NVIDIA Unlocks Certain Professional Features for TITAN Xp Through Driver Update

[jabbadap]

So they updated the drivers to show people that VEGA FE does not beat Titan Xp on specviewperf, like somebody would use either without certification on pro softs anyway...

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

This kind of crippling cards as a marketing "scam" needs to stop. There really is no needs for 32 different flavors of the same damn card that has features enabled or crippled by simple software switches and firmware manipulation.

 

[cryohellinc]

This kind of crippling cards as a marketing "scam" needs to stop. There really is no needs for 32 different flavors of the same damn card that has features enabled or crippled by simple software switches and firmware manipulation.

This. You should get what you pay for. Full stop.

 

[Vayra86]

- Normal people don't have enough money to throw at Titans, and pros perfectly understand all the differences between different Titan versions. Also NVIDIA has never forced anyone to buy Titans.
- Never used one, don't care. And I'm an NVIDIA user. Come again please.
- Factually it has 4 gigs of VRAM, 0.5 of which runs slower which made a lot of people angry, yet in absolute most games these 0.5GB of slow VRAM don't affect performance/FPS in any way. The specs could have been better presented, true and for that they lost a class action lawsuit.
- GameWorks use the hardware features which work faster on NVIDIA GPUs. It's not like GW use the features which don't allow AMD cards to run GW titles. In a lot of games you can disable GW features completely. Also, since NVIDIA is a dominant player in the GPU market and GW allow for better graphics, independent game developers use the said features because they will work for at least 75% of people out there without a discernible performance loss.
- What?
- NVIDIA has never made anyone buy FE cards. Never.
- This has been proven to be false for at least a dozen times already.

So what do we see here? A load of either falsehoods, incompetence or baloneys.

Yeah, come with another dozen please, because you've got nothing so far. Or just don't.

I think he was being mildly sarcastic. (see point 5).

Main reason is rose tinted specs and never supporting the market leader (look at Intels' haters too). Most folk love the underdog, forgetting that both are simply buisinesses after your money.

Of course it was mostly sarcasm, I'm glad at least you got it.

But there is a distinct tone in @birdie's response too and a certain blindness as to why people could definitely hate Nvidia. Because even though these points that I put forward are perhaps not (all) real issues, there is definitely an underlying strategy within them that people generally don't like and there is also a rather 'lenient' way of looking at it in that response to them. Let's highlight a couple here

- 970's 3.5 GB. Like you said, they lost a lawsuit on it and for good reason. This was outright, blatantly misleading your customers and purposely hiding the way the company builds its mid-range GPUs, which generally is with asymmetric bus widths but was NEVER done as sloppy as it was done on the 970. With that in the back of your head, I find it rather strange to see you 'defending' Nvidia's stance on 4 GB present on these cards. Even the court disagrees with you.

'Factually it has 4GB VRAM..' Are you for real? What's next, selling DDR4 with half the memory capacity at 1/8th of the speed it has on the box? And will you then also state 'oh but it has 8 GB on the stick, so factually its correct'?

- GameWorks. It is proven that Gameworks has been detrimental to game performance in several titles and it has also been proven that Nvidia locks that API down and chooses its own timing to give out source code to whomever wants to optimize around it. While Nvidia works very closely with those that use GWorks, they also have a tool here to manipulate parts of the game that influence competitors. A good example, is Nvidia Hairworks and how it was applied in The Witcher 3 - AMD cards suffered heavily from high degrees of Tesselation while there is no explanation for using the resolution it was using, and zero visual advantage to it. And on top of that, they didn't just slam AMD with this, but also all their own Kepler-based customers who saw their very recent 780ti's perform half as good as they should with no visual advantages in the game. They leveraged Maxwell's stronger Tesselation unit, but even Maxwell cards themselves register a ridiculous FPS increase when you turn it off or to Low. This is Nvidia crippling performance to make us buy a higher end card, quite obviously.

Or, lets take another good example and have a long look at Project Cars and how CPU PhysX was implemented - a mandatory piece of the game.

