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Benchmark Wars

I think it's funny people are taking up for Nvidia when it has been a running business practice from day one to be douchebags.

they have done nothing to earn good will, other than make working video cards, which last I checked AMD does that too, and there aren't multiple stories about them being shady scumbags...

objective much?
 
Hell, I haven't even installed the first one yet.

Semi-seriously, though: developers pushing one benchmark/application or another is certainly nothing new, but it's good to see that folks aren't following their "suggestions." So more power to you, guys.
 
keep hearing "Blah Blah good reason not to buy nvidia cards". no way this is a ridiculous reason not to buy them, even worse case scenario of bogus code to trip up amd cards/drivers it's still irrational to avoid nvidia. sure it's a reason to jump and shout about their practices but seriously would you rather drive a regular car or a sports car with a wheel clamp? the most likely scenario is that amd drivers aren't 'up to code' as past experience leads me to believe. nvidia does work closer with game developers and their drivers are more solid compared to amd. this should never be discounted as it plays a critical role in the performance of the product, again like a sports car with cheap shit bald tyres you're gonna crash that thing into a pole. if it is bogus code like people suspect what if you want to play the next game nvidia rapes? it's all good to be honest and legit but unfortunately the mafia runs shit around here so you gotta pay your dues.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
keep hearing "Blah Blah good reason not to buy nvidia cards". no way this is a ridiculous reason not to buy them, even worse case scenario of bogus code to trip up amd cards/drivers it's still irrational to avoid nvidia. sure it's a reason to jump and shout about their practices but seriously would you rather drive a regular car or a sports car with a wheel clamp? the most likely scenario is that amd drivers aren't 'up to code' as past experience leads me to believe. nvidia does work closer with game developers and their drivers are more solid compared to amd. this should never be discounted as it plays a critical role in the performance of the product, again like a sports car with cheap shit bald tyres you're gonna crash that thing into a pole. if it is bogus code like people suspect what if you want to play the next game nvidia rapes? it's all good to be honest and legit but unfortunately the mafia runs shit around here so you gotta pay your dues.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
You guys just need to stick to your guns and review the game when it is done since that is what the rest of us will be playing, not some time demo. I can see Nvidia probably has an advantage in tessalation since they are pushing for it to be used but the point of tesslation is to put more polys on screen with out slowing down fps, so if there are more polygons on screen and you are still getting a decent frame rate there maybe something to it.
On the other hand if runs the same speed in dx9 or dx10 cards with the same looking objects then it is a joke. My guess is if it works one way and after they optimize the drivers the objects don't look right in the demo, then they just tossed out some calculations. Which is far worse, than wanting it tested before the game is done. When the game does come out I'd test the actual game play with the current AMD drivers and with what ever they come up with by then.

As to flinging mud and screwing with the code but sides are muddy as hell. My favorite has to be Ati getting Vanguard Saga of Heros. They said their was nothing funny then nvidia came out with the 6800 and it was closer to the raster than anything else had in years and the highest poly and normal map count the characters did not even render at all showing that the code was bent as hell.

The other thing is the thing that should matter the most at the end of the day is can I play the game and does it look good.
 
stealthy123 said:
I think it's funny people are taking up for Nvidia when it has been a running business practice from day one to be douchebags.

they have done nothing to earn good will, other than make working video cards, which last I checked AMD does that too, and there aren't multiple stories about them being shady scumbags...

objective much?
Click to expand...

Nah... Just articles about their broken drivers.

It's been a while since ATI was caught being shady. Was FutureMark still called MadOnion back then?

Then there was the whole Quake/Quack thing. Which, I need to be specific on. A NUMBER of you have blamed NVIDIA for this one. It was ATI that cheated, in a quite ugly manner, to get better performance in that particular benchmark.
 
Decibel said:
Nah... Just articles about their broken drivers.

It's been a while since ATI was caught being shady. Was FutureMark still called MadOnion back then?

Then there was the whole Quake/Quack thing. Which, I need to be specific on. A NUMBER of you have blamed NVIDIA for this one. It was ATI that cheated, in a quite ugly manner, to get better performance in that particular benchmark.
Click to expand...

