3 ms·

I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm th

I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm that is used as a benchmark for the hardware would be considered close to fraud, but for the graphics crowd it's all in a days work.

xxs 4y ago
The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.
dotnet00 4y ago
It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.
- mastax 4y ago
  I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.

xxs 4y ago

The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.

dotnet00 4y ago

It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.

mastax 4y ago
I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.