GeForce vs Radeon latency in Skyrim on high-speed video

Posted on Thursday, December 13 2012 @ 18:16 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Two days ago The Tech Report published an article comparing the performance of AMD's Radeon HD 7950 vs the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti in Windows 8 across a range of popular games. The conclusion was that even though the Radeon HD 7950 is the more powerful card, it delivers more frames per second than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, this does not translate in a more fluid gaming experience because the 7950 suffers from a persistent problem with high-latency frames across a range of games. The site suspects driver issues are to blame for this, and points out that Windows 8 isn't too blame, the new operating system generally improves the latency picture somewhat.
The tragedy here is one of wasted potential. The Radeon HD 7950 is, on paper, clearly a more powerful GPU than the GTX 660 Ti, with double the memory interface width and a theoretical edge in peak ROP rate and shader flops. AMD is giving you more hardware for your money when you buy a 7950. For whatever reason—and we suspect the main culprit is graphics driver software—the 7950 can't convert that advantage into consistently smoother in-game animation. As one of my fellow TR editors pointed out to me the other day, this wouldn't be the first time Radeon owners were let down by driver issues during the holiday rush. AMD was plagued by a painful series of driver issues last year, too.
Yesterday The Tech Report published a follow up that includes high-speed video capture of both graphics cards in Skyrim, you can check it out over here.



About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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