I remember back on my RAGE card that ATI released a specific quake 3 driver, or some such thing...
 
Decibel said:
Nah... Just articles about their broken drivers.

It's been a while since ATI was caught being shady. Was FutureMark still called MadOnion back then?

Then there was the whole Quake/Quack thing. Which, I need to be specific on. A NUMBER of you have blamed NVIDIA for this one. It was ATI that cheated, in a quite ugly manner, to get better performance in that particular benchmark.
Click to expand...

Quake was the one where ATI dropped the IQ to improve performance wasn't it?
 
griff30 said:
If you scratch Ubisoft titles off the Christmas list.--- Suddenly software gets fixed.
Too bad we cant get that done with F@H.
Click to expand...

As SirMonkey stated earlier, Stanford is supposedly working on an decent ATI folding client right now, and is supposed to enter closed beta testing very soon. Once that happens, hopefully it shouldn't be too much longer before it enters open beta so that all of us can try it. Unfortunately, it sucks to keep waiting as i'm sure we have a ton of untapped potential here on the [H]ard forums based on the sheer percentage of us running ATI video cards.
 
fattypants said:
I think he's just pointing out the intellectual bankruptcy of attempting to equate a cheat from almost a decade ago to being just as bad as still cheating to this [literally] day.
Click to expand...

Its as fair as randomly jumping to conclusions with no solid facts.

Note: PR bullshit does NOT count as solid facts.
 
Hey Kyle, I just wanted to say that I respect you. I removed AT from my RSS feeds long ago because I've noticed strange things. You tell the IT/enthusiast world like it is. You're an asset and I'm not trying to kiss up for some unknown reason, just trying to tell it like it is.
 
Derangel said:
Its as fair as randomly jumping to conclusions with no solid facts.

Note: PR bullshit does NOT count as solid facts.
Click to expand...

Neither of us know if this is fact or PR spin until the NDA lifts. If the Hawx benchmarks line up with other benchmarks, or of they're way out of whack, we'll know the truth.

You still gotta wonder though...why is Nvidia so keen on using an unreleased demo of a TWIMTBP game?

Tune in tomorrow for answers...
 
H.A.W.X.2 can go to hell for all I care. Benchmarks lie and so do companies.

"I'm sorry, you lost internet connect, we can't let you continue playing your single player game until it is reestablished. Thank you for buying Ubi Soft."

Babel-fish translation...

"We don't believe you paid for that product, extensive market research proofs to us that you are a pirate, since no one would actually pay for our games. Thank you for stealing Ubi Soft. Why are you still here?"
 
Derangel said:
Quake was the one where ATI dropped the IQ to improve performance wasn't it?
Click to expand...


Actually they both pulled fast ones during the Q3 era. When Ati did it it was cheating, when Nv did it i was called optimizing. Renaming the .exe back then got you a very different experience performance wise. Though to be honest, the IQ loss was minimal to hardly noticeable when you were zipping along at 100fps trying your best to slaughter all that stood b4 you in a fast paced DM. Everyone optimizes on a per game basis these days anyhow, that is not the issue. Batman Arkham Asylum AA style shenanigans are the issue. This benchmark, if the AMD assertions are truly correct, would be another one of those problematic shenanigans.

Though I am currently more inclined to believe that this is more of an "oops we ran out of time" thing rather than a deliberate gimp on Ubi's part, even with Ubi's less than stellar history of fair play. If that turns out to be the truth, then Nv is simply trying to take advantage of a broken and meaningless benchmark to try and reduce any damage this launch does to their market share. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
 
fattypants said:
Neither of us know if this is fact or PR spin until the NDA lifts. If the Hawx benchmarks line up with other benchmarks, or of they're way out of whack, we'll know the truth.

You still gotta wonder though...why is Nvidia so keen on using an unreleased demo of a TWIMTBP game?

Tune in tomorrow for answers...
Click to expand...

As a rule I take anything said by PR people with a grain of salt. I tend to label all PR statements as PR bullshit until they've been proven to be otherwise. Seen too many PR statements that are outright lies not to do so.

