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Nvidia Has a Driver Overhead Problem, GeForce vs Radeon on Low-End CPUs (Patreon)

Published:
2021-03-11 12:25:16
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Here's all the data I have so far for those interested.

Files

Comments

Ben Wagener

So, if I want to stream and don't have a top level CPU I can ignore the advantages of NVENC, since the overhead of the NVIDIA-driver negates them and I can go for software-filters and software-encoding while enjoying better overall performance while not streaming?

Atanas Petrov

Do.you think 5600x bottlenecking 6800xt a little bit in 1440p ?

Question Of The Day BOT

The main advantage of NVENC is not the performance impact, because that's very simular to AMD AVC, but the image quality is better. And software-encoding is going to have a bigger impact on performance if you want to match NVENC quality.

Treble Sketch

Curious, how does this fair with games that run with older APIs or maybe Vulcan?

ZarconDeeGrissom

if this affects the GTX10 series (GTX1050ti) on win7, that could explain some YouTube live vid playback issues I've seen for about a year or so. I have my doubts, as I think it's some YouTube web page java/whatever stuff just using more CPU thread resources (and the ancient FX8350 just can't keep up). It is clear in the task manager that the browser is eating a lot of CPU for the thread running YouTube vids, and in fairness even tho the FX8350 is 'old' I doubt a video should require more than 32GigaFLOPS of CPU just to play at 1080p, lol. if the driver is affecting win7 GTX10 cards, then it is also possible it pushed YouTubes horrid webpage coding over the edge on 4+GHz CPUs.

Julien Green

I wonder how much this explains why radeon 6800xt/6900xt is faster at 1080p/1440p than their green team equivalents. If Nvidia didn't have this higher overhead would they take the lead at the lower resolutions?

Frank van de Pol

It's a problem with low end CPU's the test systems of most reviewers have a 9900k, 10900k, 3900X or 5900/5950X CPU. That should resolve that issue or at least most of it.

The Trojan

Well, I agree as far as the test results go.... but I'd hardly consider 3600x "low end"... probably more correct to say does not effect enthusiast level cpus as it seems to affect mid-tier cpus as well.

Julien Green

I think that the question I'm wondering is how the driver's work in terms of the command the cpu is performing. Does the driver overhead come in the form of the few threads that are mostly used in games? Is that one thread needing to performs more commands to accomplish the same frame with nvidia that with radeon because if that's the case then having more/faster cores won't matter. Let's take a game like CSGO, that runs at like 700fps or something silly, and assume it all runs on one core. If 10% of that core is used for the driver on nvidia and 5% is used on radeon than a radeon card is going to look 5% faster just because it's all on the same core, so even if the nvidia card has more raw grunt it won't matter.

Julien Green

I'm basically wondering if the overhead of drivers can even be offset to other cores, since the drivers are what's sending the commands to the cpu in the first place. If Nvidia just requires more cycles to draw a frame than radeon and those cycles can't be pushed to other cores if the game isn't already doing that, then a radeon driver will utilize less of the core for the driver cycles and more for the game cycles.

Julien Green

Idk if that makes sense lol I'll write up something more succinct in the discord for the monthly q&a and hopefully Steve will understand what I'm asking

Ole-Martin Broz

I'd correct that one slightly. it's not performance impact as amd wins there, it's not quality cause amd wins there too, it's quality at Twitch bandwidth, 10-20mbit where nvidia is superior still. not to mention OBS and ease of use.

Ben Wagener

@Ole-Martin Broz How does AMD win there when it comes to quality? And 10-20 MBit Bandwidth at Twitch? Amateur-streamer usually stream with a bandwidth below 10 Mbit.

Ben Wagener

That could be because of the change to AV1 on YouTube, what for the GTX10 series has no decoder built in.

FredBKevin

Is this fixable ? Can we expect that nvidia will push out some firmware patch/fix after watching the work steve put in.

Alberto Martinez Alonso

If there are not a single CPU available in the market that can not "churn out" the data that an RTX3090 would require to be the bottleneck at 720p or 1080p Mid/Low quality instead of it's driver in certain games I really see a completely and very sharp valid point in your observation.

Alberto Martinez Alonso

As Steve said, they can try to optimize the code, would these optimizations affect all the GPUs or just the ones currently on sale, who knows. But if the only way to be as fast as the hardware implementation on the AMD is with special instructions integrated on a CPU (Like SSE/AVX) that don't exist yet on any CPU currently in the market then they will need to put back the necessary hardware on their new GPUs