Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor box for the final installment in this series things in video needs to fix previously we discussed things that Tim and myself felt AMD and Intel needed to address now it's time to focus on the Green Team since we do have quite a bit to talk about here I won't give you a whole rundown on the previous two episodes if you're interested in those and you did miss them then the links will be available below as with the previous videos we're looking at this from your perspective the perspective of a consumer so let's get into it after the gtx970 fiasco we thought in the video would want to play it cool with the geforce 10 series but I guess with it being one of the best-selling GPUs of all time they clearly didn't see the need and video started off strong in May of 2016 with the gtx 1080 followed up by the 1070 in june and then in July the 1060 it was a strong lineup covering the 250 dollar 400 and $600 u.s. price points that in late 2016 and video throw us a curveball with the 3 gigabyte 1060 a new model featuring half as much of VRAM which in itself wasn't a particularly big deal however what was a big deal was the fact that they disabled an SM unit taking the kuda coil count from 1280 down to eleven hundred and fifty-two this meant despite having the exact same name it actually featured 10 percent fewer cause calling a three gigabyte model a gtx 1060 was extremely misleading given that the specs only suggest that the vm capacity had been changed and not the core count ideally in video really should have called that model of gtx 1050 TI before the 1050 TI it was launched in october admittedly though this isn't something i pulled in video up hard enough on at the time i've since called them out a few times about it but i regret not making more noise about this you know day 1 coverage it seems in video didn't really care about the negative feedback they received from some reviewers and many customers as they went on to later release a five-year bite 1060 and although that model does have all the cores enabled the reduce memory capacity in this case also means less memory bandwidth and therefore less performance then more recently they also released a three gigabyte version of the GTX 1050 which has less bandwidth than the original two and four gigabyte models so we want to see in video do better here moving forward and just stop with the misleading product names and we personally will make much more of an effort to push back against this and to consumer practice now if you thought we missed the whole GT 1030 fiasco when discussing the misleading product names well we didn't it's just that this one is so bad that we felt it deserved its own category the three gigabyte version of the GTX 1060 certainly was misleading and should have never happened but for around 20% less than the 60 gigabyte version those playing at 1080p I should only see about a 7% dip in performance so at least in terms of value it is actually pretty good again we're not trying to justify anything by saying that we're merely noting that it's not actually a bad value product however what NVIDIA has recently pulled with the GT 1030 really is disgusting there's just there's no other way to put it although the core configuration hasn't been touched as was the case with the GTX 10 63 gigabyte the performance has been severely crippled by swapping out the gddr5 memory with ddr4 memory the stuff that modern desktop PCs use as system memory the end result is almost three times less memory bandwidth dropping down from an already anemic 48 gigabytes per second to just sixteen point eight gigabytes per second this means that in memory intensive workloads in other words games the new ddr4 version is often one to two times slower and it's not half the price either it's like $10 cheaper just $10 this is incredibly deceitful by Nvidia and the ristic game is on a tight budget is extreme and while it's unfair to take advantage of anyone robbing those struggling the most to get into game really is disgusting in our opinion I could go on and on about this one but for now let's just move on as there are a few more things we need to discuss with the release of the GeForce ten series Nvidia announced the founders edition a sexy-looking reference card that no one should have bought and we said so or we said as much in our day one coverage in terms of quality the founders Edition models aren't bad thermals leave a little bit to be desired but overall the build quality is good and they look quite nice personally I don't actually have too much of an issue with the FE cards that many of you have asked me to include this one in the video so I have and I can certainly understand where you're coming from Nvidia do charge a premium for the inferior references on graphics cards and let's be honest that the FE models are just reference design cards and the real problem is that they often make them the only choice for early adopters and they do this for the first few weeks which in my opinion is Nvidia yet again taking advantage of their most loyal customers that said I should just quickly point out that you do have the option to wait and get a board partner cut at a cheaper price and a board partner card offers better thermals and all that sort of stuff and this is what we recommended you do in our day 1 GT X 1080 review unfortunately though if you are after a Titan model then you will be forced to buy a reference card from Nvidia so on that note it would be good to see and video open up the Titan series to their blog partners to make custom-designed versions of that card but probably more important than that we would just like to see that the board partner cards are included in all the day1 launches as I said this one isn't too much of an issue for us but we would like to see Nvidia allow their partners to offer custom design cards on launch day much like what they did with the GTX 1072 I released for example speaking of the GTX 1072 I we would like in video to stop feeding us new GPUs I mean sure release a new generation over the course of a few months if you must but after that just stuff it with the unnecessary cut down models that share the same names as the fully fledged parts stop it with GPUs that we don't need that just clutter up the product line and stop rolling your most loyal customers in the process we've already talked about the dodgy cut-down model so there's no need to go over all