Question for Radeon users

[Elthrael]

As someone who really doesn't care about "brand loyalty" (I've owned about an equal number of red and green cards going back to the ATi days), I see a lot of fanboyisms thrown around that just plain aren't true. "AMD has bad drivers" type of thing (right now it's nVidia's turn to have bad drivers).

I'm looking to buy a 9070 XT when prices aren't completely insane anymore (and we're getting there slowly in Europe), and while I'm obviously going to buy it to play new games (otherwise I'd just ride my 1080 Ti to its fiery grave), I do play quite a fair share of older games, especially older shooters and RPGs.

One thing I've seen claimed for nVidia cards is that they're "better for older games". Is there any truth to that statement? Any particular reason like emulation support, better software-level visual enhancements or something like that?

[C1REX]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Elthrael:

I don’t think there is a big difference. I play a lot of old games - including on emulators.

However, I do remember few examples:
- Final Fantasy 13 needed a mod for high VRAM AMD gpu. Super easy to install but still.
- Resident Evil Revelations had similar problem but later driver update fixed that.
- Earth Defence Force 6 was crashing on Radeon GPUs for the first few months. Devs finally fixed the problems(it was their fault) but long after there was a fix made by mod community.

Both brands offer driver level frame generation but I personally prefer lossless scaling app for upscaling and frame gen in games that don’t have it natively.

I use Radeon sharpening slider option as I like it a lot in almost all of my games including the newest AAA ones.

Nvidia has better power consumption.

But there is really not that much of a difference now. Choose whatever has a better price and makes you feel better. Swapping brands is a good way to avoid fanboism.

[gwwak]

Nvidia cards also tend to perform better for compute or workstation applications.

[Midnight Aurais]

better for older games could apply to physx which doesn't run great when using amd

prior to the latest nvidia drivers both amd and nvidia had around 17-19 issues on average that said they aren't the same ones

on top of just the nvidia drivers there has been some instability already going on prior in games like the last of us and is happening in part 2 were nvidia users on average experience more crashes then amd users or better said amd has no crashes that i know of with that game indiana jones is another example its a ray traced title yet seems to run better on average on amd then nvidia from the amounts of complaints i could gather

i ain't a fanboy as like you i been changing teams each upgrade that said i am going to stick with amd for 1 the pricing is now ridiculous here at least amd has better performance vs cost and the 2nd part is i fricking hate that 16 pin connector and its a given because now even 9070 xt's seem to melt even while the connector draws less then half the max rated capacity

so if you do purchase a 9070 xt or non xt variant avoid the 16 pin like the plague stick with the trusty old 8 pin pci cable variants as the board partners were just allowed to pick what connector they wanted

so for the first time i probably stick with amd for a next upgrade that said got no reason to yet got a 6950 xt for cheap can handle games at 4k no problem

also another reason i would stick with amd is that i left the windows eco system behind for linux and still of today linux favors amd still on top linux has better fps in a lot of games vs windows if your gpu is amd

[Illusion of Progress]

It's a bit of a broad claim, but no doubt there are cases where nVidia might have "more desirable results" in some older and/or "off the beaten path" examples, perhaps especially in examples using OpenGL. It's not always because "AMD drivers are bad" (and AMD rewrote their OpenGL implementation late 2022 which largely improved things) but sometimes it's also because of games simply using very outdated philosophies (and yes, nVidia did historically have better OpenGL results in those older versions and AMD did neglect things at times). Sometimes though, games would outright rely on nVidia specific functions... while neglecting to make decent alternatives, even when the possibility exists. In many cases, the fault lays squarely on the game.

A quick example that comes to mind is Minecraft Java, which uses OpenGL. It used to rely on an nVidia OpenGL extension to allow rendering the fog in a consistently spherical fashion. For AMD (and Intel) hardware, the function was not supported so fog was more of a "straight wall" ahead that "moved" depending on your camera orientation. This resulted in changing visibility of some terrain right along the fog line depending on the camera angle. This may be less pleasant or desirable.

