Consulting the work of our friends over at Techgage, it looks like Rob Williams reported similar results back in August, so that hasn’t changed much with the 17.10.1 driver push. We did find uplift in Superposition, but the trouble is that this uplift begins to emerge primarily when the card is beginning to struggle for other reasons – like frequency, shader count, or ROP limitations. It’s difficult to fill an 8GB framebuffer, so AMD’s claims of 50% uplift in AVG FPS may make more sense or better come to fruition were a 4GB card to exist. At this time, we do not have a means to create a 4GB framebuffer, so we can’t validate those claims in a direct comparison. We have some ideas, but they may not work. We’ll see.
In the interim, there’s really not much reason to disable HBCC, and it occasionally provides a 0.5-4.0% performance increase. Limited system memory would be a reason, of course. It might be worthwhile to enable HBCC and just leave it in the background, hoping occasional uplift will emerge. We can only speak for the applications which we’ve tested, naturally, and there’s potential for HBCC uplift in production applications (untested) or memory hog games (user mods for Skyrim and FO4, for instance, are often VRAM pigs). In the event you encounter one such game, HBCC enablement could help; of course, if stability or system RAM issues are encountered, there’s obviously not much loss to disabling HBCC, either.
As it stands now, we’re not presently able to observe appreciable performance uplift in any of our tested games, with one exception being the synthetic applications. We observed repeatable uplift in Superposition (~4%), with similarly repeatable (but insignificant) ~1-1.4% uplift in Firestrike. That’s probably good news for competitive benchmarkers, it’s just not meaningful for most users.
Let us know if you find an application where this technology is better leveraged. We may attempt some other applications in the future, but will probably wait for more driver updates to push.
