Radeon or Gtx?

{scumworks}

Hey guys! =D

I've been slowly upgrading my pc, and now I feel the time has come... yes it has COME! For my gpu ^^

With third party coolers comming (and showing good results), the choice lay between the gtx 780 or the r9 290.

The r9 290 looks a clear winner with 1gb extra and generally pulling ahead in charts, but I had (alot) of problems with AMD/ATI cards in the past (apps not gaming). And I'll ofcause be missing out on nvidia centric features.

Any thoughts or experiences?

Dashiva

Nvidia all the way, still. CUDA is useful for so many things (Xnormal, for instance) plus I never have had an Nvidia card with driver problems. Every Radeon I've ever had (and I have one now) has driver problems or incompatibility. AMD makes better hardware, but Nvidia makes *stable* hardware. Plus, you're going to want GSync when it comes out.

{scumworks}

Unfortunately, thats been my experience aswell. My last AMD card was the 4750 which bore so many issues that I eventually bought a used gtx 260 just to get away from AMD (wasnt even a real performance upgrade, but it worked great). Thought I'd never look back since then, but the r9 290 does look like a good deal.

That said, I'd prefer even using my old card over a buggy mess.

HitmonInfinity

Nvidia. Before I got into 3D art I went AMD all the way with my PCs, but I soon discovered that 3D apps and ATI don't play well together. I got all kinds of weird bugs. I still use AMD cpus, but I wouldn't recommend their video cards for what we do.

NegevPro

I'd say go nvidia also. I usually alternate brands every upgrade and my nvidia cards have always just worked. My older ati cards were just as stable but currently I have a radeon 6950 and I get problems all the time due to drivers.

illo

Ive got a pair of 6970's and they work fine in every app Ive tried, xnormal supports openCL as well so AMD cards work fine.

AMD has gotten a TON better at driver support, just remember to update.
note: if you try linux, be prepared for slightly more issues with amd.

ZacD

Cuda seems to be a popular way to accelerate apps, I wouldn't be surprised to see more people use it. Also G sync is getting great reviews, too bad we don't have mantle running on any games yet.

{scumworks}

I guess its still somewhat of a gamble buying a AMD, even if they upped their support. I would gladly sacrifice performance for less bugs, the 4750 experience caused severe hair loss ..

Edit - With xbone and ps4 running amd, you have to wonder what the future gonna look like. But afaik, neither consoles support mantle.

Skamander

Under normal circumstances the AMD R9 290 has the most bang for the buck, and since the drivers are not as optimized (performance wise) as nvidias yet, it will probably get even better in the future.

I write under normal circumstances because a lot of litecoin (and other cryptocurrency) miners buy AMD GPUs like mad, which lead to a price increase of around $100 for AMD cards (launch price $399, street price ~$499 on partpicker.com). The 290 is still faster than the 780, but the price advantage is not really there anymore. So, if we now include criteria like power consumption (R9 290 consumes around 80 watt more under load) we can probably call them equally good.

So, if you want to buy now, get a 780 since you had problems with AMD in the past. If you can wait a bit until prices normalize get the 290 from AMD.

p.s. just out of curiosity: what problems did you have? I buy graphics cards since the 90s, and only had problems in the 90s (with nvidias first geforce and 3dfx's voodoo cards) and early 2000s (nvidia and ATi). But I delete old drivers before I install new ones, keep my pc software wise tidy and play games not at launch (which helps with driver problems since AMD and Nvidia had more time to optimize their drivers for the game).

monster

I've used many AMD cpu's very successfully. But everytime I've tried an AMD/ATI video card, it just doesn't work out. Not due to gaming, but game dev issues.

+1 to CUDA also. I remember about a year ago, I had to convert a library of textures to DDS. The CUDA command line converter was 5x faster than the regular one.

{scumworks}

@Skamander - Been along time, but from what I recall it was mainly with the viewport. Shaders not working or showing, selections not updating (or acting very slow), transform gizmo bugging out etc..

I usually had to find a somewhat stable/working driver and stick with, as new ones only gave me greif.

Target_Renegade

You should do a poll if possible. From personal experience, the only bad experience I've had with an ATI (pre-AMD) card was in my laptop, since then I won't touch them, since all nvidia (even cheap pieces of shit) have been 100% fidelity. Plus you get all of the cool compatibility with PS and 3DS.

{scumworks}

@Target_Renegade - ^^ sure, added poll.