What Sucks About HardOCP Video Card Reviews

evilsofa said:
Then go be like most other people and read those benchmark sites.
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I do but I thought this thread was about ideas to improve HardOCP benchmarking articles? Am I wrong for making a couple of suggestions? Seems you think that way.
 
primetime said:
For what its worth (not much) but i almost ALWAYS go straight to the apples to apples comparison. The apples to oranges comparison just dont interest me much - Just throwing that out there for my 2cents
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Same. I like seeing two cards on med/high settings and the frames they both pull. I could care less if card A pulls 60fps at low and card B pulls 60 fps on high. I want to run on high. I want to see what card does so at a given speed.
 
i personally don't like the charts, i prefer bar charts instead of candlestick ones, but that's just me! other than that i like the reviews.
 
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According to a lot of people around here you just don't kiss enough AMD ass. Get with the program!

/s
 
I have no problem with Hardocp video card reviews. My only suggestion would be to add a few more games, even if they don't push the graphical boundaries. Things like CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends are all super popular games and people want to know what kinda performance they can expect in those games.

Other than that I will continue to lurk around.
 
Brent_Justice said:
You know what I just noticed, that I never noticed until now, there is an NVIDIA The Way It's Meant to be Played logo on the setup screen of WoW - Screenshots | [H]ard|OCP

This just wasn't an issue nobody at all complained about it like they do GameWorks today :eek: I miss those times.
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That's because ATI was solid competitor many times ahead in performance so people didn't need pathetic excuses to cover for outperformed gpus.
 
ebduncan said:
I have no problem with Hardocp video card reviews. My only suggestion would be to add a few more games, even if they don't push the graphical boundaries. Things like CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends are all super popular games and people want to know what kinda performance they can expect in those games.

Other than that I will continue to lurk around.
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The only problem with testing LoL and other big esports titles is even a 950 is overkill. I built a gaming computer for the neighbor kid (well, I selected the parts, made him build it) and stock clock 950 paired with an i3 6100 pushed LoL well over 150 fps at max quality. What do you want [H] to do - spend time showing LoL at 500 fps, or testing a game where the performance actually makes a difference?
 
Endgame said:
The only problem with testing LoL and other big esports titles is even a 950 is overkill. I built a gaming computer for the neighbor kid (well, I selected the parts, made him build it) and stock clock 950 paired with an i3 6100 pushed LoL well over 150 fps at max quality. What do you want [H] to do - spend time showing LoL at 500 fps, or testing a game where the performance actually makes a difference?
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it might be overkill, but it still can be important. For example turning on freesync/gsync or frame rate target control can reduce power consumption. Performance isn't the only metric that matters.... A gpu could have a rendering issue in game, and if it's not tested people will be upset when the card they bought won't work properly in the games they play. So there is more to it than just utter performance.
 
Like other people have said - I would much rather see what all the cards perform at specific settings, versus card A's specific settings for 60fps and card B's. I usually always skip to the "apples to oranges" (or whatever it was renamed to) part because I hate having to sift through the 60fps settings and figure out why card B was able to pull 60fps at X resolution and Y anti-aliasing setting, ugh.
 
Endgame said:
The only problem with testing LoL and other big esports titles is even a 950 is overkill. I built a gaming computer for the neighbor kid (well, I selected the parts, made him build it) and stock clock 950 paired with an i3 6100 pushed LoL well over 150 fps at max quality. What do you want [H] to do - spend time showing LoL at 500 fps, or testing a game where the performance actually makes a difference?
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Isn't Dota 2 badly bottlenecked by cpu when playing in 60+ fps range?
 
st4rk said:
Like other people have said - I would much rather see what all the cards perform at specific settings, versus card A's specific settings for 60fps and card B's. I usually always skip to the "apples to oranges" (or whatever it was renamed to) part because I hate having to sift through the 60fps settings and figure out why card B was able to pull 60fps at X resolution and Y anti-aliasing setting, ugh.
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We are changing format on the RX 480 review and may be sticking with it going forward seeing how it works out. For the RX 480 review, we are going to find our best playable settings at a specific resolution like always, but instead of find best playable settings for all other cards compared, we will match the 480 best playable on all the cards. This way we still see what is the best IQ the 480 can push and will also give us an apples to apples comparison. Maybe the best of the both worlds?
 
gigatexal said:
I like that. I think it would work out well. It sort of sets the card being reviewed as the index and shows what all of its peers can do relative to that index or card. I look forward to it. So this new review is it coming out soon, say a month or two? ;) (ducks behind angry NDA laywers)
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I have beeing thinking on this new format for a while and since this new RX 480 card does not truly fit perfectly into any comparisons with cards on the market currently, it seemed like this would be a good time to give the format a try.

You would have to ask Brent. ;)
 
I do not comment a lot in this thread, as there is no real reason for me to argue against what readers want....as you KNOW what YOU want. That said, I have read every single post in this thread since I posted it, and have taken all those to heart. A lot of what has been discussed here can be contributed to an evolved format. There are things about our current format that I do not like either. It is hard for us to be "perfect" when you take canned benchmarks out of the mix. But I am listening.
 
The new table format is much worse than the old one. Takes up more space, FPS font is the smallest so hard to see and the overall readability is pretty bad compared to the old one. The settings were mostly in one column and performance in another. Now eyes have to do lots of up-down, up-down jumping to do basic comparisons instead of seeing everything at a glance.

