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Video card performance: needs more memory bandwidth
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
Tom's Hardware did a post addressing Guild Wars 2's performance on various hardware. There's another thread to talk about processor performance, but there are some striking things that make the game an outlier in video card performance, too, and I think they deserve a separate thread.
Here's the article, with two particular pages that I want to highlight:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-4.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-6.html
On the first page, I'm mainly interested in the comparison between a Radeon HD 6450 and a Radeon HD 6670. The former has two SIMD engines, while the latter has six. The 6670 clocks its SIMD engines higher, too. Thus, the 6670 has more than triple the shader and texture performance of the 6450. It also has more than double the ROP performance.
But look at the comparison. The 6670 beats the 6450, but barely. It doesn't triple the 6450's performance. It doesn't even double it, even though the Turks chip in the 6670 is more than twice as fast as the Caicos chip in the 6450 at everything relevant to gaming. Instead, the 6670 barely wins at all.
Why? There's only one plausible explanation that I can see: memory bandwidth. The 6670 has a 128-bit memory bus, while the 6450 has a 64-bit bus. But the particular 6670 that they test uses DDR3 memory, while the 6450 uses GDDR5. At a given clock speed, GDDR5 has double the memory bandwidth per channel of DDR3. They don't say which particular 6450 they use, but it's likely to have the memory clocked at 800 MHz, the same as their 6670. That would give the two cards the same memory bandwidth.
So the if the two cards have the same memory bandwidth, while the 6670 is more than twice as fast at everything else--and often more than three times as fast--then the 6670 ends up winning, but barely. That's a huge memory bandwidth bottleneck.
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Now go to the second page I linked. This time, I'm interested in comparing a GeForce GTX 460 to a GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Again, the GTX 460 is typically the far more capable card. They're both based on Nvidia's Fermi architecture, but the GTX 460 has 7 SMs, while the GTX 550 Ti has 4. The latter is clocked higher, but the GTX 460 still has an enormous advantage in shader and texture performance.
And unlike the DDR3 version of the Radeon HD 6670, the GeForce GTX 460 isn't starved for memory bandwidth. Yet having a huge advantage in performance of the GPU chip itself, together with a slight disadvantage in memory bandwidth (both cards have a 192-bit memory bus, but the GTX 550 Ti clocks it a bit higher) translates to being about 10% faster.
A more typical result would be the GTX 460 winning by about 40%. It seems that even a card that has ample memory bandwidth for most games will be seriously constrained by it in GW2.
The conclusion that I'd take away from this is, if you're buying a video card for Guild Wars 2, make sure you pick something with lots of memory bandwidth. The game doesn't really systematically favor Nvidia or AMD; what it favors is having lots of memory bandwidth.
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There's something else that I'd like to point out on the second page, too. Go down to the bottom of the chart and compare the Radeon HD 7770 to the Radeon HD 7870. A 7870 is basically double a 7770 or sometimes a little more in nearly everything. It delivers less than double the performance of the 7770, but that's because performance on the 7870 is meaningfully held back by other factors--most notably, the processor.
That's a typical result when memory capacity isn't a factor. If memory capacity were a factor, you'd see the 7770 choke for lack of memory. The 7770 has only 1 GB, while the 7870 has 2 GB. But 1 GB is plenty, even at max settings and a resolution of 2560x1600. 1 GB may or may not be enough for an Eyefinity setup, but the GPU chip in a 7770 will choke at that on max settings anyway.
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And so, a few quick conclusions:
1) Buy a card with GDDR5 memory. I've been recommending the Radeon HD 6670 with DDR3 as a severe budget, low power card for quite some time. That's a good idea for most games. Not for Guild Wars 2.
2) Don't pay extra for a card with stupid amounts of video memory. If you get a GeForce GTX 670, get a 2 GB version, not 4 GB. If you get a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, get a 1 GB version, not 2 GB. And so forth. Memory capacity is not a meaningful limiting factor in GW2, with the possible exception of some cards that Apple ships with unusually little video memory.
3) Don't buy a GeForce GTX 660 Ti for Guild Wars 2. There were a bunch of Nvidia fanboys excited about the launch of this card and saying they were going to buy it. But taking a GPU that is already strapped for memory bandwidth and fusing off a memory channel entirely is trouble in an average game, and big trouble in a game like GW2 that is so heavily memory-bandwidth dependent. While the GTX 660 Ti is a little faster than a Radeon HD 7870 in an average game, I'd be very surprised if the 7870 isn't faster in GW2. The 7870 is also a lot cheaper.
4) More broadly, the GeForce GTX 670 is the only Kepler card released yet that makes much sense for GW2. It's like that more generally, of course, but GW2 has a much stronger case of it than most games. The GT 640 is a crippled DDR3 card. The GTX 680 has the same memory bandwidth as the GTX 670, so it will probably perform about the same, but it costs $100 more.
5) Don't overclock your GPU for Guild Wars 2. You might see gains from overclocking your video memory, but overclocking the GPU is just a waste.
Comments
The 7870 is not cheaper in all countries.
