The latest edition in the Doom franchise, Doom: Eternal has made much stir in the gaming community. The first person shooter franchise is famous for setting its game story-line in space where the protagonist battles space demons. However, a game is judged on its performance as much as it is judged based on its story.
Although almost any game would work smoothly on upcoming graphics cards not everyone can afford them. But what if this latest game works on old graphics cards as smooth as it would on new?
AMD’s Fine Wine vs NVIDIA
AMD’s new Fine Wine Technology helped its old graphics cards such as AMD Radeon HD 7970 to give optimal performance for the new Doom game. Hardware Unboxed recently did a benchmark analysis where the older AMD graphics cards were benchmarked against NVIDIA’s Kepler and Maxwell Architecture.
The comparison was between the NVIDIA’s 600 series graphics card released in 2012 and the AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 released at the same time. At that time the NVIDIA’s GTX 680 won over the AMD Radeon HD 7970 giving better performance in terms of frames per second. However, Now for the newly released Doom Eternal while running it on low quality at 1080p, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 gave 65 fps and the NVIDIA’s GTX 680 gave 35 fps. It is evident that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is giving almost double performance than the NVIDIA’s GTX 680. It must be noticed that both cards were launched at the same price.
The results were shocking as moving to the next generation in the NVIDIA Graphics card still didn’t manage to give the fps even close to the AMD Radeon HD 7970. GTX 780 Ti and GTX 960 managed to give 37 fps and 45 fps respectively. It is still way behind AMD’s one. AMD’s fine wine has worked over the years and produces a playable environment giving 65 fps.
Why is AMD Performing Better Than NVIDIA?
So what made the AMD’s Graphics cards to give better performances even after many years of their release? Even though it lost at the early phase. With the AMD’s fine wine the architecture of the AMD’s 7970 aged like wines older it gets, finer it becomes. The AMD’s old graphics card works well with the Doom Eternal while the NVIDIA GTX fails to produce a playable environment.
AMD old graphic cards are like a giant behemoth full of raw and untapped power. They launched latest graphic drivers compatible to their old graphics cards so that they fully utilize the cards potential. This allows games like Doom Eternal to run smoothly with them.
AMD and the NVIDIA updated their drivers for Doom Eternal. AMD said the new driver delivers a 5% better performance for Doom Eternal compared to its previous driver. It optimized the drivers not only for Eternal Doom but also for some other games like Half-Life: Alyx and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. AMD is still working on solving some of the issues though.
They worked on the optimization of the drivers and not only made its newer graphics card to give better performance but also managed to bring up its older cards at optimum performance range with the changing times. While GTX new cards produce a good performance, their old cards become obsolete with the passing time. This becomes problematic for gamers.
Hopefully though with APIs like DirectX12 Ultimate, this problem should become a thing of the past with newer architectures coming in.