I still hold a grudge from the absolutely horrible drivers that AMD has had in the past... especially the drivers from their AllInWonder cards.
I'd had a few flaky Catalyst driver versions recently as well, although some of that might come from me overclocking the card.
Same reason NV's drivers have broken SLI in Watch Dogs and shadow/lighting bugs in SLI in FC4 -- there are always quirks with multi-GPU solutions for both NV/AMD.
Ya, and today HD7950/7970/7990/280/280X CF flies.
280X CF has lower frame times than a single 980.
http://www.techspot.com/review/948-geforce-gtx-960-sli-performance/page3.html
HardOCP and PCPer have noted that R9 290/290X CF is super smooth, smoother than 780/780Ti SLI.
If you happen to play less popular PC games, NV superior drivers is a total myth.
Not to mention in the last 5 months NV's driver support for Kepler is MIA.
Right now, 780 is only 9% faster than an HD7970Ghz, R9 290X > 970 or 780Ti at 1440P, while a 980 is just 10% faster than an R9 290X.
Ironically, you also mention DSR but R9 290 series has VSR.
VSR shows better IQ than NV's DSR:
1. "In Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, the result falls surprisingly clearly in favor of AMD's VSR. For VSR manages the feat visibly better to address not only the flicker in 2,560 × 1,440. In the same breath, the game will also be displayed more sharply than the Nvidia solution.
2. In Bioshock: Infinite, there is a tie between DSR and VSR with minimal differences. So the image at VSR is slightly sharper.
3. In The Walking Dead, the result turns in 2,560 × 1,440. Anti-aliasing is a little better at DSR, otherwise there is minimal differences. While VSR provides the minimal sharper image"
http://www.overclock.net/t/1529509/computerbase-de-amd-vsr-against-nvidia-dsr-review
Not sure then how DSR is some selling feature for NV.
Well on the NV side, the only good cards worth buying today are GTX970/980. If you cannot afford those, try to find a used GTX780/780Ti, or wait for the GTX960Ti.
It's very hard to NOT consider price/performance because it affects IQ and FPS in games. For example, R9 290's 45%+ faster performance will directly result in a better experience for you since you'll have more options to raise graphical settings. If this is not important, than why even upgrade from a GTX560Ti in the first place as it can still play games well at 1080P with medium settings.
Right now NV has HDMI 2.0 but unless you have a 4K HDMI TV, this doesn't matter. NV also has full DX12 support but you don't have Windows 10 and by the time DX12 games come out, most cards today will be outdated unless you are running GTX970 SLI or faster. NV has TXAA but it has as huge performance hit and poor IQ most of the time. If you can't live without PhysX, I guess it's a factor. If you love 3D gaming, then 3D vision is a big bonus for NV.
You forgot this important point:
"According to Nvidia, developers can, under certain licensing circumstances, gain access to (and optimize) the GameWorks code, but cannot share that code with AMD for optimization purposes."
So while AMD can approach developers with optimizations which allow their hardware to perform better... it's a no-go area when it concerns GameWorks specific features.
Do you really believe AMD does not want to support CF in FC4 if they could? You must think so poorly of them to believe that.
Ultimately reality speaks louder than propaganda. How many NV sponsored titles or GameWorks games run like crap on AMD? A lot.
How many AMD GE games run like crap on NV? Not many..
The one time AMD played NV's game with GE was in COH2 with snow physics via dx11 compute. Could NV optimize that? Nope, not even now, it runs like crap on NV hardware.
We'll see how the freesync vs g sync wars turn out. Right now, for Nvidia I like that g sync is a real option and I like that you can stream to a shield tablet, even if I don't have one (although Razer is looking to make AMD's stream to any 5.0 Android device).
But I like AMD for the superior VSR vs DSR (according to most Omega reviews). I prefer AMD's performance drivers, where it is no contest that GCN has risen in performance relative to Kepler dropping off the face of the earth and even Maxwell to an extent. I prefer Nvidia's drivers for tweaking resolutions though.
So, AMD. Better IQ with downsampling, drivers will enhance performance and not dehanace (Kepler), free sync will be more widely available if it doesn't suck. Also, why wouldn't you support market balance? Monopolies are undesirable.
