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AMD vs NVIDIA.. GPU wars
We seem to have two factions for GPU's AMD and NVIDIA.. We all see people recommend one or the other as well as the known $$ to preformance ratio, accurate? maybe. Let's leave it to the Polls for an over-all winner (for MMORPG.com anyways)
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
Comments
I have used both (currently AMD HD 6870). Sometimes NVIDIA has the best product for the price, sometimes AMD. I lke competition, it keeps them honest...
I hope they both continue to be profitable and keep making better and better video cards!
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Neutral. I switch with every new build. My last rig was NVIDIA, my new rig is AMD. I'm a fan of AMD processors though. If you had asked "AMD or Intel" I would have picked AMD.
Yea, my old desktop had a 5970 in it; it ran hot as hell, but spat out some good performance. I do agree with the competition to drive new levels of $$ to performance as well.
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
It changes (or can change) with each new card introduced and as sales and price drops come along; and the right card for one build may not be right for another because there are other factors to consider (cooling solutions, power draw, etc).
Its AMD for me. Ive owned many nVidia cards in the past and all of them just died on me, I switched over to stritcly AMD cards in all my builds and never had a complaint from any of my customers, and i personally only use AMD cards and never had one fail me.
nVidia because they havent let me down yet.
and I'm too lazy to try and learn about AMD/ATI cards. If you told me you had a Radeon HD 6000 something, I'd ask you "is that good or bad"
I'll look into it when i'm ready for my next build in a billion years. unless I somehow because rich. then i'll just surround myself with gaming rigs and women.
oop, i didnt mean to type all that. yes I did.
I happily purchase cards from both.
That said, I can think of two point in favor of AMD right now.
First, for this generation, they almost universally have better cards. Nvidia doesn't even have remotely competitive cards until the GTX 460, or 560 for the latest batch. Anything below that (like the 550) is a joke. AMDs cards are also considerably better on power draw and, by extension, heat output.
Secondly, AMD/Ati have lately been the ones actually striking new ground. Lately, they've been much faster to both adopt new APIs and smaller die sizes. Nvidia, on the other hand, has been known on more than one occasion to basically launch campaigns against new APIs, because their cards are slow to support them.
I'll still happily buy Nvidia cards when they're worth my money, and both of these points can fall in Nvidia's favor at different times, but in the here and now, AMD definitely seems like the one to go with.
Switched from 3dfx to nvidia when 3dfx got belly up and had the GeForce 1 + 2 but i was never satisfied with the technical quality of the cards.
When i wanted to buy the GF2 Ultra i got 3 defective cards in a row and switched to ATI and witnessed they had a much more brilliant output on the screen and much better technical quality.
Since then i buy ATI having the 6950 atm. probably for the next 3 to 5 years - i dont see much advancement coming as we have the consoles dictate the graphiks and even new future consoles wont be better.
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I run with Nvidia and Intel usually. I have found they are more stable.
I also find that Nvidia had better driver support. The ATI graphic cards would often become unusable after 2 years, as the graphic drivers were not updated. I usually try to get 2 to 3 years use from a PC before I replace it.
Can i vote 3DFX?
I usually buy Nvidia but whatever card is offering the better value at the time is what i purchase.In the beginning years Nvidia had better drivers and updated them more often,but now a days i feel both manufacturers are about even.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Coming up even with performance, but why the massive price gap? I know fo rthe laptop i just got, I grabbed the 580m instead of the hd6990. My friend just got his with the hd6990 and a slower proc and our games run almost the same, I beat him by around 2-5fps on average the 580m runs cooler as well.. Which if that was worth the extra 250$$(GPU) and +350$$(CPU) I don't know. i know if I could fly back in time I would of grabbed the 6990
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
I''ve never been a bigger fan of one over the other, i just buy whichever gives me the best performance for the money i have to spend.
driver issues lately with NVIDIA "gulp"
You would think this far along there wouldn't be such major issues with the drivers.. no excuse for that anymore
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
I take it you mean the TDR's? Hehe i can remember drivers 4 or 5 years ago with the same problems from them, oh how times have changed
They've new drivers out today that supposedly fix it and about bloody time as those errors have been back since the July drivers.
Edit - The new drivers are out, just not updated on the main site yet http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=85159035c3da8d2997a4a2e18571e7d9&showtopic=213670
Actually the GTX 580 is the fastest(single GPU) card you can buy. The performance crown belongs to Nvidia this generation. I dont like dual-cards or crossfire/sli.
And both the GTX 570 and GTX 560 are fine cards with fantastic price/performance ratio.
AMD 6950 and 6970 are also fine cards. But they cant compete with a GTX 580 if someone wants the fastest single GPU card.
And if you compare tesselation performance I would say Nvidia can also do fine if we talk about supporting new features.
Personally I use a AMD card right now. And I have no problem with them at all. But I also respect Nvidia and they often impress me. If I had to buy a new card right now it would certainly be a GTX 580.
