Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today's video should hopefully be a short one but still an interesting one for those out there that are either currently gave me on an HDR display or a thinking of upgrading to an HDR display in the near future so you might remember a few weeks ago I looked into the performance differences between HDR and SDR gaming on graphics cards using invidious Pascal architecture using a Titan xpath scale I found that simply enabling HDR resulted in a 4% hit to performance on average across a handful of titles while enabling g-sync HDR tanked performance by a pretty significant 12% average not all games saw this performance it were enabling HDR but certainly enough of them did to cause concern for HDR gamers in that video I suggested the performance it was judaism driver-side work that was needed to send out HDR and specifically g-sync HDR signals through Pascal's display engine with the amount of work varying depending on the game and its HDR implementation well today there's a new Nvidia graphics architecture in town in the form of cheering we've already talked a lot about the performance of Troon GPUs in our previous reviews of the r-tx 2080 and our TX 20 atti but one thing we didn't really touch on was the improvements in video made to the display engine one of the key changes is the inclusion of a native HDR pipeline this essentially means that what in video is previously doing in software through drivers can now be done natively in hardware on cheering bass cards tone mapping in particular is one aspect of HDR that you can now do natively and this theoretically should resolve the HDR performance issues we saw with Pascal and I'll get onto that in a moment the other key new feature of chewings display engine is support for DisplayPort 1.4 a with DSC or display stream compression DSC is a VESA standard that provides in their words visually lossless compression enabling support for higher resolutions and refresh rates without chroma subsampling previous Pascal cards were limited to 4k HDR at 98 Hertz or 8k at just 30 Hertz through a single cable while during with DSC support can now output 4k HDR at 144 Hertz with that sub simply an 8k at 60 Hertz through a single cable that doesn't mean today's 4k 144 Hertz HDR displace like the Acer predator X 27 will be able to run at 144 Hertz with that chroma subsampling with the cheering GPU for DSC to work it needs to be supported on both ends of the display cable so both the GPU and monitor itself need to support the technology and in the case of these current 4k 144 Hertz monitors the monitor does not support DSC but it does mean that we now have GPUs capable of running displays at 4k 144 Hertz and 8k 60 Hertz so one side of that equation is ready now it's up to monitor manufacturers release new displays that integrate support for DSC I mean full 4k 144 Hertz with HDR in all its glory I did say to my review of the predator X 27 and a sous PG 27 UQ the buyers of this panel might feel a bit burned when many of the early adopter issues are fixed in a second generation of the product and the subsampling issue seems to be one will be fixed relatively quickly anyway back to HDR in v8 claims we shouldn't be seeing any performance it with HDR enabled compared to SDR so let's put that to the test using the GeForce r-tx 20 80 TI founders Edition and the exact same system I used previously my personal rising 7 1718 ring and of course the Acer predator X 27 g-sync HDR display as the monitor in hand let's first take a look at some of the games that were most impacted by HD our processing with Pascal graphics cards in Middle Earth shadow of war enabling HDR on a pascal card resulted in a 5% hit to performance and enabling chasing HDR saw a massive drop of 14% however with cheering that performance job is eradicated there's only a 1 FPS difference between SDR gaming and chasing HDR gaming and that's basically within the margin of error Star Wars Battlefront 2 was another game heavily impacted by HD are seeing drops of 5% with HDR enabled and 13% with Qi sink HDR enables however on the RT X 20 80 TI there is essentially no difference between HDR and SDR performance and these results carry over to battlefield one which uses the same engine and had nearly the same performance issues with Pascal no such problems with cheering in assassin Street origins again we saw up to an 11 percent performance drop with Jason HG are enabled with cheering I did see a slight dip and performance switching on HDR but now we're talking about just you know one to two FPS or three percent performance it as opposed to 11 percent hitman wasn't as impacted by HD our own Pascal just a four to six percent performance drop but again on the twenty atti that deficit has been erased entirely a couple of games did see no performers hit with HDR or g-sync HDR enabled on Pascal those were far cry 5 and the new shadow of the Tomb Raider which I went back and tested for this video unsurprisingly these titles also saw no HDR performance impact on cheering cards so in the case of the new display engine insuring what NVIDIA has claimed is absolutely the truth the new HDR pipeline completely resolves the issue of worst performance with HDR enables compared to SDR that's great news for those currently gaming on HDR displays but also for the future as HCl will no doubt become much more widespread in the next few years trees new HDR pipeline is also white in video decided to benchmark games using HDR for their early comparisons between the r-tx 2080 and GTX 1080 you might remember this famous slide from before launch where Nvidia tested games like shadow of war and Mass Effect Andromeda using HDR showing impressive performance gains between the 2080 and 1080 I speculated at the time that Nvidia did this because cheering had no HDR performance drop which makes truing look that little bit faster than Pascal despite most gamers being more interested in regular STR performance where the margins would be narrower and it looks like that was the correct assumption to make going on what we know now the other question you might be wondering is should I buy a cheering card over a Pascal card if I'm gaming on an HDR display for example should you buy an RT X 20 80 over a GTX 1080 Ti as we know in SDR games the RT X 20 80 delivers almost the exact same performance as the GTX 10 80 TI yet it costs around 100 to 150 US dollars more so 20 percent more for the same performance as Steve seventies review the 20 80 only really makes sense at the AIB MSRP but no 20 80 you can buy right now is even close to that price making it poor value for STI gamers but for HDR gamers we're seeing a situation where HDR games are 12% slower on the 1080 Ti compared to the 20 80 purely thanks to Pascal's non-native HDR pipeline that changes the equation someone the 1080 Ti is around 17 percent cheaper but in these HDR games is also 12 percent slower that doesn't make the 20 ATVs stand out value option but it does close the margin someone compared to regular SDR gaming the issue though is that this comparison only holds true for the handful of titles that are affected by HDR on Pascal there are some games like shadow of the Tomb Raider they're run perfectly fine in the HDR mode on Pascal with no performance drop there are also still a lot of games that don't support HDR at all so if you plan on playing any of those on a 2080 the value proposition just gets worse and worse so my advice for hgr game is thinking of upgrading to something like the 2080 you're still to just get the 10 atti as despite trying this new HDR pipeline the 1080 Ti is better value going on current prices that's it for this revisit of HDR performance with truing cards in hand if you haven't already seen our 35 game benchmark of the 2080 and 28 ETA go back and take a look at that because it's pretty comprehensive to say the least subscribe for more graphics card coverage consider supporting us on patreon so that we can afford to benchmark 35 games with the next GPU release and I'll catch you in the next one you