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News hardware & software 31 March 2020, 20:03

author: Jacob Blazewicz

8-year-old Radeon Beats Nvidia Chips in Doom Eternal

Hardware Unboxed conducted a benchmark of older GPUs in Doom Eternal. It turned out that AMD chipsets are winning against equally aged GeForce, and the 2012 Radeon HD 7970 performs better than its much younger competitors.

Clash of older Radeon and GeForce models in Doom Eternal brought an interesting result.

Since last week, players can enjoy the new installment of the Doom series, which apparently met the expectations of fans to a T. Of course, there are always those who don't believe the official hardware requirements and prefer to hold off on purchasing until benchmarks appear. One of them was conducted by Hardware Unboxed channel on YouTube, and the results may be surprising to some. Well, it turns out that older Nvidia chips are clearly losing to the same generation of AMD products in Doom Eternal, often against the results of user-made benchmarks. The GeForce 780 Ti from late 2013 should perform slightly better than the debuting Radeon R9 290, while in id Software's game the Nvidia model averages only 37 frames per second in Full HD at low detail, while the AMD card does not drop below 80 fps under identical conditions, and on average maintains 99 fps.

But that's not the weirdest thing. In the same settings as above, the old Radeon HD 7970 is able to maintain an average of 65 frames per second and not below 50 fps. Thus, AMD's 2012 chip not onlye fares in Doom Eternal better than the GeForce 780 Ti, but also the GTX 960, which debuted in 2015! The GeForce 1050 Ti from 2016 also performs slightly worse than the HD 7970, albeit with a loss of just a few fps. The situation seems to be improving in Nvidia's favor when Dynamic Resolution (RS) scaling is enabled, but only to the extent that the 1050 Ti is slightly ahead of AMD's card. Also AMD chips still dominate the top of the list, although in both cases, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti came out the best of all the tested GPUs.

A summary of GPU performance in Doom Eternal. Source: Hardware Unboxed.

Why these seemingly absurd results? According to Hardware Unboxed, the reason are the different policies of Nvidia and AMD. Radeon's manufacturer has been supporting its systems much longer than the competition. At the same time, the company is known for the initial problems with drivers, so AMD's cards gain performance only with subsequent updates. The industry websites have even coined a slogan "AMD's finr wine" to describe this "aging" of GPU from the Californian company.

AMD does not forget to support older GPUs.

After all, this's just a small victory for AMD, which had to give in to Nvidia at higher levels of graphic detail (via Hardware Unboxed). In last week's Ultra detail benchmark (without RS), only the new GeForce made it to the top five, clearly ahead of the best AMD chips in any resolution. Apparently, the latest Radeons have not yet matched their capabilities.

Jacob Blazewicz

Jacob Blazewicz

Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with GRYOnline.pl in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).

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Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal