AMD Video Card Driver Performance Review - Fine Wine? @ [H]

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AMD Video Card Driver Performance Review - Fine Wine? - We take the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X and AMD Radeon RX 480 for a ride in 11 games using drivers from the time of each video card’s launch date, to the latest AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.1 Beta driver. We will see how performance in old and newer games has changed over the course of 2015-2017 with new drivers.
 
Awesome article. Thanks for the rational level-headed look at this seemingly magic phenomenon AMD fans are talking about. It's good to get some real numbers to the rhetoric.

I have a 7970 under water in my media centre and it still kicks ten kinds of ass at 1080p, so I'm happy that AMD is putting the effort in.
 
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Great article gentlemen. Glad to see a breakdown to the history of driver releases.

I would say that fine wine improvements are subjectively there given past track records from AMD. I am glad that they finally pulled their head out their collective rear ends and decided to go progressively forward, albeit baby steps. Rather than 1 step forward 2 steps back.
 
Thanks Kyle - interesting read. Seems to me like AMD driver improvements made a huge difference back when the 7970 and 680 were vying for the lead (2012-13?). The 680 was way faster at first, but with driver improvements, the 7970s caught up and even passed the 680 in some games. Sounds like now, AMD is launching their cards with better drivers.
 
very interesting article. IMHO it looks like first release drivers are at 90-95% performance of the card. That is a pretty good starting point. Wish they'd spend as much time on linux drivers where most of the time a GTX 1060 outperforms pretty much anything AMD makes :-/ FWIW: I have an R9-290 in my windows 7 box and a GTX 1060 in my linux box, so I'm not "team red" or "team green" but am cheering on AMD to become more competitive with both intel on the CPU front as well as NVIDIA on the graphics front.
 
Very nicely done.
What a shit-ton of work.

These articles are always very interesting reads. Thanks.
 
Are there any VR performance improvements with the Re-Live drivers? That was the big opportunity (imo).
 
Just saying thanks. This is quality work, and yes, I'm certainly looking forward to the nVidia article as well.

One suggestion: I would love to see these kinds of tests done @ 3 generations. There is a huge contingent of gamers out there that can't afford the latest and greatest, and will often be 2+ generations behind.

Heck, until the 1070 purchase, I made it a point to stay one generation behind, for the intense savings. Just picked up a GTX980Ti for my main system for $250, as an example. This was what, a $600+ video card just 6-9 months ago?

Is it as fast as a new 1080? Nope. Is it a giant upgrade to my old 9800GT? Yep.

Those 7970s and GTX680s are dirt cheap out there these days, and as twzTechman alluded to above, are still playable today with "medium" settings @1080p.
 
Doward said:
One suggestion: I would love to see these kinds of tests done @ 3 generations.
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Not going to happen just due to the bandwidth needed. Most of our content is focused on helping people making buying decisions moving forward. I get where it would be interesting from a historical perspective, but the resources that it takes to do that are just too great for us to be taking on.
 
Great analysis. A year ago I would have asked about mGPU performance and support across drivers, but I think we can guess what the answer to that is now.

Completely concur that the newer interface that came with Crimson annoyingly buries (intentionally?) some features. I wonder how much money AMD blew on UX designing that mess. In any case, the "UI Changes" section was definitely worth the effort, I think.
 
I enjoyed this tremendously. Both AMD and NVidia have had their share of driver woes, but the past couple years have been better overall (although NVidia has had a few misses with drivers that boked stuff). The first AMD card I got (back when they were still ATi) was specifically to replace an NVidia card that gave me an NV4_DISP.DLL error whenever anything 3D was launched - like literally any game. I stayed in the red camp for years until I switched back for a GTX 670. At the time (2012?) AMD's drivers were a mess and NVidia was doing great things.
 
A lot of it depends on long-term drivers. Over a period of say, 3-5 years (for those keeping their cards for the long haul), this might make a noticeable difference. I'd love to see a 7970 vs GTX 680 type of comparison for example. Of course, this also depends on Nvidia as well and how much they improve.

The big advantage AMD has for now is that they have a few features that may gain widespread adoption, like Async. If it gains more widespread adoption, then the 290X for example might prove to be a lot better in the long run than the 780Ti.