- Titans and their marketing. Maybe you've missed this, but Titan was marketed NOT as a pro card, but as the largest and most powerful GPU ever made for gaming. Evidenced by the fact that over the past releases Titan has lost everything that made it a 'prosumer' card. But it did keep the price tag of that segment - a great example of Nvidia's underlying strategy and how they enforce price inflation.

- Founders Editions and their marketing. Again, perhaps you've missed this, but what everyone saw coming from miles away also actually happened: the FE cards were a means to inflate the price points of each GPU tier from the 1070 onwards. And the AIBs responded in kind, by putting their premium on the FE's MSRPs for their cooling solutions/branding. There are exactly ZERO examples of AIB cards being cheaper than the FE, which counters the argument Nvidia had for actually releasing them. They sold the FE as a great premium cooling solution while in essence its the same NVTTM cooler that they've had since Kepler, with the same shitty throttling, even on Pascal which runs a lot cooler.

- Crippling through drivers. Correct that is proven to be untrue and I know this. At the same time, you do see Nvidia deploy new graphical features that completely destroy last gen's card performance and they know very well how to time those things with new GPU releases. The Hairworks bit being a great example of how its used as a motivation to sell Maxwell to Kepler owners.

Now, I understand its a company that wants to make money, but in the same vein I understand people who can see the underlying strategy they use and spit on it. I am one of them, even though I've been using Nvidia cards since Kepler days, I do see Nvidia for the filthy rats that they are. Let's not sugar coat this and call it out for what it is. There is no need to apologise FOR them - they've proven very capable at that themselves.

Point 5 still stands - they make products that are simply too good to ignore.

 

[Relayer]

I can't believe that people didn't realize that there's no difference between the GPU's and it's all drivers that make the performance difference.

Often the pro cards have more RAM and at least with AMD different monitor connections. But don't think that the driver support for the pro apps doesn't cost the IHV's money. If they didn't charge extra for the pro cards then regular consumers, who don't require pro app support would be sharing the expense.

Still we can thank competition from AMD for this bone nVidia has tossed us.

 

[JJJJJamesSZH]

how convenient, you cripple 1.2k card performance and you enable the feature simply using driver update

I think Titan X (Pascal) user like me will never get any benefit from this.

 

[Fluffmeister]

FineWine!

 

[Gasaraki]

It's been like that for at least 10 years already except for FP performance/features.

And the same Vega GPU has been/will be released as a consumer part and a pro part - say something nice about AMD too, OK?

What's up with the people hating NVIDIA so much everywhere?

People are dumb. Workstation cards have always been the same as desktop cards except for certified drivers for workstation applications.

 

[cdawall]

Wait are people upset nvidia is making sure their flagship product stays competitive by giving people more features for free?

What forum did I just log into...at this point I think people would argue against intel/nvidia if they lowered prices. Stop complaining about things that are good for consumers.

 

[Imsochobo]

Geez, pick one.

- The marketing around Titan and the release scheme it follows
- Geforce Experience & forced login
- GTX 970 3.5 GB
- GameWorks
- Destroying the market with good product (I love that one)
- Price inflation through Founders Edition
- Crippling (insert old arch here) through drivers

I could probably add another dozen if you want?

My personal list:
GF experience.
GTX970 3.5GB.
Gameworks.
Driver issues occasionally in windows.
huge boards for no reason whatsoever (GTX1070,1080 especially)
Legacy card drivers.
Linux drivers suck horsecock (game performance is o-k though desktop experience is better on a raspberry PI!!!!)

 

[cdawall]

My personal list:
GF experience.
GTX970 3.5GB.
Gameworks.
Driver issues occasionally in windows.
huge boards for no reason whatsoever (GTX1070,1080 especially)
Legacy card drivers.
Linux drivers suck horsecock (game performance is o-k though desktop experience is better on a raspberry PI!!!!)

Anyone who complains about nvidia drivers should be forced to use AMD for a month with a single overclocked card. Nvidia drivers work so much better it isn't even funny.

That doesn't even start with the crossfire issues. Start a game up, guess crossfire isn't working today, reboot the game, still no crossfire, reboot the system, reset up wattman, oh it works kinda now.

 

[Vayra86]

Wait are people upset nvidia is making sure their flagship product stays competitive by giving people more features for free?

