Those who keep an eye on the world of GPUs will know that Nvidia’s older, Kepler-driven cards are not performing well in The Witcher 3. A recent set of drivers issued by the company said it had identified several “bugs,” and that performance should now be improved.
Based on the collective responses in ongoing Nvidia forum threads such as this one, however, the drivers didn’t resolve the problems people have been having.
The under-performing Kepler cards in The Witcher 3 have given rise to a popular sentiment that Nvidia may have intentionally left their older cards behind, in order to push customers into buying newer GPUs. A sort of planned obsolescence, if you like.
In order to see how our own readership felt about this, our latest poll asked: “Did Nvidia intentionally cripple Kepler-powered cards when optimising for The Witcher 3?”
From the sample size of a couple of hundred people, 60% felt the answer to that question was “Yes.” It was a two-response poll, so the “No” camp was 40%.
The poll ran prior to, and after, the release of the Nvidia drivers specifically said to target this problem. When they were released there was a small boost to the “No. The Kepler performance is poor, but I think this was an error that Nvidia will fix.” replies; but a few days later the 60/40 split returned.
This poll, of course, does not constitute any kind of evidence or proof to the claims. It does, though, show that trust in Nvidia is not especially high. The company has previously run into trust issues over the amount of VRAM actually available in their GTX 970 cards.
I suppose it’s also possible that the poll was just hijacked by mischievous AMD fans.
Here’s the final tally. There’ll be a new poll up on PC Invasion in the coming days.
[poll id=”3″]