Price contra performance you'd get a lot out of 2x 660Ti vs a GTX 680. Even more so if you overclock them. And why wouldn't you? Overclocking will always give you a gain, not the other way around.
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Awesome info as always, Quiz. I am in the market for a new video card, so your post is priceless!
I currently have a 5850, and I'm thinking about upgrading to this 7850: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150609
The side-by-side comparisons I saw on Anandtech's benchmarks, it looks like I'll get better performance, as well as lower temps and less power consumption by switching to the 7850. It also has GDDR5. That card looks like a winner to me, is it?
Great post sir! Thanks.
I just wanted to drop a commenthere too. I built a new system a few weeks back. I went with a 3570k i5, 8gb of pc1600 and a HD 7850 Sapphire card.
With no overclocking at all yet, I am pinned at 60FPS in GW2 @ 1920x1080 with everything maxxed except I run native rendering with no supersampling, no bloom and depth blur off, because I dont like blur or bloom. I have vsync on. If I ever drop below 60, it's very breif an only to 56+
Not a bad system at all if I say so myself. I could have waited a while and got the 7870, but I got a killer deal on the 7850 and couldn't pass it up. As an upgrade from my 550ti, it's a beast
While there might be places that only have a few video cards, so that a small sample size throws things off, the 7870 is typically a lot cheaper, because AMD charges a lot less for it. A cursory check finds that it's true of:
New Egg (United States): $260 before a $20 rebate, versus $300 with no rebate
NCIX (Canada): $245 before a $30 rebate, versus either $310 before a $20 rebate, or $300 with no rebate
Ebuyer (Britain): £201 versus £252
MSY (Australia): $299 versus $379
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Comparing things to a GTX 680 is absurd. It's kind of like how Dell will say, here's a computer equivalent to what you can buy for $500 elsewhere, but we're going to claim that it's nominally worth $1000, but we'll sell it to you for a super discounted price of $700. Except that they won't explicitly tell you that you can get it for $500 elsewhere. If you want an Nvidia card, then the relevant comparison is to a GeForce GTX 670.
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Overclocking only helps you if the thing you overclock meaningfully limited your performance without the overclock. Overclocking your processor won't make Notepad run noticeably faster.
The problem is that, while a Radeon HD 7850 is a decent card, it's not that much faster than a 5850. That's just too much to pay for a card that might be 30% faster than what you have, if even that much.
Ok thanks for the tip. What would you recommend instead of the 7850 in that price range? The 5850 runs really well, it's just loud and runs hot. My main interest in upgrading is to find something with similar or better performance that runs quieter and cooler.
It is important to note that the Toms Hardware performance evaluation was done during a "Beta" event and is no reflection on actual performance post release.
You can tell this by the Renderer: DirextX 9 text in the graphics configuration which has not been displayed since the last few stress tests.
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It sounds like you're interested as much in a premium cooler as a performance increase. Or at least I assume that by "runs hot" you mean "reaches 80 C in gaming" as opposed to "heats up my room". If your problem is the latter, then switching to a 7000 series card can give comparable performance with 30% less heat, but that's about the best you can do.
Assuming the former, this is about as good as you're going to do:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127662
Or there's this, which has a slight factory overclock to the memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102983
Those are a little more expensive than what you were looking at, but not a lot, and a Radeon HD 7870 is a fair bit faster than a 7850. They'll also put out a little more heat than your current 5850, but two big fans on a great big heatsink should make it possible for them to be fairly quiet.
Just an FYI to add to the mix... there's a new Nvidia driver on the way (306.xx beta is available today) which fixes several things with GW2 specifically and gives some pretty substantial performance improvements for 5- and 6-series cards. From what I've read, it also does a good job at increasing minimum frame rates which gives noticeably smoother performance for many people.
Yeah, they do tend to do that. The problem is that when people care and you'll get web site hits, it's too soon to tell. By the time the game has been out for a while and you have final results, people don't care anymore.
They really botched the Star Trek Online performance evaluation, as they did it during a period when Champions Online (same game engine) had artificially anti-aliasing on AMD cards. Think that will affect a game's performance?
There is nothing else in that price range with similar performance, if heat and power are your priority.
It's faster than the 5850, and can overclock to 7870 speeds on stock voltage ( or slightly above ).
So if you're going to buy a card anyway, go for the 7850.
Err... the 7850 is a far superior card to the 5850, although if you have a 5850 it is good enough to get a decent frame-rate on max settings.
This is from the ArenaNet article: Bill Freist Talks Optimization and Performance
Just FYI:
I have an i5-3570k with a Radeon 7850 2gb and 8gb ram.
FPS is great and matches these results (if not slightly higher) except for slightly hard to read text and some odd bounce when moving. Its like I am getting a slight spongy slow down every second although FPS itself not affected. I also get some noticeable tearing during the Vista cut scenes which was not present prior to release.
It is barely noticeable, although just enough to be annoying.
I am hoping its not an issue with the card. Is anyone else experiencing a similar issue?
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A Radeon HD 7850 is a better card than a 5850 in every way I can think of except for double precision floating point performance. But my point was that, if you already have a 5850, a 7850 isn't better by enough to justify paying $200+ for the upgrade unless there is something flagrantly wrong with the 5850 (e.g., it died).