I'd go with AMD because the monitor thing looks like it'll lock users into a vendor if they want fancy sync, and even if this card is the same, AMD seems to offer better price/performance choices so I'll have more flexibility with upgrading. Also, AMD cards are maintaining performance much better so I'd be a bit more sanguine about future support, and my GTX 970 has been having some really annoying driver issues, so I don't really trust the pat "oh nV has better drivers because reasons or I don't trust AMD drivers because I had problems with ATi drivers."
Also AMD really should have better market share than it does, and I really don't like what nV's been getting up to.
8800 GT -> GTX 260 core 216 -> GTX 460 -> GTX 760 -> GTX 970 -> R9 4?? most likely. AMD's best cards really never were well timed for me, but I'm sick of nV. I've had driver issues on two of those cards, and I really don't want to get locked into the lovely ecosystem that brought us the GTX 960 and other price/performance duds.
For video cards, the first and foremost priority is whether the things do what video cards do and do it well.
Could you please elaborate more on the 970GTX driver troubles you mentioned and also how AMD are maintaining performance longer?
I would go with AMD in order to reward their behavior over Nvidia's. Starting the whole idea to permanently lock-in your monitor purchase with brand of video card really sucks, and I'd rather not give them more money with which to figure out new ways to dick me over.
I would probably stick to AMD. I just dislike changing the drivers in an existing Windows installation. Dropping in a faster Radeon would be just that: Drop it in, boot, done.What would you go with and why?
Honestly I don't even care. Nvidia is simply taking advantage of the situation because they can.
OK so if AMD had 70% market share hypothetically, tried to shove FreeSync as a vendor locked standard, tried to push DX12 aside in favour of Mantle, tried to charge us $100+ per each monitor for FreeSync if GSync was an open standard, locked out specific IQ features out of Nvidia cards in Gaming Evolved games, this would be perfectly fine to you? :hmm:
The fact that NV is leveraging its market share and as a result purposely refuses to accept an open industry standard (FreeSync), while at the same time supporting its own standard (GSync), shows all their care about is profits, not the end user experience of the entire PC market.
Imagine if tessellation, Havoc physics, HBAO, TressFX were AMD locked features and AMD purposely locked out gamers with NV cards from using them. Would that be fair? If AMD did this, I would stop buying their products immediately. Any company that tries to lock me in or shove proprietary garbage down my throat that makes them $ as a result will get $0 out of me, period. Win me over with showing respect, showing that you care about the PC gaming community, that you care to not hurt other gamers. :thumbsup:
If NV allowed Physx, G-Sync and PCSS+ to run on AMD cards, allowed direct access to GW code, and if NV cards were conclusively better at performing those tasks, I would have no problems with such a strategy. Instead, NV artificially limits features and gimps performance on AMD products. That's not fair business practices or showing that you really care about the entire PC gaming community. If NV was so confident in its features, they would make them open standard as they would run faster/better on NV hardware and entice gamers to shift to NV GPUs in the first place. NV isn't confident enough in their own features which is why they vendor lock everything they can think of. Because NV is in a stronger financial position than AMD, they can afford to throw more marketing money at vendor locked features.
Nvidia's practices are anti-competitive and hurt consumers. I have no idea how you could post that...NV isn't hurting anyone. Competition is great...
Nvidia's practices are anti-competitive and hurt consumers. I have no idea how you could post that...
It has been clearly laid out and discussed many many times, you either ignored the information or refuse to accept it.Please, do tell.
It has been clearly laid out and discussed many many times, you either ignored the information or refuse to accept it.
This looks to me like an emotional response in itself, instead of looking at the message look at the person perceived to be "emotional" in effect being biased. So discard anything in the message.I refuse to accept what has been laid out as anti-competitive or hurting customers because it comes from a bunch of people that have some emotional attachment to AMD....
This looks to me like an emotional response in itself, instead of looking at the message look at the person perceived to be "emotional" in effect being biased. So discard anything in the message.
This looks to me like an emotional response in itself, instead of looking at the message look at the person perceived to be "emotional" in effect being biased. So discard anything in the message.
TWIMTBP games being abusive on AMD hardware because they were locked out of being properly driver optimized, the big black box that is gameworks for the developers (and the crappily coded games that are coming out using this feature), the sub pixel tesselation in some games just to take down AMD performance (NV perf also suffered for this, you know, just to a lesser extent), just to name a few.
Being loyal to a brand that continously keeps shafting their consumers is some kind of weird stockholm syndrome that defies all logic itself. Their new hit in this regard is the VRAM issue regarding the 970, but hey, they have the marketshare and mindshare so its okey :awe: