AMD's 5700XT 20-30% faster than Nvidia's 3090 on slower CPUs due to driver overhead issues

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Testing by Hardware Unboxed has shown that Nvidia has significantly higher driver overhead, providing even AMD's last generation cards to be up to 30% faster than Nvidia's current flagship.

 

Media

 

Quotes

Quote

Nvidia's Ampere GPUs... maybe be far more easily bottlenecked by less powerful CPUs in comparison to AMD's Radeon cards. Four processors and five graphics cards across multiple generations were used to conduct the test on several modern AAA titles to expose the driver overhead problem on Nvidia's Ampere cards. Shadow of the Tomb Raider... has been used to compare the CPU usages on two systems - one with an RTX 3070 and the other with an RX 6800, both running Intel's Core i3-10100 processor. The framerate for this test was locked to 60fps on both systems and it was consequently observed that the Nvidia side exhibited significantly higher CPU usage to render the frames. It seems pretty evident, at least from these numbers, that Nvidia's Ampere cards are suffering from some sort of bottlenecking in such CPU-demanding situations in games, irrespective of the processor used, be it Intel or AMD. However, whether this is due to the driver overhead or if there is some other issue at play here can only be determined by further testing. It should also be kept in mind that this is an academic exercise since most people running something as powerful as the RX 6900 XT and RTX 3090 probably won't likely be playing such games with lowered graphics settings. CPU-bound situations can be experienced by people with older, even-less capable CPUs, and in that case, the Radeon cards may be better alternatives for them.

 

My thoughts

It just goes to show how important a balanced system build is to ensuring you're getting the best performance out of your hardware. An low end processor should not be paired with a flagship card or vice versa as you are leaving significant performance on the table. This is especially true as these tests have shown for Nvidia CPUs. 

 

Sources

NeoWin (Quote source)

[aisle9]

Had NVIDIA taken HW Unboxed off of their shit list yet? Yes? Last week? Well, they're back on now.

[Random_Person1234]

Already posted.

[rcmaehl]

2 minutes ago, Random_Person1234 said:

Already posted.

Missed that. Was looking for "nvidia" or "hardware unboxed" when skimming through titles

[PhantasmaXD]

41 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Had NVIDIA taken HW Unboxed off of their shit list yet? Yes? Last week? Well, they're back on now.

HW Unavailable in shambles!