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Over the last 48 hours, AMD has been dominating hardware news thanks to the launch of the RX Vega as well as some new Radeon Pro Vega cards. Now in what appears to be a well timed effort to combat AMD’s new Radeon Pro cards, Nvidia has launched a driver update to boost the performance of the Titan Xp graphics card in creative professional apps.
Nvidia made the announcement on its own blog yesterday, though surprisingly it has been kept fairly quiet so far. The post doesn’t give us many technical details, but it does claim that the latest Titan Xp driver can boost the GPU’s performance in applications like Maya by up to three times.
This seems to indicate that Nvidia did purposefully hold back Titan Xp performance in some applications in an effort to not cannibalise sales of the Quadro line, which is Nvidia’s ‘professional’ graphics card range.
Here’s Nvidia’s quote on the driver: “We built TITAN Xp for people who design and create — and, of course, play games. And it’s always getting better. Our latest driver — available today — delivers 3x more performance in applications like Maya to help you create and design faster than ever.”
From there, the post just goes on to remind us all of the external GPU adaptor options available for the Titan Xp. Hopefully we will see some Titan Xp owners dive in to the performance benefits this driver brought to pro-grade apps.
Update: A Reddit user over on r/Nvidia benchmarked this new driver with an original Titan X (Pascal) and came back with some interesting numbers. Here are the performance gains in several apps following this update:
- Catia – 72% Increase
- Creo – 107% Increase
- Energy – 54% Increase
- Medical – 53% Increase
- SNX – 654% Increase
- Solidworks – 95% Increase
The card used was not the newer Titan Xp but the results should be fairly similar.
KitGuru Says: Nvidia’s news release was very light on details but the timing seems fairly obvious. Nvidia wants to give the Titan Xp a bit of a boost ahead of Vega’s rollout.
lol their software team is that good that they can hide performance vs AMD needing to try and squeeze out performance. Not saying its good in anyway to hold back performance, just still sour about the underwhelming Vega.
It could be just Nvidia being Nvidia and just making sure they can try to steal the lime light from anything AMD right about now. Maybe Nvidia should try to fix their crappy Ryzen+geforce performance issues on AMD platforms and stop worrying about getting a few percent better performance in crap no one really gives a crap about. Maybe if they did that Nvidia would actually steal some real lime light from AMD’s RX Vega launch and sell a lot more cards while they are at it.
With Vega looking to be just either matching or beating a 1080 at the top end people that were waiting for Vega and had Ryzen platforms probably would be more inclined to buy a Nvidia card if they fixed the drivers for the Ryzen platform.
Side note:
My hope is AMD has kept a bit of performance hidden to throw off Nvidia and that the tech that was disabled in the AMD Vega FE cards will actually be enabled on the RX vega cards and we get to see performance a bit higher than we have been led to believe we are going to see on review day of the RX Vega cards. Most likely not but there is a slight chance this is what will happen even though it is a very small chance.
If Vega had some hidden performance, that would be a very interesting twist. Personally, I’d love to see it happen.
Nice move, Nvidia drivers team hide the performance of Titan Xp vs AMD Vega cards and now they crush them even more… lol
Yea it would be pretty interesting for sure. I am not sure if AMD is sneaky like that..lol It would make for some great press marketing if there was some hidden performance AMD was hiding from Nvidia.
I personally don’t think the Titan Xp has as much left in the tank as Nvidia would like us to think with these new drivers. All they are doing is trying to deflect the focus off of AMD and the RX Vega I am pretty sure on that point.
It has been a great year so far for hardware with AMD releasing the Ryzens & Nvidia’s 1080Ti and now the Threadrippers coming soon and maybe RX Vega might be interesting. You notice I left out Intel’s x299 platform as something being great..lol
No, they did to the titan xp what amd did to their vega FE. They are adding some optimization from their pro drivers to the titan, the same thing AMD did with their Vega FE. Basically they are saying to AMD “We can play the same game you are playing”.
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