Because it makes their cards look good. AMD doesn't want people using it because it makes their cards look bad. AMD's email to Kyle simply boils down to that.
 
Derangel said:
AMD doesn't want people using it because it makes their cards look bad. AMD's email to Kyle simply boils down to that.
Click to expand...

If it makes their cards look bad and does so unfairly, they have every right to protest. But we will know tomorrow whether or not his protest is unfounded.

By the way, while you're taking PR statements with a grain of salt, you might also consider taking TWIMTBP game benchmarks the same way. Especially when, as in this case, Nvidia has has much more and much earlier access to the game.
 
GORANKAR said:
Actually they both pulled fast ones during the Q3 era. When Ati did it it was cheating, when Nv did it i was called optimizing. Renaming the .exe back then got you a very different experience performance wise. Though to be honest, the IQ loss was minimal to hardly noticeable when you were zipping along at 100fps trying your best to slaughter all that stood b4 you in a fast paced DM. Everyone optimizes on a per game basis these days anyhow, that is not the issue. Batman Arkham Asylum AA style shenanigans are the issue. This benchmark, if the AMD assertions are truly correct, would be another one of those problematic shenanigans.

Though I am currently more inclined to believe that this is more of an "oops we ran out of time" thing rather than a deliberate gimp on Ubi's part, even with Ubi's less than stellar history of fair play. If that turns out to be the truth, then Nv is simply trying to take advantage of a broken and meaningless benchmark to try and reduce any damage this launch does to their market share. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
Click to expand...

Thankfully stuff like the Batman AA AA issue aren't too common. It wouldn't surprise me if some studio came out and talked about AMD pulling some crap too. Its something not at all unique to this industry and actually its fairly tame compared to some of the crap that goes on elsewhere.

Fun fact to prove a point: DC and Marvel killed dozens of comic book companies during the silver and gold ages due to both the Comic Book Code and them co-owning the rights to the term "super hero" and all variations of it. Both companies aggressively go after anyone using it. They are both quite likely price fixing comic book prices as well as prices on both sides seem to go up at around the same time.

At least AMD and Nvidia aren't that bad, yet. Still I wish we didn't have to worry about this stuff happening and didn't have to go "well yeah its entirely possible that the code was intentionally screwed". Would make things so much simpler. Can't even go to consoles without worrying about that stuff either.
 
fattypants said:
If it makes their cards look bad and does so unfairly, they have every right to protest. But we will know tomorrow whether or not his protest is unfounded.

By the way, while you're taking PR statements with a grain of salt, you might also consider taking TWIMTBP game benchmarks the same way. Especially when, as in this case, Nvidia has has much more and much earlier access to the game.
Click to expand...

I take ALL canned benchmarks to be an utter waste of my time. The only performance numbers I put any stock in are real world numbers from people who actually play games to test them.
 
Derangel said:
I take ALL canned benchmarks to be an utter waste of my time. The only performance numbers I put any stock in are real world numbers from people who actually play games to test them.
Click to expand...

Agreed. This is pretty much the essence of [H]ard. Folks obsessed with time demos and canned benches are on the wrong site.
 
In addition, many game demos that are released before a title often carry a disclaimer at the beginning that basically states the demo does not reflect the quality of the final product.
 
I cant believe that some of u couldnt believe something like this can happen. Fact being it has happened and will continue to happen. Nvidia wish they had it easy, actions like this make it obvious.
 
No worries, in the end you can be sure Kyle and [H]ard will let us know what time it is :)
 
fattypants said:
I think he's just pointing out the intellectual bankruptcy of attempting to equate a cheat from almost a decade ago to being just as bad as still cheating to this [literally] day.
Click to expand...

I did mention more recent stuff. Like the crossfire driver fiasco that [H] had a big hand in getting ATI to fix it. Forget about cheats, it wouldn't surprise me if its mostly driver issues that is causing any potential tessellation problems.
 
Saist said:
My reply to this is short, and consists solely of game titles:

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Borderlands
Need for Speed
City of Heroes
Doom 3

Each of these commercially released games were deliberatly code sabotaged by Nvidia during the development stages. Nvidia has a long history of code sabotage and paying developers / publishers to use artificially altered applications to improve perceptive performance of their products while minimizing the performance of a competitor.