What forum did I just log into...at this point I think people would argue against intel/nvidia if they lowered prices. Stop complaining about things that are good for consumers.

Its not so much a complaint I think, more an eyebrow raiser that all of a sudden this is 'possible' now that Vega FE is stealing the show while in the past years we've seen Nvidia axe everything that made the Titan a true prosumer card that set it apart from the rest of the Geforce lineup.

I think, hypocrisy comes to mind here.

 

[Slizzo]

Oh look, something nobody really needs at this point, about the same as Vega FE

This is Nvidia saying, hey, look, we still have this overpriced piece of silicon here, did you know?

It's no different than the Frontier Edition RX Vega cards you know... So why the post about this? Frontier Edition - $1k for Air cooled, $1.5k for liquid.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Oh look, something nobody really needs at this point, about the same as Vega FE

This is Nvidia saying, hey, look, we still have this overpriced piece of silicon here, THAT STILL PLIEDRIVES ANYTHING AMD MAKES, did you know?

FTFY.

My personal list:
GF experience.
GTX970 3.5GB.
Gameworks.
Driver issues occasionally in windows.
huge boards for no reason whatsoever (GTX1070,1080 especially)
Legacy card drivers.
Linux drivers suck horsecock (game performance is o-k though desktop experience is better on a raspberry PI!!!!)

Spoken like a true AMD fan.
GF experience- you are not forced to use it
970 3.5- already addressed earlier in thread. Nvidia already paid for that screwup
Gameworks- nvidia is the dominant player, so it uses it's hardware for better effects. GW can be turned off in game if needed, and it doesnt make AMD cards not work. So no big deal there
Driver issues occasionally in windows- hello? Have you ever used an AMD product?
huge boards- again, fury non X? Why is this even a complaint? You can buy mini ITX 1070s and 1080s if you really want them, they exist.
Legacy card drivers- you complain they provide support for older cards? how is this really a complaint? Also, AMD cuts driver support for cards years before nvidia does. 6000 series hasnt been updates in two years, the 400 series is still getting updated.
Linux drivers- I am currently using a 1080 on linux mint. No problems here. Perhaps an incompatibility between your chosen distro and nvidia? And again have you used AMD's linux drivers?

 

[Prince Valiant]

I guess Nvidia changed their mind on Titan being an overpriced gaming card .

- 970's 3.5 GB. Like you said, they lost a lawsuit on it and for good reason. This was outright, blatantly misleading your customers and purposely hiding the way the company builds its mid-range GPUs, which generally is with asymmetric bus widths but was NEVER done as sloppy as it was done on the 970. With that in the back of your head, I find it rather strange to see you 'defending' Nvidia's stance on 4 GB present on these cards. Even the court disagrees with you.

'Factually it has 4GB VRAM..' Are you for real? What's next, selling DDR4 with half the memory capacity at 1/8th of the speed it has on the box? And will you then also state 'oh but it has 8 GB on the stick, so factually its correct'?

- GameWorks.

Now, I understand its a company that wants to make money, but in the same vein I understand people who can see the underlying strategy they use and spit on it. I am one of them, even though I've been using Nvidia cards since Kepler days, I do see Nvidia for the filthy rats that they are. Let's not sugar coat this and call it out for what it is. There is no need to apologise FOR them - they've proven very capable at that themselves.

Point 5 still stands - they make products that are simply too good to ignore.

I don't know how anyone manages to keep a straight face while defending Nvidia on the 970 memory thing or Gamworks. Has Hairworks even been used in more than a handful of games?

 

[Vayra86]

FTFY.


Spoken like a true AMD fan.
GF experience- you are not forced to use it
970 3.5- already addressed earlier in thread. Nvidia already paid for that screwup
Gameworks- nvidia is the dominant player, so it uses it's hardware for better effects. GW can be turned off in game if needed, and it doesnt make AMD cards not work. So no big deal there
Driver issues occasionally in windows- hello? Have you ever used an AMD product?
huge boards- again, fury non X? Why is this even a complaint? You can buy mini ITX 1070s and 1080s if you really want them, they exist.
Legacy card drivers- you complain they provide support for older cards? how is this really a complaint? Also, AMD cuts driver support for cards years before nvidia does. 6000 series hasnt been updates in two years, the 400 series is still getting updated.
Linux drivers- I am currently using a 1080 on linux mint. No problems here. Perhaps an incompatibility between your chosen distro and nvidia? And again have you used AMD's linux drivers?

