What happened to the nvidia drivers? What happened to us? Activism time!

Comrades,

I remember a time when every new driver was released we would flock together in joy of the increased performance it would bring to us. Yes, I remember a time where a new driver meant more capabilities, not less. I remember a time when we used to laugh at our comrades with AMD/ATI cards for their driver department was always lacking as compared to the green team's. Now, it seems, it is now our AMD comrades who are feeling the schadenfreude instead of us.

I remember a time when we would eagerly await for brilliant modders like @Mr. Fox to conjure up an even more sophisticated version of the drivers that nvidia gave us. And now, comrades? Now, Mr. Fox tells us to stay on 344, stay on year-old drivers because the current ones, the current ones are oh so much worse.

My friends, how could we have become so content with the status quo? Did @jaybee83 campaign for nothing? Do we not remember the spirit of resistance we have generated with the #WTFnvidia twitter campaign and @iaTa's petition that led to the reverting of the driver overclock block? Why haven't we pushed further? Why haven't we demanded for an unlocked vBIOS? Why haven't we revolted in the face of such terrible drivers? Have we, as consumers, become complacent with the inferior quality that has been given to us for the products that we have purchased?

For months and months I have gone on and off the forum to check Mr.Fox's posts. To see if he recommends for us to finally use the new drivers. And month after month I am left disappointed. Why are we behaving like this problem will go away on its own? Don't we understand that unless we demand for the quality we payed for we will not get it?

I would like the community to, once again, rally the troops, assemble the militia, and march for nvidia. I would like for us to discuss here on what the best course of action would be, and I would like for us to stand up together and say "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!".

 

The competition is basically dead, and we're the vocal minority.

 

This is the sad truth. But you know what i hate most, people complaining about Nvidia but keep buying whatever crap they throw at you. I mean come on, if you wanna fight then FIGHT.

 

How do you fight a monopoly? It's either buy or don't buy.... Not a good option

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There are always other options available but one has to be willing to sacrifice. The problem is that we want to "FIGHT" but not willing to make any compromise for it. We will complain about titan X being too expensive but still buy it because it give 5 more FPS which we cannot live without.

 

I miss the good ol' days. That's why I'm still using 347.xx and will probably think twice about buying my next gaming rig... It may take a couple years for the general pop. to catch up but it will hurt them eventually. It seems the new "trend" is to only allow the latest in graphics cards perform somewhat optimally.*

*Effectively forcing upgrading and giving the middle finger to anyone who doesn't buy new hardware every year.

New hobby, where art thou?

 

Call me hopeless, but I still believe AMD will rise from the ashes and kick some butt, otherwise we all are so out of luck. Their HBM2 seems like tailor made for notebooks, so I'm not sure what takes them so long to release it. Their GPU's are not that far behind Nvidia, I think it's power usage, which should be improved with Greenland architecture, that was holding them up.
Yeah, I remember when new gpu line was coming out once a year, so how old 970, 980 is now?
If not that, then my 2 year old laptop will still be upper mid range 10 years from now, maybe that won't be so bad, after all.

 

Hey, I'm totally fine with that, as is my wallet.
However I wish as well for AMD to come back into the game.

 

Actually the truth is because terribad drivers affect laptop users only, nVidia doesn't give a **** because they know there's too much ingrained ignorance about laptops for it to really affect them.

When nVidia starts releasing drivers that disable overclocking or cause uncontrollable throttling on desktop cards, you bet they'll get hit by a ****storm hard and fast.

 

This.
The above can't be said enough. We can cry until we're out of tears but it won't mean a thing. We have to put our money where our mouth is....which is why (sadly) I've been buying games on PS4 > Laptop lately.

 

We're talking mobile here, not desktop. Titan X is a desktop card, and there, you have AMD options. On laptops there are none. Maybe one or two with R9 M380 which is barely equivalent to a 128-bit GTX 965m. Otherwise you're looking at an R9 M270 or M275 which doesn't even compete with a 950m. You really have to be a die hard Nvidia hater to deny yourself that level of performance difference especially if you are a gamer that likes to play the latest AAA games.

I mean if they were killing puppies because I was buying Nvidia, then yeah, I'd probably suffer with AMD GPU and the slim amount of laptop offerings. But it's not anything like that.

