ATI vs. Nvidia & Why

[tincart]

I buy whichever card offers the best performance in the games I play and I look for a max price of $200. I do not care if it is an AMD or nVidia chip. I want good price to performance ratio in games I am currently playing (and possibly some that I may buy in the near future).

 

[xp0c]

Check out these cards from Sapphire
http://www.legitreviews.com/news/12111/

oops! this is old news

 

[peonyu]

I go with AMD all the time now. Why ? Personal experiences. I have had not 1, but 3 Nvidia cards die on me in less than a year. Their build quality is inferior to AMD cards. On the other hand I have had a Radeon 4850 card for 3 years volt modded to the moon and back, a 5850 vmodded to hell and back...Both of them are still running as good as they were years ago. And now I have a 7970 purring along [with no vmods admittedly] but stock overclocked and Im confident it will last for years.

Nvidia cards have failed me not on a performance level [they are great] but on VRM quality, since those go POP easily [400-500 series atleast]. That is just my experience, but I have enough of it to have seen a difference between the two companies and the parts they use [Nvidia = cheap, AMD = quality components].

 

[Arzachel]

http://verdetrol.com/

(tilt your screen back) or view the page source

Totally off topic, but what.

<!-- Rainbow Dash is best pony -->

 

[Xcobra]

Like most consumers, I go for price/performance. I was with the red team for a while with my last AMD card being the HD 3850. Right now I am still with a my GTX 260. It has served me ok I suppose. I have had to RMA once. My time to upgrade is coming up soon.

 

[mosox]

I dislike nvidia as a company and many of the people behind it are insufferable jerks. Many of their fans are complete .... well I won't say it, but whatever.

+1

But the thing that got me off Nvidia was the bumpgate
http://www.techspot.com/news/43614-customers-get-shafted-in-nvidia-class-action-suit.html

I've never seen a hardware company so evil and insensitive towards their own customers. With their sleazy tactics they avoided some big payments but they lost my respect for ever.

 

[PremiumAcc]

Personally I go with whichever provides the best performance at the lowest price. I could care less if it is an AMD or a NVIDIA card.

 

[sandorski]

AMD all the way. Hell, I'll go AMD RAM and Liquid Cooling eventually. As for Video Card specifically, I'm also more familiar with CCC and don't feel like figuring out something different anyway.

 

[JAG87]

Before the 8800GTX I really didn't have a brand preference. Since then I am strongly leaning toward green because of several reasons

• better image quality:
  shimmer-free AF, hybrid AA-modes, PhysX, SSAA@all APIs, AA compatibility flags, downsampling, FXAA, ambient occlusion via the driver
• better MGPU support:
  early profiles, less microstuttering/more smoothness, way better support for less popular(=benched)/older games, way better support for 3+ cards
• more tweaking potential:
  more AA combinations, manual LOD bias adjustment, SLI/AA compatibility flags
• customer care:
  We want SGSSAA too -> happens
  We want a fps limiter -> happens
  SGSSAA@DX10/11 a bug, we want it to stay -> happens
  downsampling broken (no official feature, mind you), we want it back -> happens

Due to all this, Nvidia is a premium company in my eyes, and I like premium. Can I imagine going back to team red? Maybe...but alot has to change over there. While I get some benefits (AA in BatmanAA, PhysX) I hear people whining and pointing fingers on the other side. Get more proactive, give your customers added value instead of talking, then I can see myself coming back.

Nvidia for all the reasons listed above (minus Physx, I really don't care about that)

AMD would have to offer at least a 50% performance lead for me to consider their product and lose these features, and they haven't offered that since the days of R300.

 

[bryanW1995]

Wrong one.
The 900 was the OK one.

 

[Sulaco]

Whoever has the best card, at my price point, when I'm ready to upgrade. Period.

"Brand loyalty" is for...well....

 

[Phynaz]

I go with power consumption / performance within my price point, which is usually $179.