RELAX. We don't need white knights to come in and defend the green team. My list was half sarcasm half serious and people act like someone just killed their dog or something

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

RELAX. We don't need white knights to come in and defend the green team. My list was half sarcasm half serious and people act like someone just killed their dog or something

White knighting would mean I was defending nvidia. I am only pointing out how dumb those comments are.

Complaining that "oh the PCBs are a little big" or "there are occasional driver issues" is a waste of bytes. (or complaining the linux drivers are broken which is just....incorrect)

 

[Vayra86]

White knighting would mean I was defending nvidia. I am only pointing out how dumb those comments are.

Complaining that "oh the PCBs are a little big" or "there are occasional driver issues" is a waste of bytes. (or complaining the linux drivers are broken which is just....incorrect)

I think you'll need to re-read your response a bit more critically then - and about the degree of dumb in those little lists, I think opinions differ wildly. Also since when do you decide what's a waste of bytes?

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I think you'll need to re-read your response a bit more critically then - and about the degree of dumb in those little lists, I think opinions differ wildly. Also since when do you decide what's a waste of bytes?

There is opinion, and then there is ignorance.

-he complained about PCB size on the 1070/1080, ignoring there are nano sized 1070s and 1080s available. So no reason to complain then.
-He complained about occasional driver issues, something that comes with the territory of the PC and happens to every company. Why mention it as if nvidia was expected to be the holy grail of stability?
-the linux driver post, which is factually incorrect.

It is a waste of bytes because either these issues are not issues or are incorrect from the get go.

 

[Vayra86]

That's an awfully selective read you do there, scroll up a paragraph to that first little bit of your response.

And then apply context of your whole message including your 'fix' of my quote. It kinda sets the bar here, no need to go there at all. Just sayin'

There are other ways around this too - such as linking the ITX 1070 and 1080 to set someone straight. Much more informative I'd say

 

[SPLWF]

Wait, you mean you spend all that money and only now they are releasing special unlocking drivers? Eff you Nvidia

 

[Chaitanya]

Of course it was mostly sarcasm, I'm glad at least you got it.

But there is a distinct tone in @birdie's response too and a certain blindness as to why people could definitely hate Nvidia. Because even though these points that I put forward are perhaps not (all) real issues, there is definitely an underlying strategy within them that people generally don't like and there is also a rather 'lenient' way of looking at it in that response to them. Let's highlight a couple here

- 970's 3.5 GB. Like you said, they lost a lawsuit on it and for good reason. This was outright, blatantly misleading your customers and purposely hiding the way the company builds its mid-range GPUs, which generally is with asymmetric bus widths but was NEVER done as sloppy as it was done on the 970. With that in the back of your head, I find it rather strange to see you 'defending' Nvidia's stance on 4 GB present on these cards. Even the court disagrees with you.

'Factually it has 4GB VRAM..' Are you for real? What's next, selling DDR4 with half the memory capacity at 1/8th of the speed it has on the box? And will you then also state 'oh but it has 8 GB on the stick, so factually its correct'?

- GameWorks. It is proven that Gameworks has been detrimental to game performance in several titles and it has also been proven that Nvidia locks that API down and chooses its own timing to give out source code to whomever wants to optimize around it. While Nvidia works very closely with those that use GWorks, they also have a tool here to manipulate parts of the game that influence competitors. A good example, is Nvidia Hairworks and how it was applied in The Witcher 3 - AMD cards suffered heavily from high degrees of Tesselation while there is no explanation for using the resolution it was using, and zero visual advantage to it. And on top of that, they didn't just slam AMD with this, but also all their own Kepler-based customers who saw their very recent 780ti's perform half as good as they should with no visual advantages in the game. They leveraged Maxwell's stronger Tesselation unit, but even Maxwell cards themselves register a ridiculous FPS increase when you turn it off or to Low. This is Nvidia crippling performance to make us buy a higher end card, quite obviously.

