Best 400$ Graphics card

Shadow Ghost

i wana choose between the Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 or the R9 390 i don't plan to play past 1080p or overclock so i don't think the 970 would be best but for the sake of game development which is better in programs like Mari 2.0 Zbrush Photoshop(High Res Textures) should i get the R9 390 for the 8GB

bugo

for work, i always go for Nvidia, most softwares dont have good compatibility with Radeon.

Nostradamus

To my knowledge the 970 consumes much less power and runs quieter for the same performance.
I have one and it has served me quite well.

k@rt

There has been quite a lot of talk recently about the fact that nVidia architecture doesn't handle parallel processing and therefore risks suffering performance losses with async compute under DX12. This would appear to be more problematic if you are planning to do much with VR.

Some people are claiming that if you are concerned about async compute and DX12 then going with Radeon may be the safer option atm... but there seems to be an awful lot of speculation and obviously no concrete information about how nVidia and Radeon are actually going to perform in real world DX12 situations.

If you are interested to know more there are a quite a few posts on Reddit PC gaming talking about the whole thing... if you can wait to buy a card it would probably be the better option, but if you need to get one now maybe read some of this stuff and see what you think:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3jqdso/nvidia_hw_performs_poorly_with_async_compute_due/

http://www.overclock.net/t/1572716/directx-12-asynchronous-compute-an-exercise-in-crowd-sourcing

Just thought I'd mention it, it may be relevant to you.