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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Good analysis, but like all good analysis this needs a followup for all the questions created by this analysis...

This suggests that the AMD 7900 XTX has better utilization than the NVidia 4090 (which is extremely surprising to me!!). Is there a "smaller NVidia" that could be used to see if utilization scales with size? The 4090 is physically and architecturally larger than the 7900 XTX after all.

There's also a question about smaller AMD cards, as the 7900 XTX has the largest "infinity cache". Do 16MB sized infinity caches keep utilization high? Or is this something that's only going to work on the 7900 XTX?

Just some idle thoughts. I'm personally interested in how the architectures utilization scales going up or down, and why that is. That is, VALU utilization for AMD, specifically (and SM Issue Active for NVidia or maybe SM ALU).

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Starfield is getting poor utilization on nvidia because they do not align memory, because they are doing an “indirect execution” thing and telling the driver that the wrong thing is being executed, and then doing this over and over nonstop.

This causes big pipeline bubbles, so your 4090 is mostly sitting there idle. So is a 7900XTX probably, but to a lesser extent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16ewupt/major_pr...

This was a problem with another title recently, where the consoles would tolerate some abuse of the api spec much better than PCs would. Maybe gollum.

It's my understanding that Bethesda partnered with AMD when building this game, hence the original lack of DLSS. I wouldn't be surprised if it's better optimized for AMD cards as a result. I would expect the same situation in reverse for a game that partnered more closely with NVidia to take advantage of and show off its features.

Case in point : Cyberpunk 2077. Runs much at a higher fidelity than SF and is very much a showcase piece for Nvidia.

They dropped new drivers and the game yesterday, seems to smooth things over already. They are also going to talk to Intel, Nvidia and AMD to improve performance.

Nvidia claims that their driver update achieves about a 5% performance uplift on RTX 4000 cards. So if you were getting 80 FPS in New Atlantis, you'd now get 84 FPS instead.

They do discuss the smaller caches lead to worse utilization but overall lead to better performance due to the trade offs. It’s in the conclusion at the end.

From what I've seen Bethesda tried to get Nvidia support in optimizing for release but the game division at Nvidia is not getting resources because server/AI market is where the money is at and they only have so much experts available.

I wouldn't be surprised if this became a common theme with Nvidia in the future.

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