It's not that making the fog behave that way on non-nVidia hardware was impossible. Minecraft simply used ridiculously outdated philosophies (fixed function pipeline rendering in 2021 when hardware was moving away from that around two decades earlier). The solution would be to use the programmable shaders to write their own shader, which is an added flexibility that more recent (or in this case, slightly less ancient) OpenGL versions offer. That is what it now does as of 1.17 when it updated to OpenGL 3. This goes back to Minecraft being a passion project of Notch in 2009, him choosing to use what was already long outdated philosophies in 2009, and technical debt piling up to the point where it took Mojang way too long to address it.

Now if you play Minecraft on AMD hardware, it's absolutely great. But if you want to delve into older versions, the fog will still be like that in those versions. So how important is stuff like that is to you? I can't answer that for you.

Older emulation is another example where older OpenGL examples come into play. I've had no issues with DuckStation on my 7800 XT, but if you're using older software, results may vary.

[andreasaspenberg575]

there is certain older games that is glitched on amd gpus. only game i can think of at the moment is machines wired for war. other older games, like gangland have no issues. let me tell you this: those games also struggled on ati gpus. the best way to find a list is therefore to search up what games it was that glitched on ati gpus.

[Midnight Aurais]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από andreasaspenberg575:

there is certain older games that is glitched on amd gpus. only game i can think of at the moment is machines wired for war. other older games, like gangland have no issues. let me tell you this: those games also struggled on ati gpus. the best way to find a list is therefore to search up what games it was that glitched on ati gpus.

if they are to old there are always compatibility layers like dgvoodoo 1 and 2 and 3DAnalyzer and dxvk

that said if i want to play some 16 bit i prefer using linux over getting a windows 32 bit system then using "turn windows features on or off" to enable 16 bit linux still allows 64 bit alongside 16 bit that's how i can just play animaniacs out the box old but gold wel technically wine is a compatibility layer

technically you can also use dosbox but i have not been able to get every game working through that

there are also older games that require nvidia inspector to fix ambient occlusion not working in the game while amd does not have that issue

[Elthrael]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από C1REX:

Nvidia has better power consumption.

Coming off an OC'd and undervolted 1080 Ti, I think an RX 9070 XT is gonna pull about the same amount of power, so in a way, that's more efficient per watt 🤣

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Midnight Aurais:

i ain't a fanboy as like you i been changing teams each upgrade that said i am going to stick with amd for 1 the pricing is now ridiculous here at least amd has better performance vs cost and the 2nd part is i fricking hate that 16 pin connector and its a given because now even 9070 xt's seem to melt even while the connector draws less then half the max rated capacity

so if you do purchase a 9070 xt or non xt variant avoid the 16 pin like the plague stick with the trusty old 8 pin pci cable variants as the board partners were just allowed to pick what connector they wanted

Oooohhhh yeah. I'm no expert in electronics but I know enough to tell that the 16 pin just reeks of bad ideas and bad "nah it'll be fine" engineering across the board. The hell were they thinking pushing so much power through basically one wire anyway. No contingencies or anything, it's really bizarre. I'm surprised no one has raised a ruckus to any EU consumer protection agency, this is downright dangerous.
The models I'm interested in (Powercolor Reaper, Sapphire Pulse, XFX Swift, ASUS Prime) all have the 8-pin anyway.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Illusion of Progress:

(awesome OpenGL info I edited out for brevity)

This was a fascinating read. I'll look into it. This is the kind of stuff I hoped for, something to look into.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από andreasaspenberg575:

the best way to find a list is therefore to search up what games it was that glitched on ati gpus.

Same, thanks. Will look into it.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από gwwak:

Nvidia cards also tend to perform better for compute or workstation applications.

True that, but for my use case, the only vaguely "work-y" thing I do with my PC is audio production and there the CPU does the bulk of the work. I can run Reaper on my R7 7700's iGPU just fine, heh.