Other than that, it is a near-tie breaker, like GTX 1060 versus RX 480 or similar "close" rivalries, where one has an advantage (Ex: GTX 1060 is somewhat faster in DX11 and uses a bit less power) versus the RX 480 (which does better at DX12 and has more VRAM).
 
Doward said:
Heck, until the 1070 purchase, I made it a point to stay one generation behind, for the intense savings. Just picked up a GTX980Ti for my main system for $250, as an example. This was what, a $600+ video card just 6-9 months ago?
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Did I understand you went from 980Ti to 1070? That is a sidegrade at best. Only minor gain in power draw
 
Great article and appreciate the amount of work that went into this.

The Radeon drivers have really come a long way. My HTPC is still running an R9 285 and the new UI for the Crimson Edition drivers is very nice and full of features.
 
Some impressive results with many of the tested games. Thanks for putting in the level of time and effort required for this kind of comparison testing!
 
alecmg said:
Did I understand you went from 980Ti to 1070? That is a sidegrade at best. Only minor gain in power draw
Click to expand...

Ha, no! Went from the 9800GT in one system, to a 980Ti.

My steambox went from an R7 250 to a 1070 :)

You illustrated my point, though. They both (1070 and 980Ti) have very similar performance. One was 420 and one was 250, though!
 
Great article. There was obviously a lot of work that went into this to test that many driver versions over that many games. Kudos.

As for the results, I'll take it. 5% free performance is still an increase even though it isn't a whole lot. But it does also indicate that you should buy a card based on its performance now, not what it could be if the drivers were better optimized.
 
This particular article really portrays what I love about [H]ardOCP. The crew went back through each of the driver revisions and tested anew instead of using old data from previous reviews. That took one hell of a long time. The effort definitely shows in the article. Thanks for taking the time to put the AMD Video Card Driver article together. Well done.
 
Kyle, performance gains with drivers is only 1 part of "FineWine".

The other part and the important one, is that tier for tier, AMD GPUs tend to hold up better over time.

Example: 7950 vs 660Ti, 7970 vs 680. 290 vs 780, 290X vs Titan Kepler/780Ti, 380 vs 960.

Whatever the cause, their relative performance improves, to a point where a GPU like the 7970 is still a very capable 1080p gaming GPU today in most of the new games whereas the 680 fell behind.

The proposed idea of FW is that a gamer on an AMD GPU gets more value out of it over the years, so they can go longer without upgrading and still get a good gaming experience.
 
Bahanime said:
Kyle, performance gains with drivers is only 1 part of "FineWine".

The other part and the important one, is that tier for tier, AMD GPUs tend to hold up better over time.

Example: 7950 vs 660Ti, 7970 vs 680. 290 vs 780, 290X vs Titan Kepler/780Ti, 380 vs 960.

Whatever the cause, their relative performance improves, to a point where a GPU like the 7970 is still a very capable 1080p gaming GPU today in most of the new games whereas the 680 fell behind.

The proposed idea of FW is that a gamer on an AMD GPU gets more value out of it over the years, so they can go longer without upgrading and still get a good gaming experience.
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Roger that.
 
Dat marketing graph 6% look like 100% increase.
1485604665LXDaK22cJA_1_4_l.png
 
Bahanime said:
The other part and the important one, is that tier for tier, AMD GPUs tend to hold up better over time.
Click to expand...
How so? I mean, case in point, 380 vs 960 are exactly the same as they were 2 years ago, save for Doom and AGE.
Bahanime said:
The proposed idea of FW is that a gamer on an AMD GPU gets more value out of it over the years, so they can go longer without upgrading and still get a good gaming experience.
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Actually, you get the same value, because you do have to drop settings in modern games to maintain experience. On both cards. So, the proposed idea of FW was a meme and frankly, remains a meme, as this article finely illustrates.

Can't wait to see nVidia follow-up. I suppose it will compare 980Ti and 1080 or something.
 
Bahanime said:
Kyle, performance gains with drivers is only 1 part of "FineWine".

The other part and the important one, is that tier for tier, AMD GPUs tend to hold up better over time.

Example: 7950 vs 660Ti, 7970 vs 680. 290 vs 780, 290X vs Titan Kepler/780Ti, 380 vs 960.

Whatever the cause, their relative performance improves, to a point where a GPU like the 7970 is still a very capable 1080p gaming GPU today in most of the new games whereas the 680 fell behind.

