Resolution Scaling: AMD 1 - nVIDIA 0

[XacTactX]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_6950_Vortex_II/27.html

AMD has been making good on performance improvements with the new 11.4 drivers, especially with Cayman it seems. But look at 1920 x 1200 (2.3 MP) and 2560 x 1600 (4.1 MP) and you should see what I'm talking about. AMD gets faster as resolution goes up, possibly due to CPU limitation with nVIDIA, or some other reason. The HD 6970 is now ~6% faster than the 570 at 2560, making the 6970 faster while costing less to buy and own. The 6950 2GB is 8% faster at 1920 than the 560, and 9% faster than the 560 at 2560, which I'd say is significant.

This is just my personal opinion mixed with some fact, please correct where necessary.

 

[pxc]

The HD 6970 is now ~6% faster than the 570 at 2560,

The link shows:

2560x1600
93% HD 6950 stock
100% HD 6950 (overclocked PowerColor model)
102% GTX 570 stock

The PowerColor model is 20-30% more power efficient under load than the GTX 570, and virtually identical in performance/$.

 

[vengence]

OMFG 8% eight hole percent!?!?!?!?!?1 That's like 1 frame more out of 12! Stop the presses! This is REVOLUTIONARY!!!!!!


Seriously, grow up, you'll never pass the pepsi challenge at a 6-8% frame rate difference. The difference between the resolutions is like 5%. It's waaay under the noise floor.

 

[Yakk]

Well, as [H] 's own tri-Fire reviews prove, seems nvidia does a lot more work on the CPU, and AMD seems to offload more of the work on the GPU rather than the drivers & CPU.

Good & bad for both. But differences no doubt scale as resolution and card count increases.

Nvidia's way is probably easier to upgrade if you got something wrong and fix it, all at the expense of performance and CPU utilization. (and somehow they also mange to use boatloads of more power for the same tasks)

AMD's way, it's harder to change something that is hardcoded into the GPU (ie: CF on 5xxx series problem could only be fixed in a new GPU series), but you'll generally get optimal performance on the hardware you have along with great power efficiency, while being more independent of the CPU.

Seems to be a trade-off on your approach. Both are viable options, just different.


This brings something else to mind...


Trivia Time! Which former IT figure said the following (paraphrased) :

"We don't have one, because the (graphics) chip steals cycles from the CPU!"

 

[Lord_Exodia]

This all makes sense as nvidia appears to be more cpu dependent and AMD has more vram. I personally like ot game at the IQ settings hardocp's recent redux article avoided because nvidia would have run out of vram so AMD was my logical choice. In either case I think it's a hard value to dismiss with AMD's offerings. I'm not saying nvidia doesn't also offer compelling products. The 3GB GTX 580 still is the top single gpu card IMO and a tri or quad setup of that is still top E-Peen for a power rig where money is of no concern.

 

[XacTactX]

AMD's way, it's harder to change something that is hardcoded into the GPU (ie: CF on 5xxx series problem could only be fixed in a new GPU series), but you'll generally get optimal performance on the hardware you have along with great power efficiency, while being more independent of the CPU.

I forgot to write about it in the first post, but I think they've done something to the 5000 series' CrossFire scaling. The 5970 is now 25% faster than the 580 at 2560, there were times before when it was only 10% faster on average. Same thing with the 6990, now it's noticeably ahead of the 590 at 2560.

Compare relative performance at 2560, the gap between AMD's top dogs and nVIDIA's top dogs goes up, though I'm not sure if it's because of what games W1zzard is using in the test suite or the drivers.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_6950_Vortex_II/27.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_6670/22.html

Trivia Time! Which former IT figure said the following (paraphrased) :

"We don't have one, because the (graphics) chip steals cycles from the CPU!"

Haha, got no idea.

 

[Deleted whining member 223597]

Cool story bro. How many more times does it have to be mentioned? I mentioned this twice in the triple review. Btw single card > dual card because of less heat and no stuttering up to 2560x1600. Gtx 580 can play almost every game at that resolution with good fps.