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My Nvidia Geforce GTX experience.

PostPosted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 12:36 am
by pam
My friend got a Zotac Geforce GTX 650 Ti 2GB GDDR5. Its a 128 bit card with 768 cores and manufactured on 28 nm kepler architecture. The card i use is an MSI Radeon HD 6790 1GB GDDR5-- This has a 256 bit interface and is 40 nm, based on Amd 'Barts LE', which is similar to a 6850/6870.
The day i bought the card back in 2011 and slotted it inside, it has practically been running flawlessly. Drivers updates increase frame rates in games. Games like crysis3, BF3, Metro:last light, farcry 3, bioshock:infinite run without any problems or crashes.

A few years ago gaming 'monkies' said things like you dont need more than 4 cores are now having the last laugh. Neither the FX-8350 or Haswell i7 4770k and their interconnects provide the resources for running any new games, now that graphics drivers have caught up and FullHD is rubbished...but that's a different story.

Performance of a GTX 680, Titan, Radeon 7970 etc are laughable considering things John Carmack has up his 'sleeves'. He clearly mentions that hardware for the id-tech 6(game engine) does not exist. People wanting to buy flagship cards of today for the purpose of playing games are fools. No graphics cards besides SLI, crossfire configs and the GTX 690 will provide you a playable 50-60 fps above fullhd. Todays graphics cards are like the intel pentiums that up the clock speed and everyone claps their hands. CUDA and OpenCL performance has been handicapped in the new GTX 600 series versus the GTX 500 series, as Nvidia wants to target all gamers and keep the cost low!

...He bought the gtx 650 Ti in November last year and was able to play games without problems. Then he upgraded to windows 8 and started overclocking the card and everything else. The card is not overclock friendly. (The 6790 when overclocked reaches the performance of a 6850). And then one day problems started. He called me over to check and all he got after a few minutes of gameplay was the sarcastic smiley windows 8 BSOD screens. I thought for so many times the system crashed, the card surely needs an RMA. Did further testing and benchmarking and those ran just fine and the temps were cool. So i told him let me take it and do further testing and in return gave him my 6790.

And then i faced the same problems. After 30-40 minutes of gameplay windows shows the smiley face. I definitely knew the card is bad. Sent it for RMA and got a new one a week later. Put that in and the exact same thing happened. I got face-palmed beyond retribution. So i increased the voltages of my chip and then after an hour it happened again. I upped the NB freqs and after that it NEVER happened again! Ever. No crashes whatsoever. To add to the problem anything ubuntu is uninstallable. All i get is a blank screen with the monitor showing a white widget--signal not detected via a usb install. Found a solution, eventually.

...So i called him up last week and told him the cards fine and i could adjust some settings in BIOS to get it working. Well, he has a 2500k and the one i use is in the signature. He said what card?--Your 650Ti. He said keep it. And even he uses ubuntu for web surfing. I told him i cant keep it for free(did not tell him i lost sleep over it). He said he gets higher frame rates with 'his' radeon 6790 and was willing to pay me some money for it too. I thought he was joking and so i went on techno-blabbering about kepler and all the features. He said ill pay you if you really want the cash. Abuses were hurled and i told him its not a joke, that 6790 is 1GB...and he insisted ill pay you. I said forget it.

That episode left me fuming. I wanted my old Radeon back. :(

Re: My crappy Nvidia Geforce GTX experience.

PostPosted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 3:21 pm
by ryanvade
Pam, that is a sad story. Lets just face it... You are an ATI guy. ;)
That being said, I am a Nvidia guy. From what I understand the Titan works fine under Ubuntu, just not the fine tuning features. :( The 660 Ti however does not for some reason... odd. Either way if someone gave me either I would be thanking them for weeks. I just don't have the luck... :roll:

Re: My crappy Nvidia Geforce GTX experience.

PostPosted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 12:39 am
by pam
Now im really liking this Nvidia and primarily because of CUDA.

But this is how Nvidia cheats the public:
A GTX 580 has fewer CUDA cores than almost all the kepler GTX 600 series.
Yet it hammers the GTX 600 series in CUDA performance. On the other hand gaming performance has increased with kepler.
A GTX660 Ti hammers the 580 in almost all games.

But GPGPU compute is superior in GTX 580 and not by a little. Its almost comparable to a Titan.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gef ... 42-19.html

OpenCL performance was always bad with CUDA cores. Now it has been chopped further!
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gef ... 42-21.html

The newest Blender versions have put a hold on OpenCL as AMD was facing severe latency issues. CUDA is the only thing being used now.
AMD is working with developers to solve and commit all opencl related issues. Older versions of blender are pure bliss as opencl is supported in them.

For further reading ( if interested) here is the discussion of opencl and what to expect:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... ers/page16