The proposed idea of FW is that a gamer on an AMD GPU gets more value out of it over the years, so they can go longer without upgrading and still get a good gaming experience.
Click to expand...

Lol and trolls continue with that fake and debunked argument .. in games where 7950/7970/290 / 290X were performance, competitive and comparable versus 670/680/780 / Titan / 780Ti in their time the differences remain the same, The differences are not due to driver optimizations or because they age better than nvidia cards, that "anomaly" has two reasons, the first is related to game developers who perform optimizations and development of games with "current technology" AMD brands which included all HD7000 series, R9 200 series and R9 300 series cards, sharing rebrands and the same architecture, can you say that the architecture of Cayman has received the same "love" ( Optimizations) as GCN? in fact I venture to say Fermi in that aspect have aged way better than Cayman because it had better driver support overtime and wasn't just abandoned as happened to Cayman when AMD launched GCN.

GCN did not change much from 1.0 to 1.2 which helped a lot in part, but what is happening now with the RX 400 series? Is AMD becoming a new Nvidia because all its drivers and enhancements focus on RX 400 cards? That's the same nvidia do with your current generation and architectures, and that's the same thing is gona move to the current AMD technology as soon Vega see the world, that the same reason became the second part of that performance differences , Nvidia went from kepler to maxwell and all its focus became maxwell, then from maxwell to pascal and the same thing happens, but why does maxwell age better than keppler? Because they share similarities in architecture to pascal, so most pascal enhancements also apply to Maxwell .. as well as with AMD with 390 series to 290 Series to 280 Series and HD7000 series ...

This article just proved that it is not a question of a great aging or a great architecture or that AMD make better cards than nvidia, which were only more supported because of an architecture basically unchanged in years and which can be considered "an anomaly"...
 
Excellent read. If anything, it made me pull the trigger on an MSI RX 480 4GB on Newegg today - It's down to $175 and there's a $20 rebate until Wednesday. So, RX480 for $155? Yup. And this generational comparison made it more clear that it was a sound investment besides a great deal.

B-bye GTX 770 :D
 
Nice article, I appreciate any gains I can get from simple software updates.

But I'm a bit disappointed, for a few weeks now we've seen posters talk about the "legs" AMD hardware has and how AMD users get better driver performance increases.

Either way this just proves that AMD's driver team is competent and there is no such thing as a "magic bullet" driver.
 
Araxie said:
Lol and trolls continue with that fake and debunked argument

This article just proved that it is not a question of a great aging or a great architecture or that AMD make better cards than nvidia, which were only more supported because of an architecture basically unchanged in years and which can be considered "an anomaly"...
Click to expand...

I think you mis-read, you seem to ignored this:

"Whatever the cause, their relative performance improves."

Whatever the cause... because I didn't want to get into and speculate what the causes are. But really, it doesn't matter the causes, to the gamer, AMD's old GCN GPUs from way back are still potent today. More-so than the NV GPUs of their time.

Examples:

780ti-blops3-1080p.png


780ti-bf1-1080p.png


780ti-doom-vlk-1080p.png


Whatever the cause.. these older NV GPUs (770, 780Ti) just do not fare well. For example, the AMD GPU of that time would be the 7970 and 290X and in these very titles, the 290X is up there next to the RX 480 in performance. While the 7970 is far ahead of the RX 460.

So while you can trash talk, just understand that "FineWine" isn't about drivers only, nor is it about console optimization, or NV neglecting to optimize their older GPUs for new games.. it's a combination effect. But this article from [H] definitely shows AMD keeps on optimizing for it's entire GCN stack with new drivers. So even older GPUs benefit.

The end result? AMD's GCN based GPUs have out-lasted their NV counterpart.

Whether it remains to be seen for current stuff in a few years time, we can only speculate.

Though there's evidence to show that again its happening in the Maxwell era, with the 390 vs 970 situation:

 
It was smart of AMD to iterate on GCN because it allowed them to keep these optimizations rolling out to many generations. Im just happy my 290X's still kick ass and will do me until Vega/Volta arrives and maybe beyond that. I do agree it maybe paints Nvidia in a poor light as they have continuously jumped architectures and not kept optimizations going for the older uarch's. But that is their business model and the way they decided to do it, it creates more innovation in their designs id imagine, but leave the older gens to stagnate. The unfortunate reality is that a 780Ti today is a joke compared to a 290X, when it was originally faster. With the latest round of drivers im wondering where Hawaii sits in relation to the newer 980. Im just happy I picked the right camp to do a longer term build with because its a pain to tear down the WC loop!