The GTX 580 is generally in the realm of 10-15% faster than the Radeon HD 6970, for 40-50% more money, and an utterly massive increase in heat and power draw. If we're talking about building a new system, then the requirement for a beefier PSU to run a 280W card (especially given the fact that Nvidia rarely obeys their own claimed TDP), that brings the cost difference up still. Besides, most of us already have computers that are space heaters; I'd rather not exacerbate that problem to the tune of 100W, to say nothing for paying about $20 more a year for the card. I keep GPU setups for about 3 years, so tack on $60 to the price difference.
If having that 10-15% is absolutely utterly crucial, and nothing else matters, or if one simply wants the bragging rights for having what is technically the "fastest card", then the impractical nature of the 580 might be okay, but for the rest of us the GTX 580 is just that: impractical.
The GTX 560 and 570 certainly aren't bad cards, but they're basically Radeon HD 6950s and 6970s with slightly worse energy characteristics, so I don't see any particular reason to recommend them.
As for tesselation, no game in the forseeable future will ever use more than a tiny fraction of that capability. There is pretty much nothing on the market right now that doesn't provide more tesselation performance than is needed. Nvidia's overpowered units are useless for anything but synthetic benchmarks.
If I were to buy a card right now, well, I wouldn't. I'd wait for Southern Islands. AMD not only almost always supports APIs first, they also tend to release first, by a long shot, with Nvidia usually running to catch up; Kepler is nowhere in sight. Who knows though, Nvidia might treat us to some more wooden mockups at CES 2012
Nvidia does a fine job designing cards, as the Geforce 6-8 series showed us, but for the immediate moment, I see little to recommend them, not just today, but for the forseeable future, at least until Kepler comes out, assuming it doesn't turn into the unmitigated disaster that Fermi did.
My history with ATI cards tends to be that they burn themselves out after 12 months of use, where as my Nvidia cards tend to last about twice as long. Couple that with that with Nvidia driver support tending to be a lot better, and I lean toward prefering Nvidia even though on average it costs a bit more.
I like nvidia more. I like the prices and power that AMD has but my 2 AMD cards have broken while this geforce 9500 has been kicking for damn near 3+ years now. I also find nvidias gpu software to be much more simple and easy to navigate compared to the ati catalyst controller.
This topic has been one of the most argued for me. I side with AMD for the simple reason it costs 75% less sometimes and more often then not at least 35% less in the mobile market all the while delivering the same amound of performance.
In fact, I tend to argue nvidia ruins the mobile market cause of there stupidly insane pricing schemes, thats not to say I wont buy nvidia but its how I feel.
As many times as I have told people why notebooks are affordable theres nvidia rearing its ugly head hijacking the price of a simple laptop up and inflating it to way beyond its worth.
Not only that but nvidia has made some crap mobile gpus that were complete failures giving the mobile market a bad rap. Its probably why most sane people by the new AMD gpus in the high end market of mobile gaming now adays.
No I in no way commend nvidia.
Even so nvidia is better the no nvidia even though nvidia fan boys could care less if AMD was on the market or not. Anyone that has there gpu they are great gpus afterall, the ones that dont have bad soder ball like the mobile 8xxx series had which would burn up after so long and need reflow jobs.
I never buy AMD from experience. I used to buy ATI when they were better than NVIDIA, but now that ATI is AMD....Not buying that either. And ever sicne NIVIDIA straighten their acts, no reason to buy other GFX card.
Ready for GW2!!!
Eycel, you actually bring up a good point.
On the desktop market, Nvidia's cards are mostly just AMD's cards with a slightly worse power envelope. There's no real reason to recommend them, but you're not doing anything disastroud by buying one. One the mobile market, however, there is absolutely no excuse to purchase an Nvidia GPU unless there is absolutely no choice in the matter. What's only a modest power draw problem on the desktop market is a crippling problem for Nvidia on the mobile market, half because the gap is bigger, and half because it matters a lot more in a laptop (where power draw strongly inversely corresponds to hardware life, battery life, and usability).
Nvidia has better software but AMD has more head room for OCing. Max watts for the PCIe slot is 300w if I'm not mistaken and some of these new Nvidia cards come very close to that cap.
My vote goes to AMD.
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Take a look at the game Rage & all the issues surrounding AMD/Ati Video cards, let alone the horrible isssues being encountered by a lot of AMD CPU + AMD/Ati GPU combos.
I owned two ati 9800 pro's and a x850xt back in the days when Ati where the clear performance leader. In the end the constant driver trouble made me switch back to Nvidia. Sorry but reliability trumps an extra 3-5% performance every time IMHO and the savings from buying the cheaper card soon evaporate when you have to dick about with rolling back drivers on the regular.
Yes but is that the fault of the card maker or the game maker? I have a 6850 and have zero issues with games or drivers, but then again I don't play Rage...:) Perhaps its best to wait a few months so they can work out the kinks.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Why does everyone keep saying that nVidia has better software? Honestly, in the past 2 years, ATI Catalyst and nVidia drivers have been pretty much the same: both look and feel about the same, both offer the same options more or less (overclocking, monitoring, configuration, etc), both are more or less on a 30-day release schedule, both more or less the same amount of bugginess, both more or less lagging with support in new games, both more or less lagging by the same amount in SLI/CF profiles.
I think anyone who is still saying Software needs to get out and look more, or come up with some recent evidence because I'm just not seeing it.