Now, I'm not going to say that AMD/ATi has not done the same thing. As far as I am personally aware, directly aware, indirectly aware, or remotely aware, AMD/ATi has never actually been proven to have paid a developer / publisher to sabotage commercially released game code. As far as I am personally aware, directly aware, indirectly aware, or remotely aware, AMD/ATi has never actually been proven to have paid a developer / publisher to sabotage independently released game code.

I am directly aware of AMD/ATi working with developers to implement vendor neutral solutions. Case in point: City of Heroes: Going Rogue. AMD helped Paragon Studios implement an OpenGL specification rendering engine that gives identical image quality as long as the driver supports ratified OpenGL specification calls. Yes, the changes to the CoH rendering engine did knock out graphics chips and drivers that did not make ratified OpenGL API calls (cough: INTEL :cough), but for the most part, Nvidia and AMD/ATi cards given the same image quality with roughly the same performance among similar performing cards. I find AMD's statement about providing a neutral code solution to Ubisoft to believable.

Now, is Nvidia grasping at Straws? I have my own opinions about this, and my own opinion is that Nvidia, as a graphics card company, doesn't have long to live.
Click to expand...

Quite the claim you're making, especially considering the fact that NVIDIA had no hand in Borderlands or Need for Speed: Shift whatsoever.

Batman they obviously worked closely with for PhysX integration. Contrary to popular belief, AA was disabled on ATI in Batman: AA because ATIs drivers didn't support MSAA modes on one of the proper format surfaces that Batman used, and it was not NVIDIAs choice to use that format either.. it was in the game already and was not osmething that could just be changed out last minute without re-QA'ing the whole game, given that AA was a last minute addition to give PC gamers more differentiation from console.

If you don't believe me, go query the ATI drivers for multisampling support on G16R16 from any driver in 2009 prior to July's driver and prior and you'll see it returns an error. ATI added support right before the game launched but it was too late to go back and test for it, and it was also not even known that the support had been added last minute. Without the vendor lock it would've resulted in corruption on ATI, meaning NVIDIA was adding to the developers support costs by adding AA, which is clearly not an option.

So if anything, really ATIs drivers were holding back PC gamers having AA in the game.
 
Interesting criticisms directed at AMD's chosen way of dealing with tessellation from Anandtech's forum. How real and objective is this? Anyone know?

"The whole point of tessellation is that it is adaptive. If it's all fixed anyway, why not just precalc it all, like games have always been doing?
Unigine Heaven is adaptive, and so is HAWX 2. They don't just bruteforce all triangles down to the maximum level of tessellation. Run Unigine Heaven in wireframe mode, and you'll see how it dynamically adds and removes triangles when objects get closer or move further away, even on the extreme setting. The setting merely dictates how detailed the adaptive tessellation should be. At lower settings, it will stop subdividing the triangles sooner, resulting in lower detail. But other than that, the algorithm is exactly the same: always adaptive.

Where AMD is hurt is in their limited throughput.
I mean, if you take one triangle over the entire screen, and tessellate it down to triangles of about 16 pixels, as AMD suggests... then that is still adaptive tessellation...
It will not work well on AMD's hardware though, because the pain is in the conversion of 1 triangle to such a large number.
AMD can only do limited amplification of triangles, so you need to feed it pretty detailed geometry to begin with, and then have limited subdivision done by the tessellator, eg each triangle converted to 4 smaller ones.
But that is not how tessellation is meant. Tessellation is meant to serve two purposes:
1) Reduce the overall memory/bandwidth required for geometry, by generating details on-the-fly.
2) Improve image quality by smoothly moving from lower levels of detail to higher levels of detail, and avoiding any kind of undersampling/oversampling problems.

But in order to achieve these two things, you need to be able to handle a large range of tessellation factors, so you can start with very low detail geometry, and have it tessellated down to almost per-pixel details when required (again, this is all adaptive).
Since AMD's range is so limited, you can't really achieve either of the purposes for tessellation. You need to feed it highly detailed geometry in the first place, which means you still need a lot of memory/bandwidth. And you still need to rely on 'oldskool' multiple levels of fixed geometry, with their popping and undersampling/oversampling issues.

