Global Conflict

I have recently bought a GTX 970, however it turns out that it is in fact only a 3.5gb card, not a 4gb card as advertised. The supplier I got the card from are offering refunds if I want it.

With all the shenanigans of the 970 only being a 3.5gb card, AMD have craftily dropped the price of the R9 290x to be about the same price as the 970. Now it is about a year older and much thirstier on the power consumption aspect, but it's also a beast and does have 4gb of vram.

Which should I go for?

GPU RAM comes to play when rendering for high quality/screen.
Do you have (or planning to buy) a screen larger then FHD? like 2k/4K?
If so then maybe... but even then i doubt 500MB is what going to matter. probably going to run out of computing power before that. Or are you planning on SLI/Crossfire for 4K screen?

If you don't plan on using a 4K screen with 2xVcards in the next 3 years (GPU life cycle) then stick with the your Nvidia card.

EDIT:

Tom's Hardware wrote: There's been some kickback from the community as Nvidia originally released some incorrect specifications regarding the card's memory bandwidth, ROPs, and L2 cache, but this doesn't change the fact that, more often than not, the GeForce GTX 970 will beat the Radeon R9 290X at similar graphics settings at 1080p.

Tom's Hardware wrote: R9 290x ... Despite its greater appetite for electricity, it''s usually slightly slower than the GeForce GTX 970 at 1080p, but it manages to close the gap somewhat at the ultra-high 4K resolution.

Basically repeating what Necro has said. The card is still very good for 1080p/1440 but when people bought it, the idea was that it was a 4GB VRAM card which will be great to SLI in the future and use for 4K.

Evaluate where you will see your needs will be in a year from now (or even currently if you are already running higher resolutions) and that will tell you what you should get.

It might be worth waiting for the 300 series from AMD rumoured to be announced this quarter. Not sure how much time you have on your refund.

That was totally hilarious lol.

I really enjoyed that one, I think that's even better than the hitler bunker edits.

That was amazing.. My god

I read a short while ago that amd were offering a discount to those who had bought a gtx970 and wanted to buy a r9 290x card bit more info for you about it here in this article

http://www.kitguru.net/components/graph ... e-gtx-970/

Thanks for the input so far.

The only gaming I may be doing which is >1080p is possibly an oculus rift sometime next year. As that resolution won't be hugely above 1080p anyway, I think I may stick with the 970.

Good choice, who wants Catalyst drivers in their computer anyway, I had them several years ago (like 10) and I still hate them!
Just look at BF4, made for AMD and Mantle, works better on Nvidia!

No turbo s-h-i-t (mantle), just real power!