[AbedsBrother]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Elthrael:

One thing I've seen claimed for nVidia cards is that they're "better for older games". Is there any truth to that statement? Any particular reason like emulation support, better software-level visual enhancements or something like that?

No, there is no truth to that statement. Radeon plays old games just fine.

Source: my ownership experience with an R7 260X, then an RX 470, then an RX 5700XT and finally an RX 7900XT.

[andreasaspenberg575]

not all of the time. certain older games glitch on radeon gpus. guess that might be because they were never built for them.

[Corona Scurrae]

It depends. Usually there are less issues with NVIDIA drivers and NVIDIA tends to fix them fast whenever problems occur. Also if you are going to do any professional work then AMD is out of the question until ROCM is released. NVIDIA is also more efficient but they are stingy in regards to vram

If you only care about gaming and don't care about "future-proofing" for the latest titles then I suggest the 9070xt. Got mine last week and I have to say I'm impressed

[Midnight Aurais]

there are issues argueing about older games compatibility with gpu's
1. what do you perceive as old games mine goes back into the 16 bit days
2. what amd or nvidia gpu from that time because reality is there is a potential for any gpu to brick a older title when moving to a new architecture lets take stubbs the zombie and i mean the original copy no gpu of today works out the box with that game anymore yet when it was released both nvidia and ati had no issue running it

there is also a unfortunate truth that while games are backward compatible they might no longer have the hardware support they once had instead use legacy emulated support so new features can fit in the place of the deprecated feature that no new games use

sometimes you lose nothing when changing hardware to emulation other times some loss occurs but someone comes up with a workaround

this issue ain't just with gpu's when i moved to the 1st generation of ryzen max payne no longer worked it would crash because a instruction set was missing later was fixed with a workaround

and lastly cores a lot of bugs occur in very old games if they even allow you to run them with more then 1 or 2 cores the game doesn't know what to do with the remaining cores and might refuse to even start some can work if you change the affinity settings in task manager to use less cores but others that still does not work and you require disabling the cores in the bios for the game to run heck it might even just be tied to the speed of your processor

what the point is that a lot of factors play into why a game runs or does not run i have yet to come across a game i cannot get working one way or another this will turn into a essay if i had to right every solution i ever found

[Midnight Aurais]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Corona Scurrae:

It depends. Usually there are less issues with NVIDIA drivers and NVIDIA tends to fix them fast whenever problems occur. Also if you are going to do any professional work then AMD is out of the question until ROCM is released. NVIDIA is also more efficient but they are stingy in regards to vram

If you only care about gaming and don't care about "future-proofing" for the latest titles then I suggest the 9070xt. Got mine last week and I have to say I'm impressed

rocm is released you just need the linux subsystem enabled in windows to use it

also zuda is revived

[Corona Scurrae]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Midnight Aurais:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Corona Scurrae:

It depends. Usually there are less issues with NVIDIA drivers and NVIDIA tends to fix them fast whenever problems occur. Also if you are going to do any professional work then AMD is out of the question until ROCM is released. NVIDIA is also more efficient but they are stingy in regards to vram

If you only care about gaming and don't care about "future-proofing" for the latest titles then I suggest the 9070xt. Got mine last week and I have to say I'm impressed

rocm is released you just need the linux subsystem enabled in windows to use it

also zuda is revived

That's good to hear. Will try it out

[matt]

I don't know why anyone would say Nvidia cards are better for retrogaming or just older games. That's a weird claim to make.

Maaaybe they mean hardware support for 32 bit PhysX? But Nvidia's latest cards dropped support for it, anyway. If you have nostalgia for one of the 20 games that used it, just plug in an old Nvidia card. Anyone who's not a blind fanboy probably has something from the past 10 years in their basement or a closet somewhere. Or buy a used 750ti or 1030 on ebay for a couple bucks? Not a big deal.

[HIVEmind]

I still play Diablo 1 on quad HD nv4060 rtx. yes diabo has ultimate compatibility