That's netted me:
Voodoo 1
Voodoo 1
TNT 2
X800
HD 4670
HD 5770

 

[PhoenixEnigma]

For video cards, whatever matches my needs. I've got a 6770 and 560Ti going at the moment, and have used roughly equal numbers from both camps in the past. Curiously, where I disliked my AiW 9800Pro for how hot it ran, AMD tends to be where I look first for cool cards.

On the other hand, if I were buying a laptop, Verde + Optimus would be enough to make an nvidia man. And for all that my NF980-G65 has worked fine, I'd still be happier with an AMD chipset.

 

[at80eighty]

-price/performance
-slightly more ethical in business (personal perception)
-appear to be leading the tech cycles

owned more nvidia cards, but last 2 purchases and depending on how the 7990 or 7970 refresh stacks up, looks like i'll be sticking with AMD for a bit

 

[Rifter]

Ususally i go for price performance at the time i purchase. I dont use alot of special gimmicks such as eyefininity or physX so i buy whatever fits into my price range with the best performance. I overclock everything to that max so overclocking is taken into consideration and power consumtion is thrown out the window.

When purchasing a GPU for any of my servers or non gaming boxes i will always buy Nvidia, ATI has proven time and time again they do not have the ability to write proper linux drivers and they dont even offer drivers for other OS's such as BSD or solaris, so really in the non windows world nvidia is the only option.

Currently i have a large budget and will purchase the first single GPU card that will double my current performance, i dont care if its kepler or the 8xxx series.

 

[MrTeal]

AMD. Might have gone NVIDIA this round with a $200-$250 card, but $90AR shipping and taxes in was just too good to pass up for a 6870.

 

[BlockheadBrown]

So you're going to sidegrade for the sake of brand? Please tell me you own an iPhone?

Not exactly. I was able to get the 6870 at a decent price - much lower than I could for a 560ti. Overall, I'm happy with the 6870's performance. The cooler on the 6870 is stock and gets loudish at full load when compared to the very quiet fan/cooler on the 560ti I had in there (returned due to huge price differential for similar performance). The computer sits in the family room. If it starts to annoy me or the family, then I'll start looking. I'm hoping that I won't have to do that though.

Aside from sound, I do like having the ability to enable PhysX in games. While it's not a requirement, it is a nice benefit. I am hoping that Kepler is able to match same tier AMD GPU framerates with PhysX enabled. How much does that really mean to me? Well, I wouldn't have gotten an AMD GPU if it meant that much.

And no, I don't have an iPhone.

The point of this thread wasn't to beat a dead horse. It's a bit more telling than just a poll. You get decent feedback on why people make the choices they do for product A over product B. The results so far tend to lean towards (a very reasonable) price/performance as the determining factor. Sure, there are those that have had certain boards from one side regularly fail. Others have had driver concerns. Some choose based on how the companies are run. It's definitely a fantastic sample of responses!

FWIW: I'm not using the responses for any company. I'm not tabulating things on a graph or whatever. I'm a graphics junkie. I have been since back when the Diamond Stealth series was first out. I've had GPUs from Rendition, 3Dfx, Matrox, nVidia and ATi. Never had a PowerVR though. Anyway, I'm a nut for graphics and I love hearing people's opinions.

Thanks to all of you for contributing! Please continue doing so if you like!

Best Wishes to All

 

[BlockheadBrown]

AMD. Might have gone NVIDIA this round with a $200-$250 card, but $90AR shipping and taxes in was just too good to pass up for a 6870.

!!! That's incredible! I thought I was doing well at $120 for a 6870.

 

[MrTeal]

!!! That's incredible! I thought I was doing well at $120 for a 6870.

Heh, yeah. It was a limited quantity boxing day encore sale for $110. Shipping and taxes brought it to $125, but there was a $35 rebate.

My biggest problem now is I want to grab a second one for mining on the side and gaming, but I can't bring myself to spend the $150 on one.

 

[shadowofthesun]

I'll buy whatever can get me the best performance for however much money I'm looking to spend. That being said, all things being equal (or close enough) I'll take nVidia since I've had _a lot_ less trouble with their binary linux driver than AMD.

