Brand Loyalty or Agnosticism?

[cmdrdredd]

Oh noooo. Not a social justice warrior. Truly the worst thing.

(In actuality it reads a lot more like he's angry the dude's just blindly buying from one side because it isn't in his best interests and distorts the marketplace.)

Maybe not blind though, that is unfair without knowing the guy and all the facts. Plenty of people have use for Nvidia GPUs special features and maybe their past experience one way or another sways it too. I know my personal experience with AMD's drivers in the past was not favorable. Plenty of people say otherwise though, but personal experience trumps everything IMO.

 

[NIGELG]

Naw - Not buying it. At time of posting 79% claim to be agnostic. I'd guess at least half of you are unaware of your biases or are deceiving us.

Yeah.....sure some of them are brand agnostic but most of them are not.

Kudos again to those who actually admit they are NOT brand agnostic,they get my respect.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I try to be brand agnostic but i'll be the first person so admit that It's hard not to hold biases that you're unaware of.

I've owned Matrox cards, 3dFX cards, Nvidia cards, ATI/AMD cards...at some points in my life I've favoured price/performance ratio and sometimes I've favoured just pure brute force power. Most of the time I've ended up with Nvidia.

Right now I like their 3D stereoscopic support, I like that they're doing G-sync, I like that they have optimisations for wearable devices like my Rift, I like that their drivers have typically given me far less issues over the years than AMDs have, that over the years SLI has always exceeded Xfire despite owning both multiple times. I like their partnering programs with devs and to some extent I like PhysX.

I've owned AMD and I've done AMD Xfire a few times becausae the price/performance ratio has generally been better in the mid range before making Xfire rigs tempting but the older issues with microstuttering made me regret those purchases and pretty regular issues with their drivers and game support always irritated me.

I do think AMD have a lot of Pros though, I'd love to own one again just for the raw speed at mining and hash cracking, they're much faster than Nvidia cards, but right now I got a 980, one of the most impressive pieces of kit on the planet when it comes to graphics.

I'm still open to owning cards from both camps though and make an active attempt to investigate flagship products from both camps whenever new purchase time rolls around.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Yeah.....sure some of them are brand agnostic but most of them are not.

Kudos again to those who actually admit they are NOT brand agnostic,they get my respect.

That's messed up.

Those people who don't know they have unconscious biases can't do anything about it, those people who do have conscious biases know they have them but decide to keep them.

Besides, often biases are gained for good reason which is why our brains are susceptible to them, it looks at patterns of benefit and reward and extrapolates, humans on the aggregate have a much stronger risk aversion for loss than risk seeking behaviour for gain which means its easy to become brand loyal based on good experiences and easy to drop brand loyaloty on bad experiences.

I've been buying video cards since I was a teenager, coming on 20 years now and retrospectively looking back on at least 10 flagship product purchases in the £300-500 range, I can only really start to see my own biases emerge as a pattern of my behaviour since then.

I tend to give fanboys a bit of a break, breaking that mindset is not a thing that's easily won, at least it wasn't for me and I've definitely made 1-2 fanboyish purcahses before, in more than 1 camp.

Anyone here berating fanboys ought to consider the wealth of knowledge of their own experiences, most of us were noobs once.

 

[escrow4]

Its funny you bring up GameWorks and driver support.

Considering Watch Dogs had broken SLI for so long and terrible stutters on NV's entire Kepler line-up.

Then FC4 had broken SLI with horrible shadow bugs that completely broke immersion, took forever to fix.

Then ACU with its mega list of bugs and what not that took forever to fix, with a recent patch breaking the same bugs they once fixed. :/

GameWorks has been nothing but trouble for gamers. Its bad enough even [H] thinks gamers should stay clear of pre-ordering games and wait it out for patches to fix broken mess before jumping on board. Me personally, if I see a game having GameWorks I'm not gonna buy it when its released. I'll wait a few months til all the patches fix a broken game, then the game comes on sale and I'll get it for cheap, when its actually functional.

SLI, SLI, never over here. Waste of time and effort. Consoles don't SLI and the amount of effort a dev puts into making it work right for AAA ports varies between eventually and pfffft.

 

[Ramses]

I tried real hard to buy a 970 this evening, speaking of.
Smaller, cooler, quieter, good performance.
Between the ram stuff may and may not becoming an issue later and the cost,
I still bought another 290x. Will try a 980 when the price comes down unless AMD
makes something super amazing.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I buy whoever is not currently giving me the finger / offering better price/performance.
Voodoo1 -> Voodoo2 + TNT -> TNT2 -> GF2 -> Ti4400 -> 9700 Pro -> X800GTO @ X850XT -> X1900XT -> 8800GTS 320 -> 4850 -> 4890 -> 6950 @ 6970 -> 7970 -> 780 -> 290 @ 290X
There's a 9600m, GT335m and GTX860m in there somewhere as well.

