Nvidia theory. Is Nvidia purposely doing this

Late to the thread here, but I think this guy sums up Nvidia tactics perfectly. (It's a long watch but the third link summarizes his points for the most part.)


TLW - Basically, Nvidia has been selling overpriced gimped GPUs for years, so what you're seeing now is older AMD cards matching or surpassing Nvidia.

I myself was looking to upgrade (still on a 780TI), but after reading up on this, I'm holding out for Vega to see what happens to all the prices. Though I was hopeing for Vega to be released in Q1 like Ryzen, but it might be as far off as Q3.

NewbieOneKenobi said:

So would you recommend getting a 480 over a 1060? a couple of issues with AMD — poor support, lying,

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I dare say Nvidia are guilty of the above too lol. (3.5GB, 10 series drivers?, older card drivers?)

Anyway when it comes down to the crunch regardless of grudges (which are not really worth holding when there are only two companies to buy from) I'd suggest the RX 480.

Here's a link to a video using the latest drivers.

If it's for 1440p then better get one stronger card like GTX1070. I have RX480 and it's good enough at 1440p in 1-2 games which I play but I guess it won't be fast enough in all games and in time it will be worse.

I see a lot of people speaking of "I feel it has become slower"

Feelings do not count, if you want to be sure the only thing you can do is to benchmark old vs new drivers, and if the discrepancies are consistent you can come up with a theory.

That being said, I doubt Nvidia would do something so bad while at the same time so easy to check.

The only way to make old hardware obsolete is through "heavier" software.

The only thing which I can confirm is that Nvidia is stopping to improve drivers for older series once they release something new while AMD usually improve 1-2 generations back. The same was for last 4-5 generations. No one is lowering performance of previous series but they simply don't waste time/money on improvements when they focus on sales of new products.

Sorry if I look like an Nvidia fan (although I do have a preference towards that company)

But someone has to play devil's advocate here.

To woomack, could you please explain how you can confirm (assuming you know this information as facts based on how you worded it) that nvidia stops improving drivers for older cards?

I am sorry, but for the last 6 years all I have been reading is how evil nvidia is and how much nicer AMD is, and most of the time it doesn't seem to be backed up by anything concrete.

I have seen a ton of misleading commercials and tests on both sides, yet everyone seem to fail to recognize that these 2 companies are both fighting for the same customers and will do anything (legal) to achieve that.

I think the way a lot of people test/check this is to see that when nVidia makes improvements for x-game to be x-% faster it shows up on newer cards but not necessarily on older ones. They don't get worse per-say, they just don't improve like the newer generation cards do.

What driver version has Nvidia made FPS improvements, I think I missed that for the new generation 10 series?

wingman99 said:

What driver version has Nvidia made FPS improvements, I think I missed that for the new generation 10 series?

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Not sure off hand. Each driver release has notes however which list said improvements...

Zantal said:

To woomack, could you please explain how you can confirm (assuming you know this information as facts based on how you worded it) that nvidia stops improving drivers for older cards?

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I just test a lot and compare results in benchmarks etc but I also see how it looks like for other users. I was testing nearly every popular gpu from each generation in past 10+ years ( can check hwbot profile and 3500+ submissions ). The same was with GTX400, 500, 600, 700 and 900. Nvidia is making nice improvements in first months after premiere and later not so much. When they release something new then they focus on new GPU and it's quite normal that they want to sell new products rather than waste money on older generations.
The same are doing other manufacturers like BIOS updates for motherboards are usually appearing for 3-5 months and later only important fixes or new microcode for CPU. For instance Gigabyte is often releasing new motherboard revision rather than fix bugs in already released products.

I'm not on any side and it's not hard to notice that last years for AMD were really bad. HD7900 and R9 290/X were total fail considering how many went to RMA or were DOA ( mainly memory issues, vertical stripes etc ). Fury was marketing/pricing failure even though it's not bad chip.
In last years Nvidia was clear choice for most users and also for me but it doesn't mean that I like how are they acting.
Each generation Nvidia cards cost more what becomes ridiculous. On the other hand AMD is following them adjusting their prices/performance to what Nvidia release ( like Fury or RX470/80 ). At the end we get pretty average cards which are minimum for many gamers and cost about $300 ( at least my local prices are like that ).

wingman99 said:

What driver version has Nvidia made FPS improvements, I think I missed that for the new generation 10 series?

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Couple of driver versions after release gave 10-15% performance boost. I saw that when I got GTX1070 and after couple of updates my scores in benchmarks went up. I'm not following GTX1000 performance for some time so I'm not sure if any new drivers help some more but I haven't heard about any performance improvements except fixes for some games but that's normal.

I must admit now that I think of it, I used to get much more excited with Nvidia's driver releases in the past (with all those +5% performance here and there)

Let's see how it works for them in the long run.

Although this thread was about Nvidia purposely gimping older hardware, which is also not true. It would be suicide for them if someone found out.

I just hate it when people automatically promotes one side to good when the other side was deemed bad.

I live in a much darker world, for me they are both bad.

EarthDog said:

Not sure off hand. Each driver release has notes however which list said improvements...

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I looked through the 10 series drivers release notes and they did not have any FPS improvements. I have seen FPS improvement in the notes in the past years.

I wonder when they stopped showing it... interesting.

Zantal said:

I see a lot of people speaking of "I feel it has become slower"

Feelings do not count, if you want to be sure the only thing you can do is to benchmark old vs new drivers, and if the discrepancies are consistent you can come up with a theory.

That being said, I doubt Nvidia would do something so bad while at the same time so easy to check.

The only way to make old hardware obsolete is through "heavier" software.

Click to expand...

To dodge lawsuits it's enough if nobody can prove you did it on purpose for no good reason. If you can say it was a trade-off and something had to give, then you're safe. Even if you also say you didn't care to commit resources to mitigate the bad effect on older cards. So it would be enough to just use the same drivers for all cards and make the kind of driver optimizations that would be beneficial to new cards and detrimental to old cards at the same time, without being too obvious about intending the slowdown. It would still be defensible.

It would only be suicide if e-mails to the effect of 'yeah, let's use this opportunity to kill [insert high-end card from 5 years ago] and make the owners upgrade' leaked.

And even then, it would probably not lead to bankruptcy. Someone could lose his job. No criminal charges. No unfair competition penalties, nothing. Largely because it would be affecting post-warranty cards rather than previous generation released 1.5 years ago. They would certainly lose some customers, but who knows how many. Damage control wouldn't be particularly hard, considering that people don't have an alternative.

Maybe because there were negligible/if any improvements?!!!

Looks like there is no improvement with the Nvidia Pascal drivers.

I haven't updated my nVidia drivers since I installed the drivers that came with the card. ( ) To Galax's credit, the drivers supplied with the card were current when I got it. A combination of lazy and not seeing any real need so far. With my AMD cards new drivers were an event not to be missed. LOL

Only time I upgrade the drivers is if there's game improvements. For example, I last updated for BF1's sake.

Until my current card I only had AMD, and driver updates for them were a must have. There were substantial performance bumps with some Catalyst updates, but the cumulative effect over a year or so resulted in an upgrade at no cost. That, and AMD's driver updates were needed to fix broken drivers from previous updates.....although, it only took three years for them to fix the black screen problem with my 260x.