Thanks for the article guys, looking forward to the follow up, likely a 980Ti and 1060?
 
Love these types of articles.

Differing driver version performance / quality attributes have always been a difficult thing to aggregate and quantify. These numbers all in one spot benefit gamers' decision-making and adds value to their gaming experience.

As someone else noted earlier in the thread, retesting from anew all of the driver versions in all the titles featured was/is no cheap meal ticket. More like a serious labor of love that belies the sense of purpose and commitment [H] continually demonstrates toward its community, as well as the larger enthusiast community as a whole.

Thanks you.
 
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Araxie said:
Lol and trolls continue with that fake and debunked argument .. in games where 7950/7970/290 / 290X were performance, competitive and comparable versus 670/680/780 / Titan / 780Ti in their time the differences remain the same, The differences are not due to driver optimizations or because they age better than nvidia cards, that "anomaly" has two reasons, the first is related to game developers who perform optimizations and development of games with "current technology" AMD brands which included all HD7000 series, R9 200 series and R9 300 series cards, sharing rebrands and the same architecture, can you say that the architecture of Cayman has received the same "love" ( Optimizations) as GCN? in fact I venture to say Fermi in that aspect have aged way better than Cayman because it had better driver support overtime and wasn't just abandoned as happened to Cayman when AMD launched GCN.

GCN did not change much from 1.0 to 1.2 which helped a lot in part, but what is happening now with the RX 400 series? Is AMD becoming a new Nvidia because all its drivers and enhancements focus on RX 400 cards? That's the same nvidia do with your current generation and architectures, and that's the same thing is gona move to the current AMD technology as soon Vega see the world, that the same reason became the second part of that performance differences , Nvidia went from kepler to maxwell and all its focus became maxwell, then from maxwell to pascal and the same thing happens, but why does maxwell age better than keppler? Because they share similarities in architecture to pascal, so most pascal enhancements also apply to Maxwell .. as well as with AMD with 390 series to 290 Series to 280 Series and HD7000 series ...

This article just proved that it is not a question of a great aging or a great architecture or that AMD make better cards than nvidia, which were only more supported because of an architecture basically unchanged in years and which can be considered "an anomaly"...
Click to expand...
He didn't go into reasons just stated a trend. You basically confirmed what he said.
 
Bahanime said:
Kyle, performance gains with drivers is only 1 part of "FineWine".

The other part and the important one, is that tier for tier, AMD GPUs tend to hold up better over time.

Example: 7950 vs 660Ti, 7970 vs 680. 290 vs 780, 290X vs Titan Kepler/780Ti, 380 vs 960.

Whatever the cause, their relative performance improves, to a point where a GPU like the 7970 is still a very capable 1080p gaming GPU today in most of the new games whereas the 680 fell behind.

The proposed idea of FW is that a gamer on an AMD GPU gets more value out of it over the years, so they can go longer without upgrading and still get a good gaming experience.
Click to expand...

Yes, essentially what I wanted to say. I think the "Fine Wine" thing is more about how the cards continue to be viable long after their nVidia release counterparts get gimped by nVidia so that their users have to buy new cards.

Just look at how the 390x against the Pascal cards in the new Resident Evil game for an example. Cards released 3-4 years ago shouldn't be beating top of the line cards released in the last year in new games, but it seems to happen pretty often with AMD cards for some reason, while older nVidia cards don't have those kind of legs.
 
sover said:
Yes, essentially what I wanted to say. I think the "Fine Wine" thing is more about how the cards continue to be viable long after their nVidia release counterparts get gimped by nVidia so that their users have to buy new cards.

Just look at how the 390x against the Pascal cards in the new Resident Evil game for an example. Cards released 3-4 years ago shouldn't be beating top of the line cards released in the last year in new games, but it seems to happen pretty often with AMD cards for some reason, while older nVidia cards don't have those kind of legs.
Click to expand...
As said ad infinitum, AMD has used the same GPU architecture since the 7970. Meaning improvements made to newer hardware improves the old without any additional work. With the R&D budget Radeon has they have to stretch their technology from one iteration to the next out of necessity.

Also going to need a source that shows a 390X "beating" top-of-the-line Pascal in RE7.
 
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