Bottom line is just: AMD's tessellation is a bit of a failure. Just like the geometry shader was a failure for both AMD and nVidia in DX10. You couldn't do what you wanted to do, because throughput was too slow.
AMD fell for the same trap again in DX11, nVidia went with a complete redesign, which apparently works much better (although we're still not quite there yet).

AMD is trying to put up a smokescreen by trying to make the focus on triangle size, but that is not the REAL issue here. The real issue is that their tessellator is a bottleneck. It cannot subdivide triangles and spit them out fast enough to keep the rest of the GPU busy. That's why nVidia chose to do a fully parallelized implementation, rather than a serial one (as I said, that's the mistake made with the geometry shader, which theoretically could already do a bit of tessellation, it just couldn't spit out the triangles fast enough)."

Source:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=30637112&postcount=224
 
BlueStorm said:
Batman they obviously worked closely with for PhysX integration. Contrary to popular belief, AA was disabled on ATI in Batman: AA because ATIs drivers didn't support MSAA modes on one of the proper format surfaces that Batman used, and it was not NVIDIAs choice to use that format either.. it was in the game already and was not osmething that could just be changed out last minute without re-QA'ing the whole game, given that AA was a last minute addition to give PC gamers more differentiation from console.

If you don't believe me, go query the ATI drivers for multisampling support on G16R16 from any driver in 2009 prior to July's driver and prior and you'll see it returns an error. ATI added support right before the game launched but it was too late to go back and test for it, and it was also not even known that the support had been added last minute. Without the vendor lock it would've resulted in corruption on ATI, meaning NVIDIA was adding to the developers support costs by adding AA, which is clearly not an option.

So if anything, really ATIs drivers were holding back PC gamers having AA in the game.
Click to expand...


If they would have put the vendor lock out at the beginning of the loop, and did not have the AMD cards do all of the work, all the time, only to throw it away at the end, non Nv fanatics might actually attempt to believe that. Additionally, AMD's claim that the code was generic and would have worked fine on their cards was not publicly refuted by either the dev or Nv. It was a shady move. No way to BS around that really.
 
Wait isn't this just PhysX with DX11, Tesselation instead of x86 code?

Nvidia has specifically gimped PhysX on CPUs and is asking Ubisoft to do the same with Tesselation and DirectX 11...

This isn't suprising, its how Nvidia Competes.. they do this to compete with the CPU and PhysX and its no suprised they are supporting a developer to do the same thing with Tesselation.


For those who do not know what the PhysX cripple issue is i recommend reading the Article

It boils down to the fact that Nvidia purposefully uses an ancient x87 instruction set for PhysX on the CPU, they specifically found a weak point in the CPU and used that making the CPU seem unable to process the physics nearly as well as the GPU - artificially crippling PhysX.
 
Blacklash said:
AMD is trying to put up a smokescreen by trying to make the focus on triangle size, but that is not the REAL issue here. The real issue is that their tessellator is a bottleneck. It cannot subdivide triangles and spit them out fast enough to keep the rest of the GPU busy. That's why nVidia chose to do a fully parallelized implementation, rather than a serial one (as I said, that's the mistake made with the geometry shader, which theoretically could already do a bit of tessellation, it just couldn't spit out the triangles fast enough)." [/I]

Source:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=30637112&postcount=224
Click to expand...

I think Scali should have waited for the results, before making that statement. Initial tests shows that the 6870 is on par with the GTX 460 in Heaven benchmark with extreme tessellation:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1036321789#post1036321789
 
Blacklash said:
Interesting criticisms directed at AMD's chosen way of dealing with tessellation from Anandtech's forum. How real and objective is this? Anyone know?

"The whole point of tessellation is that it is adaptive. If it's all fixed anyway, why not just precalc it all, like games have always been doing?
Unigine Heaven is adaptive, and so is HAWX 2. They don't just bruteforce all triangles down to the maximum level of tessellation. Run Unigine Heaven in wireframe mode, and you'll see how it dynamically adds and removes triangles when objects get closer or move further away, even on the extreme setting. The setting merely dictates how detailed the adaptive tessellation should be. At lower settings, it will stop subdividing the triangles sooner, resulting in lower detail. But other than that, the algorithm is exactly the same: always adaptive.

