play games current on maxed out settings (or the very least very high settings) in your panel's resolution so at the very least in FullHD - and seriously, who buys FullHD nowadays - I, for instance, have a QHD, the same as anyone who bought a panel in about last two years and there's not so much current AAA titles that would run in that res. on max settings even on 980, let alone 970; some titles, like Arkham Knight or Quantum Break, don't even run on (a single) 980 Ti that well - that's what I mean by saying that getting an x80 is not worth it unless you have lots of cash just lying around cause next year it won't run shit on max settings. And by "run" I mean stable 60 fps - with less fps gaming becomes kind of a drag.

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

13thmonkey :

Sorry, I was looking for win 10 - my bad. :heink:

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

SinxarKnights :

I guess you're right. I didn't just presume that - that's why I decided to ask here in the first place instead of just bitching about it in the comments to news - the thing is that in the country I'm from (ahem, it's as specific as I'd like to be) there's just MASSIVE outcry about this 770 vs 960 thing. It sounded farfetched so I took a look at the specs and it seemed weird so I asked here because... well, it might sound farfetched but it wouldn't be the first time a big company did something shady... siemens, GM, BP etc. Also Linus Torvalds said that nvidia is the single worst company he's ever dealt with... But maybe nvidia IS the shit when it comes to graphics - why else amd can't compete with them even though their gpu's have insane specs (save for clock speeds).

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

Can you link to this outcry as i've heard nothing about it at all.

velzelvul · May 4, 2016

I guess I could look for the sites where I saw it on but can you read Russian? And if so - do you really want to sift through all this hate filled nonsense?

13thmonkey · May 4, 2016

so no one outside of russia has reported this? Until I see actual data (which is very very easy to create, there are beta drivers going back to 2013) then there is no story.

Does Nvidia really hinder performance of old cards with new drivers?

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