I know AMD open sourced their driver, and I'd like to support that on principle, but the hardware support just isn't there. nVidia on the Linux side has been very good to me.

Edit: Forgot to mention, when I bought my GTX 570 (my first gaming desktop in a while) I splurged a bit on a 120 Hz monitor and 3D vision setup. I doubt I'll walk away from this investment anytime soon. When it works, it's amazing.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Like both companies as a whole but had mostly nvidia cards till i purchased a 6750 from xfx which was perfectly fine.

Then i got a single fan xfx 6790 and that card left a nasty taste in my mouth with nothing but system lock ups when i was simply just watching movies but that model was prune with issues according to others who got it off newegg.

The 6750 gave me no fuss technically hardware or driver wise and i am gonna be in the market this summer to replace my gtx560 with a 7950 or 7970 as nvidia is late to the party.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, when I put together my two gaming rigs in 2006-2007, with the original E2140 CPUs, I bought ATI X1950 cards, because I got great deal on them, and at the time, they were half-decent for gaming.

Later on, I got some DFI X48 mobos, and some Q6600 CPUs, and then I bought four HD4850 cards during release week (well two of them anyways, and two more a month later). Primarily, because they were the latest and greatest on the market, and I could get them from BestBuy B&M with a 25% discount. For brand-new products on the market, I thought that was a great deal.

But then I never built the X48/Q6600 rigs for a couple of years, so the HD4850s sat in their boxes for a few years.

I bought a couple of Q9300 CPUs a year or two ago to upgrade my two rigs, and then I picked up a pair of GTX460 1GB OC cards. Primarily, because one of my intended uses was Folding@Home, and gaming was secondary.

Now, I've been using the Q9300 CPU OCed to 3.0Ghz, and GTX460 1GB OCed to 820 or so, for PrimeGrid and other BOINC projects.

Within the last month, I picked up a ASrock 990FX board with three PCI-E x16 physical slots, and a hex core X6 1045T Thuban, which I OCed to 3.51Ghz. Plan on running my GTX460s in SLI, and adding a third GPU for PhysX and CUDA.

Still trying to decide on that third GPU.

In the future, will I pick NV or AMD? Who knows. If more DC projects start to support AMD's GCN architecture, then I would likely pick some of them up. Otherwise, I'll get a CUDA card with the best price/performance.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

My personal history is.

Ti 4600 > 5900 Ultra > 6800 > 7950GX2 > 8800GTX > 2 4870s in crossfire > 5970 > GTX 580

Honestly after a long stint with Nvidia the change was kind of refreshing but crossfire brought me nothing but trouble, it was good for a while but AMDs driver support is too intermittent and recently too slow to respond to new games.

As much as I dislike Nvidia for all the PhysX rubbish it's kinda good to be back now, they almost always put out the fastest single GPU and that's really what I need to stick to given that I need to power 2560x1600 and multi-gpu is still not well refined these days.

Both camps have their ups/downs and bad/good products so its always best to judge them based on their merits and not be a fanboy, having said that I probably side with Nvidia a bit more, for the same kind of reasons I side with Intel more than AMD for CPUs, but then I'm exclusively concerned with the high end products and less so on price

 

[EarthwormJim]

I'm sticking to Nvidia. I've noticed ATI's 2D performance can be rather lacking, especially if you have a game running the background.

For instance, if I have World of Warcraft minimized, and I'm browsing firefox, scrolling through pages can be very jittery (even if I limit background FPS in WoW). Also having a high resolution image displayed in Firefox, even if Firefox is minimized would also cause noticeable slow down.

None of my Nvidia cards had these issues. My 8800gt always felt great 2D performance wise, as does my GTX580. My AMD 6850 was annoying to use.

 

[Mem]

I own both and always go for best/value performance for my price range.I'm using 560Ti at the moment as my main gaming card,however I do miss AMD's monthly updates,seems like years since Nvidia released their last official driver, oh it was October 2011 ,anyway end of the day go with what you want...I'll say had very good experiences from both companies so no complaints from me.