NVIDIA GeForce GPUs appear to be performing up to 30% worse than AMD Radeon GPUs when bottlenecked by older CPUs

[Redaktion]

High-end NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs are not friends with older CPUs, according to new findings. Apparently, the likes of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 struggle so much when bottlenecked by a CPU that they performance worse than AMD RDNA 1 cards, such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GPUs-appear-to-be-performing-up-to-30-worse-than-AMD-Radeon-GPUs-when-bottlenecked-by-older-CPUs.527436.0.html

[FlowGo]

Is Nvidia using CPU-bound driver optimizations or CPU-assisted rendering techniques like tiling? That may create this issue.

[Rick]

Is Nvidia using CPU-bound driver optimizations or CPU-assisted rendering techniques like tiling? That may create this issue.

Didn't Nvidia start using some sort of partially tiled rendering pipeline since Pascal? Isn't that why Nvidia's raster operations are more energy efficient? I guess.

[hfm]

It also only matters if you are turning details down, which you probably wouldn't do if you had one of these better performing GPUs. They do admit to that in the conclusion IIRC as I watched it yesterday.

In Reality: If you are a super competitive gamer, STILL running on an old CPU and you run your game in potato mode to be competitive, maybe consider hunting down Radeon (if you can even find a 5700XT or above anymore). If you are using your 5700XT/2070 or above fully in these games at 1080p with high/ultra details or 1440p high details or even 4K depending on which tier your are in, this doesn't matter at all.

I love the research from an academic standpoint, love to hear the root cause whether it be the rendering pipeline or whatever, the slice of the population this will actually affect is very niche.

[Tiamat]

Duh it was nerfed coz their made for gaming and they was getting bought up by crypo miners. How about you wait and compare it to ones that hasn't been nerfed?

[Targonis]

A potential reason for this is that the NVIDIA GPUs are not using hardware acceleration for many DirectX 12 functions, so the drivers are compensating for these limitations.    With a fast CPU, this may have been missed, but when CPU limited, you see that the DRIVERS are doing more than they should be

[RRTeam]

It's a good video and nice test, but pretty much irrelevant. People that buy the new cards (especially considering the price madness) won't team them up with an R5 1600 or i3 anyway. I doubt there's even 1 machine in the real world that has an 3080, not to mention 3090, that runs together with an i3 whatever generation. This test seems relevant to me like a race between a car and a fighter jet.

[Graham R Radetsky]

I call bullcrap. 1. Use more than one or 2 games. 2. Make sure your drivers, memory settings and temps are tuned and appropriately up to par. I have an amd 3600x and upgraded from 5700xt to rtx 3080 not a single game even on 1080 low is runing slower than the 5700xt. This is their computer or one poorly optimized game scenario. I can confirm it is not even close to accurate. On avg at 1080p low rtx 3080 is 40-70% faster than 5700xt consistently across high cpu demanding scenarips and 90-120% faster on gpu demanding ones like 4k gaming.

[SirStephenH]

A lack of full testing makes these results pretty much worthless.

Also, who the hell uses an i3 for gaming? You should have at least an i5 for any level of gaming and anyone using high-end cards such as these would be using an i7 or i9 anyways.

[meh]

I call bullcrap. 1. Use more than one or 2 games. 2. Make sure your drivers, memory settings and temps are tuned and appropriately up to par. I have an amd 3600x and upgraded from 5700xt to rtx 3080 not a single game even on 1080 low is runing slower than the 5700xt. This is their computer or one poorly optimized game scenario. I can confirm it is not even close to accurate. On avg at 1080p low rtx 3080 is 40-70% faster than 5700xt consistently across high cpu demanding scenarips and 90-120% faster on gpu demanding ones like 4k gaming.

Have you even watched the video? Zen 2 (3000) and above scales normally.. smh

[Wereweeb]

It's quite telling that everyone here who commented disagreeing clearly hasn't watched the video and doesn't know how Hardware Unboxed operates.

[Steelcity1981]

Hardware unbox isn't  a reliable source and this just proves it once again. They use 2 games to conclude their findings.

[Jay arsenal]

I can confirm this. On a 1800x I upgraded from a 1660 super to a 3069 (non ti) and horizon zero dawn and star citizen each became completely unplayable at any setting or resolution. The only solution was to either go back to the 1660 or upgrade the cpu

[Derek]

Why would anyone pair such a nice gpu with a Garbo cpu ?

[Popo]

Why would anyone pair such a nice gpu with a Garbo cpu ?

Piecewise upgrades? Playing GPU-bound games? Occasional gamers but needing GpU accelerated abilities? Received one as a gift? Lots of valid reasons. I would not call those CPUs garbo though, they are quite capable still.