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Dunnlang said:
Given how many different monitor configurations there are these days, I wonder if it would be possible to derive a Meapixels Per Second metric for a given card in a given game. That might allow us to theoretically predict performance on our 1080p, 1440p, 4k, various VR headsets, etc. Maybe the relationship is not linear enough to interpolate. Maybe that is something worth finding out. It's just a thought for something new to try.
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On this I agree. I believe you have some specific use cases in this regards. For instance, I think you have some gamers who have no great desire to run more than one monitor, Skyrim and Witcher3 don't require it, unless you are running an eyefinity setup. then you have another use case like mine where I definitely want and use a second monitor because it's so much better when you have TeamSpeak up on the secondary while I am killing tanks with my clan on the primary.

A down and dirty performance comparison for these different use cases would be invaluable.

As an example, I just bought a 1070 card that hasn't left Newegg for my doorstep yet. I bought it because I want to replace one of my two 27" 1080P monitors with a new 34" 3440 x 1440 display, probably an Acer or ASUS. It would be great to know this is a solid plan, something more solid to go on then a subjective claim by the manufacturer that the card will handle a max resolution of ......
 
Two things the recent RX480 article made me realise:

1. Give reasons for including the other cards in the reviews. These reasons will typically be them being the old model, the main competition, and the like, but they need to be there.

2. Be consistent. Include all of the cards in all of the tests and graphs.
 
Quartz-1 said:
1. Give reasons for including the other cards in the reviews. These reasons will typically be them being the old model, the main competition, and the like, but they need to be there.
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I can roll with that.

Quartz-1 said:
2. Be consistent. Include all of the cards in all of the tests and graphs.
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I think this is simply extra work for no reason pertaining to the RX 480 review. Why included cards that are not going to be able to support real world playability at 1400p resolution?
 
Quartz-1 said:
Actually, I was thinking more of your not including the GTX 970 in the 1080p benchmarks, but if a card is incapable of performing then I would suggest making a note to that effect under the graph. Readers aren't necessarily going to read a review from start to finish.
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Reading is fundamental.

That said, we should have discussed this on the test setup page at least. We were just in a big big rush from about 5am till 8am this morning. No excuse, just an explanation.
 
I have to say, I really like the new format in the rx 480 review.

It combines the best of both worlds, on one hand you get to see the highest playable settings of the card under test, on the other hand, it's easy to get an apples to apples comparison.
 
Consider Apples to Apples Fixed. You guys nailed it exactly. Find the best playable setting on the review card and set others accordingly and benchmark. All [H]ail the New Way.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I have to say, I really like the new format in the rx 480 review.

It combines the best of both worlds, on one hand you get to see the highest playable settings of the card under test, on the other hand, it's easy to get an apples to apples comparison.
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I think we will move forward with this format, it is more efficient and easier for people to understand I think. Thanks for the kind words. We have some edges that need to be polished, and we will make that happen.
 
I like the new format, it is definitely easier to compare right off the bat.

One thing I would like to see would be clock speed data presented alongside the FPS charts, or just give the average clock speed for each game.
 
I like the new review style a lot. However, please bring back BF4 multiplayer as a benchmark. A. you are one of the only sites to actually use the multiplayer B. its the only online/multiplayer game in your benchmark suite. and it is pretty uniquely stressful on our gaming systems, given the scale of the matches. Particularly for CPU/multicore. Its a great way to reveal driver overhead.
 
Love the new style Kyle, one of my main complaints was the lack of games tested. Hopefully this opens up more time for more game testing :D.

One thing I miss of old is the comparison screen shots showing the image quality between the brands.
 
Trimlock said:
One thing I miss of old is the comparison screen shots showing the image quality between the brands.
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I remember those comparisons, good stuff. How long have they been gone? Not sure it is relevant anymore, but back in the day I was surprised by the differences between ATI and nVidia. If I remember correctly, didn't ATI usually have the better IQ?
 
Lord Risky said:
I remember those comparisons, good stuff. How long have they been gone? Not sure it is relevant anymore, but back in the day I was surprised by the differences between ATI and nVidia. If I remember correctly, didn't ATI usually have the better IQ?
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It was normally better at AF while Nvidia did better at AA.

I still like them lol I know the IQ difference is small though.
 
HardOCP is my go-to choice when it comes to performance review.
Some technical aspects, such as power consumption and noise, are better covered by other reviewers and that's perfectly fine with me.
The only "problem" I have is the choice of reviewed cards. Being a strict 1080p gamer (actually 1920x1200) I'm not really interested in the minor differences between different cards based on GPUs that are overkill (and overpriced) for me in the first place.
More reviews of cards in the $100-$250 range, please!
 
Olle P said:
More reviews of cards in the $100-$250 range, please!
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The simply fact of the matter is that sub-$199 GPU reviews get no readers. It costs us the same amount of resources, no ads get served. Quite frankly, we have shied away from sub-$250, but the RX 480 did change that.
 
Since SLI on the newer Nvidia cards are waning or more restrictive, AMD at this times seems pretty much the same support:
  • Request EMA testing, I do believe AoTs supports EMA, would be interesting if Nvidia setup is tested with and without the bridge to see if there is any significant difference when using EMA.
 
New style looking great. I've always appreciated the no-bullshit reviews.
 
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