 

[MiRai]

I'll throw in my two cents since I did vote agnostic, but didn't say why. I've been forced to use nVidia for the past few years only because CrossFire doesn't work in windowed mode, when SLI does; but I also like the fact that I can use nVidia Inspector to play around with a handful of driver-level settings and use special-case AA like SGSSAA/OGSSAA in most games that I personally play. I'm also generally not worried about how hot or how loud a GPU (or set of GPUs) run.

 

[phexac]

Using AMD right now because when I bought, the Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 290 with custom cooler was the best card for money in the $400 or so price range. If I were shopping now, NVIDIA would be somewhat tempting, though it seems that after the price drop, those 290s are pretty darn good deals at under $300. Either way, I definitely buy on price/performance/features. This is my second AMD card in a row. Before this had all NVIDIAs.

 

[RussianSensation]

I buy whoever is not currently giving me the finger / offering better price/performance.
Ti400 -> 9700 Pro -> X800XTPE -> X1900XT -> 8800GTS -> 4850 -> 4890 -> 6970 -> 7970 -> 780 -> 290X

Seconded. You and I have picked up some similar level of cards over the years. :awe:

Radeon 8500 -> Radeon 9700 -> GF 6600 -> 8800 GTS 320MB -> 4890 -> GTX470s -> Unlocked 6950 @ 6970 -> 7970s

Did you get that X800XT PE at a big discount because iirc that was a $500+ card? Also, surprised you went 6970 instead of unlocked 6950. The deals you guys get in the US on R9 290/290Xs are amazing. Those XFX 290Xs you got for $360 is just insane.

Using AMD right now because when I bought, the Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 290 with custom cooler was the best card for money in the $400 or so price range. If I were shopping now, NVIDIA would be somewhat tempting, though it seems that after the price drop, those 290s are pretty darn good deals at under $300. Either way, I definitely buy on price/performance/features. This is my second AMD card in a row. Before this had all NVIDIAs.

I hope you aren't using that 290 with your E8400. Otherwise, update your sig!

 

[kasakka]

For me staying with Nvidia has been for the following reasons:

• Less heat and power use (on 9xx cards). With a somewhat tight spacing on cards, any reduction in heat helps because I use a SLI rig and don't see that changing. My GTX 770s were at times borderline throttling but have no such issues with GTX 970s.
• Better compatibility with Hackintosh. Even though real Macs are AMD only, yet on a Hackintosh AMD cards require driver framebuffer mods or have to connect dongles to spare ports to get another one working and other weird stuff. Way too much uncertainty and hassle. By comparison Nvidia works out of the box for whatever is supported in latest OSX version and even the latest cards work if using Nvidia's own webdriver package.
• I own a G-Sync display.

I do wish both companies got their discrepancies sorted out like DSR not working if using G-Sync display with SLI, MFAA only working with single cards, that windowed mode issue with Crossfire, G-Sync with borderless window mode etc.

Is AMD's Catalyst Control Center still a huge bag of bloat?

 

[turn_pike]

Used to be NVIDIA only buyer because they have better driver in Linux.

Now drivers for both card manufacturers are pretty good. The whole G-Sync, Nvidia Gameworks only optimizng for nvidia cards and them selling at premium because their branding allows them to has turned me into AMD fanboi.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Seconded. You and I have picked up some similar level of cards over the years. :awe:

Radeon 8500 -> Radeon 9700 -> GF 6600 -> 8800 GTS 320MB -> 4890 -> GTX470s -> Unlocked 6950 @ 6970 -> 7970s

Did you get that X800XT PE at a big discount because iirc that was a $500+ card? Also, surprised you went 6970 instead of unlocked 6950. The deals you guys get in the US on R9 290/290Xs are amazing. Those XFX 290Xs you got for $360 is just insane.

Wrote 6970 for brevity. They were reference unlocked 6950s
Also, the X800XTPE was a typo. Meant X800GTO @ X850XT. What can I say, I'm a cheap bastard

 

[Shehriazad]

I may seem like a huge brand fan or something (since my CPUs have always been AMD and my GPUs have almost always been nVidia)...but the truth is...whenever I did upgrade...at THAT exact moment...I got the best deals from those sides.

Even when I wanted to build a mini PC in 2014. I was able to get my hands on a 860K CPU for 58$ and a 750 Ti for 95$

Those offers were impossible to beat at their respective price.

GPU wise it's 750 ti, 770 Gtx, 570 Gtx, Gts 250, 8800 Gt and before that I even had some thing like a 7600 in SLI if I remember correctly...and just once an ATI card.

AMD dominated my CPUs 100%...I have never used an intel myself...but during my annual upgrade in 2K15 I might end up going Intel for the first time ever.

But basically, 860K, 7850K, FX8350, Phenom II X960, AMD Athlon 5000+, And I think my first own CPU was like a 2800+ or something like that.

I would've gone AMD GPU/Intel CPU any time...but fact is..whenever I did buy something...I just got the best offers on those hardware bits.

To any outsider I would look like a brand loyalist, though. xD