EVE General Discussion

The three times I moved to Radeon, I regretted it. Sure they look great on paper, but it always ended with issue after issue concerning drivers.

As far as your statement is concerned, yes again the rad looks better. But a large issue for me with that card is it's power usage. Plus I'd be back to guaranteed driver problems.

While I'm no graphics card fan boy, (which you quite obviously are) I simply want an easy life. For the vast majority of the time I get that with NVidia. It's always been the other way for me with Radeon. Even if I get drawn to them every now and then.

Have used radeon cards since, well forever. Way before they were even owned by AMD and still using a R9 390 now and have never had a driver issue. Most problems I've ever seen with an AMD card are down to failure to follow directions (other than dell selling me an AMD crossfire setup on an invidia mobo that wasn't compatible back in 04'-05'.) Years ago you HAD to do a full wipe of the drivers off of your system before installing updated drivers or you risked problems. That said I haven't had to go through the trouble of doing that in a long time. Current installation software is much better than windows XP (and older) days.

(For the record, when I recently upgraded to a new PC my choice of going w AMD was pure based on the stats. Price wise, performance wise and future wise the R9's are simply a better choice than invidia's offering's)

It appears to be... literally... 2x the card with double the memory and bits. So I am a bit baffled as to why the 970 appears to outperform it according to this:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Curious as to why this is and what is the "new technology". I would certainly consider a 390, but ruled it out based on similarly priced Nvidia cards outperforming them in tests I have read.

That does appear to be a pretty poorly performed set of marks. The fact that they simply lumped the 290 and 390 and the 290x and the 390x together as having the exact same performance is a pretty good indicator they didn't actually test all the cards in question but instead posted numbers based on what they believed to be the same chip sets. I can quite certainly assure you that an R9 Fury x out performs a GTX 970 which according that page it does not. Either poor testing or bias/faked results.

Except that in many cases the 390 isn't fully tapped yet. Driver updates may well increase performance further. Then you need to look at what they are weighing.
Are they sending instructions to the cards, saying, "Calculate this and give us the gigaflops result," which would mean that memory and bus speed aren't tested?

Since we are throwing out old crap for credentials.. Remember Edlin? Know what TWAIN means? Yeah.. still pointless even today.

To drop a bit of "lack of bias" into this though...
There are functional differences between NVIDIA driver consistency and AMD driver consistency. AMD does, on average, have more driver related issues when related to new games. Especially those with gameworks. To balance this however they typically have very quick patch times to correct these issues. Conversely NVIDIA may release more functional drivers but whenever they have an issue its often ignored until the next driver release window.
AMD drivers also consistently improve performance over time and they typically do not obsolete cards as quickly.
Nvidia cards come with near maximum performance at release but older cards tend to have performance degradation when the drivers advance to the next API generation.

As to hardware.. NVIDIA has generally held the technology crown even though they often fail to utilize it(kinda like intel). Though occasionally AMD surprises with their typical left field innovations.

TLDR: Both GFX solutions have pros and cons and come out relatively equal over their performance lifespans. You just have to pick and choose your headaches according to what pisses you off the most.


/edit
DX12 currently doesn't functionally exist with much of NVIDIAs lineup. This will be changed soon but in atypical fashion nvidia has some serious issues with win10 and dx12 right now in certain configurations.

I was more referring to NVIDIAs stockpile of tech they dole out as needed to give a competitive edge. Adaptive Vsync, CUDA, etc. Typically they will have the tech first by either buying it, borrowing it, or stealing it. AMD on the other hand tends to in house stuff more with innovative results(like their claim they can use Gsync features with some small changes to their software) Nvidia takes several pages from intel in this regard much like intel withholding things such as hyperthreading until there was a competitive need for it.

If you say so, fan boy.

Jen may have that issue, sure. But seeing as I have been drawn to Radeon cards 3 times, due to spec and price, hypocrisy is hardly applicable to myself. (Actually 4 now I think about it. I forgot about the card in my daughters PC a couple of years back.)

But can you say the same regarding NVidia? Or does your Have used radeon cards since, well forever. statement, exclude them completely?
I buy what works for me, atm that seems to be NVidia. If that changes, I'll be sure to let you know.

Two floppy drives! *swoon*

My first box was an Atari 800XL. Loved it but game companies ignored it so I went with Commodore next: Amiga ftw!