Radeon or Gtx?
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?
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?
Replies
That said, I'd prefer even using my old card over a buggy mess.
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.
Edit - With xbone and ps4 running amd, you have to wonder what the future gonna look like. But afaik, neither consoles support mantle.
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).
+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.
I usually had to find a somewhat stable/working driver and stick with, as new ones only gave me greif.