I agree with you there. If you DO need to get a new card, then the HD 7850 and HD 7870 from the Radeon line will probably be your best bet as they are very good in terms of performance/power draw. The Nvidia Geforce 660 (ti?) is also a worthwhile contender although a lot heavier on those Watts.
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I don't have a set budget, but I'd like to stay around or under $300.
I've been monitoring my 5850 while playing GW2, and it usually hangs around 65 C. My concern is that after playing GW2 for a few hours straight on max settings, my screens started flickering as if the video card was overheating (not really sure how else to explain it, this has happened with other resource hungry games). The fans on the video card during heavy load sound as loud as a vacuum cleaner. When the flickering starts, I bump the graphics settings down a bit and the flickering goes away (specifially disabling or decreasing AA seems to get rid of the flickering). It runs fine for a the first few hours on max settings, but eventually it starts flickering (which is why I think it's an overheating issue).
I run two monitors, my primary monitor is 1920x1080, my other monitor is 1280x1024. I game on the primary monitor. I need 1 DP port and 1 DVI port. I'd like to stick with AMD, but I'm willing to switch to Nvidia if there's a significantly better option (based on price, performance, noise level, and heat level).
In terms of power-draw, the 7850 is the better card as it draws a lot less power than the 5850. It draws approx 20 Watts less under load (about 130 Watts) as compared to the 7870 which draws over 175 Watts. All of this energy has to get dumped somewhere and the usual output is heat.
The 7850 is the lowest end card that will comfortably get 60fps on max settings and can be picked up for between $210- $240. Personally I would go with a dual fan model as they run a lot more quietly. I got a Sapphire 7850 HD OC a few weeks back (just before the price cuts, dammit!) and it is an awesome card.
7870's can be grabbed for approx $240-$270. The same advice about fans goes here. Just be aware that they do draw significantly more power. I am not sure it is going to be worth it for an extra 5-10 fps.
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If it's for GW2 only, then as explained above, I'd take a 7870 over a GTX 660 Ti even if they were the same price. That the 7870 is so much cheaper makes it an easy choice. Even if you had said you favored Nvidia, I'd still have tried to talk you out of the GTX 660 Ti. The sensible Nvidia choices are a GTX 670 at the high end, or an older Fermi card if you can't afford the GTX 670. And the latter only makes sense if you're not sensitive to energy efficiency.
On perfomance per watt, Pitcairn (Radeon HD 7850 and 7870) and GK104 (GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GTX 670, and GTX 680) are roughly equal. Tahiti (Radeon HD 7950 and 7970) is somewhat worse. Radeon HD 6000/7000 series cards are much worse, and GeForce 400/500 series cards considerably worse yet.
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The symptoms you describe sound odd. Does Catalyst Control Center say you're still only at 65 C while you're having the problems? I wonder if the GPU temperatures are fine but something else is overheating.
But taking three hours to overheat is strange. Normally, if you're going to overheat, you'd expect to overheat faster than that. Even if the problem is poor case airflow rather than the video card itself, that should heat up a lot faster than three hours. The only reason I can think of why it would take three hours to overheat is if the computer heats up your room and the entire room being hotter is what pushes it over the top. So I think it might not be an overheating problem.
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7870s seem to mostly use Mini DisplayPort as opposed to DisplayPort. You can get an adapter cheaply if you don't already have one.
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Decent brands will usually have an adapter included.
Always check what is included in the box.
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"the GeForce GTX 460 isn't starved for memory bandwidth. Yet having a huge advantage in performance of the GPU chip itself, together with a slight disadvantage in memory bandwidth (both cards have a 192-bit memory bus, but the GTX 550 Ti clocks it a bit higher) translates to being about 10% faster.
A more typical result would be the GTX 460 winning by about 40%. It seems that even a card that has ample memory bandwidth for most games will be seriously constrained by it in GW2."
Looks like that the guys at Tom's didn't take into account that there are actually 4 versions of the GTX460 (also a heads up for GTX460 owners willing to make SLI - be sure to get an exact configuration card!)
Though the oldest GTX460's have a smaller bandwith, they are more powerful than the newer ones with 256bits. From the looks of Tom's article, they pulled out an old GTX460 and measured the performance. I bet if they'd get a new one for the same test, the GTX560Ti will be the winner of the two.
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Yeah, I forgot about that. While that isn't always true (which is why you said "usually"), it is true for both of the cards that I linked.
The 7870 and the GTX 670 are pretty much on par in GW2, you will get almost the exact same performance out of either card.
A huge issue with many of the Nvidia cards in regards to GW2 is the drivers, you MUST use beta drivers for GW2 if you are using a Nvidia card. If you haven't tried it do so, it will make a huge difference. Hopefully Toms took this into account while testing for GW2.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/5247826#5247826
Check this thread out as well for the links, Anet has done there own testing and show you which cards tend to work best in GW2.
Card memory and driver are both going to be big factors in GPU perfomance in regards to GW2.
Speaking of which... the new 306 driver has increased FPS with my Nvidia cards again.