Driver war: How Nvidia just left AMD’s marketing foils pulverized and pays a lot more | Retro

1 - Von Treibern und vergessenen Zertifizierungen 2 - Benchmarksystem und Teil 1 der Ergebnisse 3 - Der Rest der Benchmarkergebnisse 4 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

Summary

What have we learned? One is happy because the other forgets to certify his drivers and celebrates a classic happening on the PowerPoint fairground. But the fact that any festival can be dissolved by an unexpected downpour and turned into a muddy desert, we now know additionally as a game with colorful benchmark bars. So far so good. But if AMD hadn’t insisted so vehemently on using the old driver, Nvidia probably wouldn’t have thought of catching up with the so nonchalantly sweaty certification until today. The enormous speed of the detention proves that it could not have been due to time.

Two sides, three drivers and only one gets it right

Nevertheless, Nvidia would probably not be Nvidia if they had consequently updated the driver search as well. It has been a real nuisance for a long time that the search on the Nvidia homepage regularly leads to outdated drivers because the update is simply missed. Oh, we’ve been over this. Anyway, AMD can do that better, at least to some extent. If you search Solidworks, you will get something completely different for a Quadro K5000 than Nvidia offers for its own cards. The Solidworks homepage shows us – the new drivers are already listed:

And on the Nvidia homepage? no trace of nothing! Why actually?

If you’re still waiting for a solution as to why the benchmark caused me such problems in the beginning, I won’t leave you in the dark at the end, of course. SPECapc 2013 for Solidworks 2013 may in fact only work diligently and correctly in interaction with a German Solidworks localization if you manually change the decimal separator from the comma to the (American) point in the Control Panel. Otherwise, the accuracy is no longer correct and you get the famous bucket of binary grits served as a result. Any questions?

Conclusion

Easy come easy go? That would be too short-sighted and would probably not do justice to AMD’s driver team in Toronto. In addition, two very important cards for AMD, the FirePro W7000 and W5000, still perform very well in a direct comparison. But it is almost negligent to rest on something that cannot last forever. The fact that Nvidia can more than double the performance in Solidworks 2013 with only one version also allows several conclusions, at least one of which might not be too flattering. But for this ad hoc certification you will probably have paid really much. Teaching money anyway.

Let’s sit back, relax, and wait to see what productive energy this small-scale war of missed opportunities can unleash. Then at least we users still have something from it and anyway – PowerPoint has always been very suspicious to me.