Is Radeon REALLY better for old PCs? | Driver Overhead

Benchmarking the Ryzen 7 1700 in 8 games using a Radeon RX 6700 and Geforce RTX 3070 to test driver overhead in CPU limited situations.

Now that DirectX12 and Vulkan are the rendering APIs of choice for modern games, the familiar strategy of upgrading the GPU ahead of the CPU is making less sense. CPUs can now hold back GPUs more readily than in the past, and it turns out that this is even more of a problem for Nvidia. Does this mean that a newer graphics card from AMD is a better choice for owners of older CPUs?

Track names: “The Doc Will See You Now”, “Vercetti Forever”, "Binary Sunrise"

00:00 Is NVIDIA driver overhead holding back your old PC?
01:05 Background: what is driver overhead?
03:16 Test System: Ryzen 7 1700, 32GB DDR4-3600, RTX 3070 & RX 6700
03:30 CPU Limited Benchmarks: Ryzen 1700, NVIDIA vs. AMD
09:54 Summary
10:58 Old CPU vs. New: Ryzen 1700 vs. 5600X
13:56 Conclusion

A D S
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G E A R
Audio:

Video:

C O N T A C T
Twitter/Insta @IcebergTop10s

#drivers #nVidia #scalperpandemic

[IcebergTech]

CLARIFICATION:
I did want to go back and test the RTX 3070 with FSR 2 instead of DLSS, but I ran out of time with the Ryzen 7 1700. There is little to no performance difference between the two upscalers, with DLSS’s advantage mainly apparent in image quality, but ideally I’d like to have maintained consistency. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic with an Intel CPU in the future, and do it right next time!

[dorktales]

Driver overhead aside, can we at least commend AMD for having fully open source drivers on Linux. They are rock solid too, almost never crashing

[hardcorehardware]

This just shows how good the 6700 is for the money, great video mate I enjoyed it.

[DMS_]

The TLOU performance the 6700 is seeing, is likely because of the bug that got fixed on 23.5.1, and happened all the time if you let the shaders compile and jump in the game without restarting it. The VRAM and ram values that ballooned during the compilation, remain there during gameplay, messing up the performance.

[Rabbit_AF]

Recently switched my son's PC from a RTX 3050 to a RX 6600 XT. He has an E5-2667V2, and I didn't think it would do much for him performance wise. I asked him how Starship Troopers: extraction played and he said it ran smooth. I ran it on an E3 1270 with a GTX 1070 ti and I thought it was a stuttery mess constantly dipping into the teens when bug hordes appeared. I'll have to watch him next time he plays to see if he just doesn't notice FPS dips or something.

All I know, is that I am glad I upgraded from that e3 1270 Xeon to a 5700g with a RX 6950 XT. I can now brute force unoptimized games.

[joekoch]

It’s really interesting to see how much the games are reasource intensive and how it can be leveraged by graphics cards. Great video good sir!

[Prehistoric_Nerd]

Considering the price difference between the two cards it was surprising to see how well the RX 6700 held out even with the 5600x.

[AshtonCoolman]

This is a great test! I've been preaching this about Nvidia driver overhead for years and years. AMD GPUs have had a hardware command processor since the ATI R600(HD 2900XT) era. There are folks on AM4 that can double their GPU performance by just upgrading to a mere 5600X. Anyone with an older Intel or AMD CPU that recently upgraded their GPU needs to see this desperately.

[ctsd]

I've read that it's because AMD uses hardware schedulers on the GPU itself, whereas NVDA relies on software scheduling on the CPU, that there is such a disparity.

[sLNK]

Been watching you (and also subbed) for a while. Honestly, your channel's content value is miles higher than creators like JayzTwoCents' nowadays. I truly appreciate your work and really hope your channel blows up asap.

[Psychx_]

The devs just omitted optimizing new releases: Due to the reduction in development time, the publishers can save money and release an even more unfinished game early, people buy new GPUs and the economy is happy.

The PC gaming industry is rotten and disgusting atm and having all increases in hardware performance eaten up by greed and lazyness is frustrating.

[steveo]

Thanks for making this video. This all makes a ton of sense, a buddy of mine is wanting to build a new PC and we are thinking of throwing a 12100F or a 13100F in it with a Radeon RX 5500XT for a ultra decentish budget build. This just kinda solidified that I am going with the RX 5500XT over the Nvidia equivalent I was going to go for. Thanks for the awesome work on these videos, the production quality is top notch from such a small channel.

[florider_hd]

I put a 1660super in my 2012 rig. Its been flawless so far, fitting right in at 500 watts. i know there are better options but for 120€ it was a great purchase!

[AlexandruJalea]

Ha, not just gaming. 2023 is a problem generally 😅

[TheUnexpected]

Absolutely love your style of documentative videos. Very well researched and the structure of your script is super easy to follow and to the point. Subbed

[hofnaerrchen]

Darth Vader never runs!^^Apart from that you might want to compare power consumption, too. Would really be interesting to also see those numbers. A "simple" adapter at the wall will do the job for total system consumption.

[airwolf]

I upgraded my Ryzen 7 1700 to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D on my Asus X370 Mainboard. Its really a big difference.

[sehvekah]

I just wanted to say thanks for this video, as it confirmed a suspicion I had with my latest upgrade, which left my rig very similar to one of your test machines(R5 1600, B350 Tomahawk, 32GB 3200 RAM and an RX 6750 XT).

My system ended up in this state due to medical issues eating nearly the last two years of my life, and when I *finally* felt up to playing Cyberpunk again, the game no longer ran on my old card(an R7 360), so that's what I chose to focus my first upgrade on. It's worked out pretty good, especially as a nasty crash/corruption lead to a windows re-install and a big push towards making Linux my primary OS.

Still it's great to have confirmation that the Ryzen 5k series chips I'm looking at for the next upgrade will be a solid match for the rest of my system, and it's *fantastic* that there's folks like you who will test out these various "edge case" scenarios to get to the hard data.

[reinhardtwilhelm]

This is even more impressive when you remember that the 3070 is ordinarily ~20% faster than the 6700.

[Antilli]

Great video... I remember the time when nVidia had lower driver overhead than AMD cards... It was all over the internet. Now that it's the opposite, what the internet says is not really that AMD has less overhead, but rather that nVidia has better scaling at higher resolutions...

The nVidia hive mind is annoying.