Where AMD is hurt is in their limited throughput.
I mean, if you take one triangle over the entire screen, and tessellate it down to triangles of about 16 pixels, as AMD suggests... then that is still adaptive tessellation...
It will not work well on AMD's hardware though, because the pain is in the conversion of 1 triangle to such a large number.
AMD can only do limited amplification of triangles, so you need to feed it pretty detailed geometry to begin with, and then have limited subdivision done by the tessellator, eg each triangle converted to 4 smaller ones.
But that is not how tessellation is meant. Tessellation is meant to serve two purposes:
1) Reduce the overall memory/bandwidth required for geometry, by generating details on-the-fly.
2) Improve image quality by smoothly moving from lower levels of detail to higher levels of detail, and avoiding any kind of undersampling/oversampling problems.

But in order to achieve these two things, you need to be able to handle a large range of tessellation factors, so you can start with very low detail geometry, and have it tessellated down to almost per-pixel details when required (again, this is all adaptive).
Since AMD's range is so limited, you can't really achieve either of the purposes for tessellation. You need to feed it highly detailed geometry in the first place, which means you still need a lot of memory/bandwidth. And you still need to rely on 'oldskool' multiple levels of fixed geometry, with their popping and undersampling/oversampling issues.

Bottom line is just: AMD's tessellation is a bit of a failure. Just like the geometry shader was a failure for both AMD and nVidia in DX10. You couldn't do what you wanted to do, because throughput was too slow.
AMD fell for the same trap again in DX11, nVidia went with a complete redesign, which apparently works much better (although we're still not quite there yet).

AMD is trying to put up a smokescreen by trying to make the focus on triangle size, but that is not the REAL issue here. The real issue is that their tessellator is a bottleneck. It cannot subdivide triangles and spit them out fast enough to keep the rest of the GPU busy. That's why nVidia chose to do a fully parallelized implementation, rather than a serial one (as I said, that's the mistake made with the geometry shader, which theoretically could already do a bit of tessellation, it just couldn't spit out the triangles fast enough)."

Source:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=30637112&postcount=224
Click to expand...

It's ironic that when the 5xxx series launched with DX11 before NVIDIA, AMD was touting tessellation as a key feature. Now that NVIDIA does tessellation better, suddenly they are trying to downplay it and asking reviewers not to benchmark it.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/19242/10
A 460 = 5870 when tessellation is used. They even had their spinmaster Richard Huddy complain that NVIDIAs cards are too powerful with regards to tessellation.

AMD does not want people to bench games with PhysX, CUDA, Tessellation. Pretty soon they will want reviewers to use lower resolutions and no AA :mad:
 
H-street said:
For those who do not know what the PhysX cripple issue is i recommend reading the Article

It boils down to the fact that Nvidia purposefully uses an ancient x87 instruction set for PhysX on the CPU, they specifically found a weak point in the CPU and used that making the CPU seem unable to process the physics nearly as well as the GPU - artificially crippling PhysX.
Click to expand...

Actually this article has been discussed extensively on the Beyond3D forum (and other forums as well), and essentially proven to be wrong as the recompiled x86 (SSE) code only gave a 2% performance difference.

That doesn't change my stance on PhysX however.. it is an annoying splinter API that confuses more than it helps. If Intel and Nvidia would've worked together with AMD on a common standard, perhaps we would've seen physics in games, that everybody could've enjoyed (or found out that the performance simply isn't there on present day GPUs, as seems more likely)

As it is, we have a vendor-specific standard that drains 50% of the fps in games, for less than impressive results. Not usable if you have a mid-range (or lower) GPU (think laptops and HTPCs, and you'll see the problem with that), and not a long-term solution, as developers put themselves in a corner when using PhysX - locking out (at least) half of their customers from these effects and be accused of taking sides. Probably not a problem for Ubisoft, but I'm sure others are more interested in not pissing on their customers.

That, however, is a completely different discussion.
 
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