that again and as for releasing models we don't really need late in a park cycle such as the gtx 1070 TI it's not terrible but it can confuse people the big issue with releasing so many products within the same series is in a video always ends up tripping over themselves and in the process they just burn their most loyal gaming customers if you bought a Titan X for example in late 2016 you'll probably feeling pretty good about yourself 40% more CUDA cores than the flagship g4s part just made it a complete another beast of course you're also paying twice the price that made absolutely no sense in terms of cost per frame but still it was the undisputed king seven months later though Nvidia will like I hope you enjoyed those bragging rights because we're offering basically the same product for $500 us less then a month after that they were like are you upset about the gtx 1080i yet no still in july huh well how about a Titan X little P the P is for taking the piece addition we're adding 7% more criticals and we're going back to charging $1200 us how about that oh and if you're a star Wars fan it might have paid to wait a further six months flea Titan X P collector's edition it's not easy being an Nvidia fan with deep pockets seriously though that's some pretty amazing high-end early adopter abuse right there this one is a bit tricky to tackle because NVIDIA can and will only charge as much as they can so if you're going to pay $1,000 u.s. for a graphics card they're going to charge you that much and it's kind of hard to pull them up on it and we also have to contend with cryptocurrency mining and we've seen how that can just below the demand for GPUs to the point blow up the demand for GPUs to the point where just a million videos MSRP mean nothing at all back in 2010 in video a charging just $500 u.s. for their flagship part the GeForce GTX 480 they did the same with the GTX 580 but later released the $700 GTX 590 and it was at that point that they probably realized that they could charge gamers much more for high-end graphics cards by the time the GTX 670 thousand 12 they were well aware of that fact and we've got the GTX 690 for $1,000 u.s. it made no sense whatsoever but for that price they still sold so with confirmation that a video could sell $1,000 us graphics cards to gamers that made no sense in 2013 the Titan range was born and this helped them to justify a $700 u.s. asking price for the flagship GeForce part you probably say that the Titan Z was somewhat of an experiment to see just how much some people would pay for bragging rights though it was also a compute heavy price though may be justified so I'm with all that information the Pascal Titan series climbed to $1200 us and our gamers everywhere are in fear of how much the next generation models are going to cost so much needed competition from AMD will certainly help here but even so the days of $500 us flash of gaming GPUs are well and truly over so while we would very much like to see GPU prices calm down and we beg that Nvidia not take advantage of the current situation they find themselves in the realities they will so not sure that leaves us on that one first just let me start by saying I don't think the game works program is quite as bad as some what have you believe but there are certainly been some underhanded tactics that need to stop firstly for those of you unaware game works is an assortment of proprietary technologies that NVIDIA provides developers allowing them to include cutting edge effects such as realistic hair destruction and shadows and it allows them to do all these things without having to create them from scratch however Nvidia seems too often go out of their way let's say to make sure these effects are done in a way that makes them perform poorly on AMD GPUs and sometimes they do this at the expense of their own geforce customers we have seen evidence in the past of technologies clearly being abused with the intention of giving nvidia an advantage for example the use of tessellation in Crysis and The Witcher 3 now this situation has caused backlash from gamers even those using in video Hardware as these dirty tricks do often hurt the performance of GeForce graphics cards we've seen examples where in video we'll take an unnecessarily large performance it rather than optimize an effect and they do is to ensure the performance hit for AMD is even greater and video of course denies these claims but we've seen some pretty hard evidence that this is indeed going on upon release we noticed a massive performance hit using both aim D and NVIDIA hardware when benchmarking the Witcher 3 with hair works enabled I reported a 55% reduction in performance with the GTX 980 but a 67% drop for the Radeon r9 290 with her works disabled the GTX 980 was still 16% faster in the online 290 that's a significant win there for NVIDIA but with hair works enabled the GeForce GPU was now 56% faster there were a few issues with this though firstly the game works feature meant that gtx 980 owners were going from a minimum of just over 60 FPS at 1080p with hair works disabled to less than 30 FPS with it enabled this actually led us at the time to recommend that no one use hair works at all however it was I discovered that Nvidia were abusing their tessellation performance advantage at the expense of their own g-force customers again we were seeing another excessive use case by default the tessellation level was set to time 64 despite the fact that no real visual difference could be seen between times 16 and times 64 even when analyzing screenshots you know side by side in fact times 16 was barely any better than times 8 well the times it was really only slightly better than times 4 and then by the time you drop it down times 2 that did make the effect look quite poor reducing the tessellation level from time 64 2 times 16 more than doubled the frame rates for scenes that made heavy use of hand works effects while times 8 boost performance by a further 20 percent in short using tessellation times 8 provided basically the same visuals with very little impact on performance opposed to not using the technology at all you can't really get away with blaming the developer on this one either which is why we've pretty much pinned the blame straight on Nvidia because it is well documented that in video worked very closely with The Witcher 3 team so from my point of view it's either sabotage or its incompetence so either way they really do