Or, lets take another good example and have a long look at Project Cars and how CPU PhysX was implemented - a mandatory piece of the game.

- Titans and their marketing. Maybe you've missed this, but Titan was marketed NOT as a pro card, but as the largest and most powerful GPU ever made for gaming. Evidenced by the fact that over the past releases Titan has lost everything that made it a 'prosumer' card. But it did keep the price tag of that segment - a great example of Nvidia's underlying strategy and how they enforce price inflation.

- Founders Editions and their marketing. Again, perhaps you've missed this, but what everyone saw coming from miles away also actually happened: the FE cards were a means to inflate the price points of each GPU tier from the 1070 onwards. And the AIBs responded in kind, by putting their premium on the FE's MSRPs for their cooling solutions/branding. There are exactly ZERO examples of AIB cards being cheaper than the FE, which counters the argument Nvidia had for actually releasing them. They sold the FE as a great premium cooling solution while in essence its the same NVTTM cooler that they've had since Kepler, with the same shitty throttling, even on Pascal which runs a lot cooler.

- Crippling through drivers. Correct that is proven to be untrue and I know this. At the same time, you do see Nvidia deploy new graphical features that completely destroy last gen's card performance and they know very well how to time those things with new GPU releases. The Hairworks bit being a great example of how its used as a motivation to sell Maxwell to Kepler owners.

Now, I understand its a company that wants to make money, but in the same vein I understand people who can see the underlying strategy they use and spit on it. I am one of them, even though I've been using Nvidia cards since Kepler days, I do see Nvidia for the filthy rats that they are. Let's not sugar coat this and call it out for what it is. There is no need to apologise FOR them - they've proven very capable at that themselves.

Point 5 still stands - they make products that are simply too good to ignore.

My cousin is working in nVidia right now in GPU architecture and some of the points above are the exact reason on which I had a disagreement couple of weeks back. Founders edition sorry reference cards, planned obsoletion and Gameworks are things I hate the most about nvidia.

 

[Patriot]

There is opinion, and then there is ignorance.

Yes... you have shown this thoroughly...
As someone who bought those 970s... and yes, they had frame runt issues.

As someone who has dealt with nvidia on linux, tesla, quadro and geforce...
And watched them cripple the monitor outputs and make sure that windows is a better experience...
And on Teslas... if you don't want your server to run headless, you better chose their 1 distro choice that is 2 versions old and use the exact recipe otherwise it won't work.

They also refused to pay at the end of the lawsuit... people who had sent in documentation showing receipts and serials... denied payment. of $30 on $350 cards... I had 4 970s... 3 of which have needed to be RMAd since the lawsuit and I will get money for none.

Geforce experience ... I put up with it because shadowplay is handy... but forcing people to create an account to use it is very very annoying... It also no longer always works right...sometimes defaults to 720p despite settings.

I have a 1080ti ... and I enjoy its performance. I have teslas at work... and a few firepros...
I desperately want competition on the high end... Cause nvidia is a bag of dicks and you are white knighting without cause.


If you want to keep being a tool...
bumpgate
driver visual quality (GTX200 gen)
driver frame rate fail/throttle fail ( 3 different gens, cars burn out)
driver turns off fan ( couple different drivers now)

Stop acting like Nvidia is a god and these issues are invalid.

 

[Captain_Tom]

This. You should get what you pay for. Full stop.

Then they will charge $2000 for the Titan and $1000 for the 2080 buddy.


Are these various flavors of the same cards essentially the same thing? Yes. But keep in mind that professionals are paying 4-6x what you are for the same card.

 

[BiggieShady]

Anyone who complains about nvidia drivers should be forced to use AMD for a month with a single overclocked card. Nvidia drivers work so much better it isn't even funny.

Ah, I suspected as much ... although I haven't used them for gaming since the evergreens, all I've been hearing is how it's much better now.
I use AMD at work though, having issues with multiple monitors ... sometimes my second screen stays locked in low resolution and I'm unable to change res unless machine is restarted.