 

Plus the power consumption is too high, I still don"t know if Enduro Tech is correctly working, for laptop, AMD has nothing to compete with Maxwell in terms of performance/watt ratio..

 

Does the GTX 980 for notebooks suffer from the same issues?

 

I use the latest nvidia drivers, what is wrong with them? Sad to see AMD unable to compete, and with nvidia products reasonably priced there is zero reason to go with AMD. I do hope AMD gets back in the game and makes things interesting.


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What issues?

 

I think he was refering to high power usage by AMD, so was the same issue present with desktop GTX?

 

Sorry, I should have quoted:

 

Ah yes. It's still considered a mobile GPU. Just mobile GTX 980 not desktop GTX 980 even though it's same silicon.

 

@Mr. Fox, would you kindly provide me with a list of all the issues and benchmarks that you have made on the drivers over the year? I'll try to make our case to the PC Master Race community, if they see how ****ty the hand was dealt to us, perhaps they will help us get another twitter **** storm up and running.

 

I did enjoy the entire read, and so on. Entire thread, really. And don't want to rain on anyone's parade-march.

But the truth is that graphics cards, peripheral external cards, essentially peaked out a very long time ago. And what actually stalled the mobile and frankly the desktop space, and gave us what we have now - was that AMD was cut off from releasing the apu project they were planning, in the form it actually would have worked in, by Intel lawsuit. Specifically that they were required to separate the cpu and gpu interfaces on the hardware interface level. Not only that, Nvidia was cut off from making a similar offering with ION prototype - that then eventually was released with a discrete intel graphics module rather than what was planned.

Intel has then continued to release their usual incremental updates as they have done for many years. And Nvidia has geared itself into that by releasing more and more energy-efficient cards in the medium to small (consoles to laptops) area, and matched their business with the existing model. It's a good business-move by both intel and nvidia, but we of course suffer as customers - the longer it takes for "OpenCL-type" based computers with generic processing units that can be programmed to run various different instruction sets, outside the current ISA, with the required sandwich of components that obviously could have (and have, in protoypes) been removed. And replaced with an integrated bus.

Rather than what we have now when people seriously are suggesting that what we need is a faster interconnected bus that can program it's own IO, etc. Anything to keep the current industry standard(ISA) must be done, see, or else large parts of the hardware business collapses.

So the thing is that no matter how much you pressure Nvidia, they're not going to start making stuff like ION with a graphics module integrated on the cpu in form of several generic processing units. And they cannot magick out performance increases on the driver level at the stage where post-processing filters draw about 90% of the actual graphics card grunt. Instead you get mobile and laptop drivers that have the biggest % increases, along with a hilarious subset of overclocks in an attempt to stretch the tdp budget. None of this is going to produce the kind of results we saw where most of the driver optimisations were culling and overdraw routines. In the same way, most of the OpenCL-type routines are not even used in any common sdk, meaning that the driver-optimisations on queuing and multitasking, upgrades for cards that deal with such, etc., are a waste of money for gamers. That's just how it is, and how it's going to be, until .. I don't know.. Intel goes out of business, and no one takes up their torch in maintaining the "cpu as part of our motherboard sandwich, or else it's illegal" paradigm.

Or at the point where ARM manages to push intel out of the market (haha, yeah, I know), without getting sabotaged to death. They could offer certain mobile laptop solutions at the moment, but they are not part of the laptop market or desktop market, very likely for purely business-diversification reasons.

Or possibly at the point when some explicitly parallel assembly language is adopted widely and entirely new hardware will be manufactured to be compatible with each other as long as they use the interfaces required by the interconnected bus standard that would go along with it.

But that simply won't happen in our lifetimes. In fact, the only commercially available product with an explicitly parallel assembly language running on several generic computing cores - was dropped and removed from marketability again. The ram-solution with concurrent reads and writes in that product was dropped in favor of one that adopts a solution for a higher frequency exclusive access writes and reads. That never is going to come near the potential of that dropped solution. That's the long and the short of it. The most we can hope for is semi-integrated components floating up from a scuttled AMD frigate that does away with parts of the sandwich-board, while integrating certain components of the gpu on the same die as the cpu. Nothing beyond that will happen in the "PC" space as long as Intel exists, and as long as there is no explicitly parallel assembly language widely adopted by all major interests in the industry. And that will not happen as long as there's money to be made on incremental updates. Simple as that.