need to do better and we want to stop seeing examples of game works technologies being used to hurt the competition opposed to enriching the gaming experience we've also seen much more recent examples of unjustifiably large performances in game works titles though thankfully we're all very well aware of what seems to be going on so as a result the final fantasy 15 issues was sorted out quite quickly after the initial benchmarking was complete and the developer on that one seemed quite happy to take the blame so perhaps it was just an honest mistake I didn't give AMD a hard time over driver support and I'm not going to give Nvidia a hard time either sometimes display drivers aren't as good as they could be but I feel overall for the most part both companies do a pretty good job after all ensuring that the current generation of GPUs as well as quite a few of the previous generations working a massive range of games can't be an easy job so I'm gonna cut them a bit of slack on that one that said I will still do a bit of nitpicking and I'm going to target the GeForce experience the software can be quite clunky at times and in many ways does feel outdated however my biggest issue is the fact that in vidi it makes you sign in to use the software and in my opinion that's just totally unnecessary of course this isn't a new thing in video made this change quite a few years ago now and we probably didn't push back hard enough at the time I also am aware that some of you may not see this as a big deal an issue worth raising at all and it's true that you probably only have to manually log in every now and then even so I feel like if you're forking out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a GeForce GPU that was really enough to have to avoid handing over your details this one can certainly be viewed as nitpicking and technically the GeForce experience is optional software but I just feel that would have been a nice gesture for Nvidia to offer it to their customers with no strings attached right so if you're watching this video you've probably heard of the g-force partner program or GPP if not here's a quick refresher and video tried to get all of their partners like a SUSE gigabyte MSI and so on to cite a document called the g-force partner program that would impose heavy restrictions on these companies the bad parts of the document which was leaked earlier this year by Kyle of hard OCP suggest that if a company didn't align their gaming brands exclusively with g-force they would no longer receive important development funds and other incentives this is another one of those anti-competitive an anti consumer moves that Nvidia just seems to enjoy making from time to time rather than simply producing compelling products and going about business fairly Nvidia feels the need to shut out their competitors using underhanded tactics GeForce graphics cards particularly at the high end are already better buys and NVIDIA holds far more market share than AMD so it's just bizarre that Nvidia continually feels the need to bury competitors using shady tactics just stop doing this sort of rubbish in video put your products out there let them compete on their own merits and if they're good they'll win over the consumers if you don't do shady deals like the GP P in the background you'll regain the trust of consumers and you'll be genuinely seen as being on the side of gamers that we know need to post clearly garbage statements on your website about how these dodgy deals benefit gamers and are all about transparency just play fair play nice and ultimately do the right thing for consumers Jacek is another one of those things that is frustrating for buyers and really only serves to line in videos' pockets with more cash now what g-sync brings to monitors is actually pretty good adaptive sync support mandatory low framerate compensation monitor validation and so forth you can buy a g-sync monitor and know you're getting something quality but the way NVIDIA has implemented g-sync is any consumer and just plain unfriendly to all buyers g-sync requires a dedicated hardware module and that module only works within video graphics cards the module is also fairly costly adding approximately $200 u.s. to the price of any given monitor this means any nvidia GPU owner wanting to buy AG sync monitor needs to spend an additional $200 u.s. compared to an AMD GPU owner that has access to very similar freesync technology for free that sucks for those who have bought in videos GPUs they have to spend an additional $200 more because free sync doesn't work within video cards and there's no reason why NVIDIA GPUs can't support free sync other than the fact that in video wants to be greedy and lock out their customers from competing technologies a free sync is an open standard in fact it's basically just visa adaptive sync so Nvidia is free very free to implement support whenever they like and give nvidia gpus access to cheaper adaptive sync monitors but they don't of course because they can force gamers into buying g-sync monitors while locking AMD owners out of g-sync and making it harder to switch GPU ecosystems it's another frustrating and you consumer move from Nvidia and one we'd like to see change so that was a long one and not terribly enjoyable we just discussed more than half a dozen things that wastes consumers feel Nvidia needs to address again this is merely a wish list if you will we don't expect the new video will address any of these concerns we're nowhere near that naive but it would be great to see them address a few of these things over the next year or so although this content piece has been almost entirely negative it's not to say that Nvidia hasn't released some truly amazing products with their GeForce 10 series because they absolutely have we love the GTX tonighti as an example we a lot of the geforce cards the 1082 is an incredible flagship GPU we use it for pretty much all our benchmarking and again we like the bulk of the Pascal lineup which makes products such as the GT 1030 ddr4 version all the more disappointing anyway despite all the negativity I hope you guys did enjoy the video and the entire series for that matter hopefully if we decide to revisit this series next year we'll have less to complain about from all three companies as always thanks for watching and I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comment section down below I'm your host Steve and I will see you next time