Fields wrote:Ash2Dust wrote:I'm looking past the Nvidia 9xx series.
Doesnt make sense for me to get a 970 when I can get a 1070 for $399 on Newegg.
AMD has great price points, but my experience with their drivers have me very wary of them.
The 480 is a comfortable price range, just asking what people on both sides of the fence are experiencing.
That's interesting; I've only had crashes and driver issues with intel processors and the only nvidia card I ever bought crashed non stop. AMD has always been buttery smooth and stable for me.
you can find people who have issues on both sides of the board. every AMD (and previous ati) video card I've owned started having major issues after about 6 months of use for one reason or another. every nvidia card I've owned has never had an issue until it became seriously outdated. maybe the rx480 is different, but as someone who used to generally prefer AMD because the price-performance ratio was generally a bit better, I cannot say that anymore with the current setting. you get what you pay for, and overall amd just hasn't put anything out in any category that has mattered for years.
if you don't want to spend over $300, then maybe an rx480 is the right card for you. even though
multiple reviews and benchmarks all put a 1060 as at least on par, if not better than, the rx480, at a
similar (gtx1060) price (rx 480) point. a 1070, if you are willing to spend the extra money,
blows the rx480 out of the water in every category for about $100 to $150 more.
if you have the extra cash and/or are looking to future-proof yourself for a few years, AMD doesn't even have any offerings. the strongest card they currently produce in large numbers is the rx480, which is comparable to nvidia's weaker gaming offerings in the gtx1060. it's not a contest right now. if you can afford the extra cash, a 1070 or 1080 destroys everything AMD offers right now, and will continue to do so until AMD starts making high end cards again, which they won't until their Vega architecture comes out, which we still know basically nothing about (more on that later).
RazY70 wrote:matsif wrote:
the entirety of the amd 400 series cards is aimed at budget builds. in terms of benchmarks nvidia 900 series cards are still beating them in many categories. they're cheap for a reason.
there's no reason to buy amd anything unless your wallet is tight.
That is totally inaccurate and I have no idea why you would suggest something like that.
The
AMD RX 480 is certainly not considered a budget card but a mid-range one, similarly to the GTX 1060. It's on par or better than the 970 in performance (particularly in newer games and even more so DX12 ) and much better in price. Take for example the
MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X which is
$278.89 at Amazon, compared to the
$399.00 MSI GAMING GeForce GTX 970 4GB. The AMD 390 and 390X are also considered great cards but are a little harder find and are less power efficient. The GTX 1060 is a great mid-range alternative but is a little bit more expansive. I'm not sure why anyone would go for the 970 at its current price range.
There plenty of reasons to buy AMD if you're in the market for a mid-range card. If you're looking for a high-end one then I think it makes sense to go with the GTX 1070 and above. That said, the new AMD high-end cards (Vega architecture) are rumored to be just around the corner and I think (at least hope) they are going to be worth the wait. Also... Zen preview in 2 weeks.
as to the gtx970 vs rx480, they really aren't that much different in actual use testing. if those were my only choices I'd probably still get the rx480 because of newer transistor tech and price point, but in real-use testing and benchmark scores they really aren't that different. I wasn't looking at price point when I made the comparison, just actual use testing and benchmarks. the rx480 in most cases I saw only beat out a gtx970 in games where AMD had a hand in the development to support their architecture, which is still the case when compared against the gtx1060. outside of that, nvidia is at a minimum equivalent to, if not beating, the rx480 on an older architecture, even if only by a small amount. numbers don't lie.
Zen is an x86 CPU architecture, not a GPU architecture, and has little bearing in the discussion at hand. unless you're in the market for a new processor, it doesn't matter in the space of this discussion.
Vega isn't to be believed until we actually see numbers, which we won't realistically see until probably Q2 of next year at the earliest. we may see preliminary AMD numbers before then, but the cards aren't going to truly hit the market and get a good round of actual use testing into them until Q2 or maybe even Q3. on top of that, AMD has overhyped all of their things as being great for years, only to always be beaten by nvidia in game testing and benchmarks. when I see the numbers I'll believe it, until then I treat it as AMD's hype engine and don't believe it because they always overhype everything they produce. remember mantle? oh yeah, no one does because it was a major flop. they marketed it as something to end directx and it didn't even work, and now basically no one remembers it even existed. when AMD offers something that has the data to back up their claims outside of their own press conferences it'll be better for everyone, but until that time AMD cannot be believed whenever they claim anything, because they are almost unilaterally proven wrong.
I want AMD to be an actual competitor again, it'll be better for all of us, but until that time the data in just about every case supports the conclusion that nvidia and intel produce the better products. it sucks that this is how things work at the moment, but if you're in the GPU market there isn't really any reason to buy AMD unless your budget is limited to below gtx1060 levels of cash.