Help me pick better GPU please, thanks!

[Evildeffy]

Umm no? Dude above said this "As of the Crimson Drivers, the 390 is basically 5-15% faster than the 970 across the board", that is what i was replying to, should have quoted it. I linked that video because it was done 2 days ago, unless these magic drivers he speaks of came out since then im not seeing 5-15% "across the board".

Ah .. well in relevant newer games it tends to be but point taken.
DX11 the GTX 970 remains competitive yes but still is the worse buy over the R9 390.

As for your WoW comment, there is middle ground you know. Some areas you can peg 300 fps, some areas 150, some areas 90, some areas 70 etc etc etc. This matters because a LOT of monitors are now coming out (and getting cheaper) that are 144hz. There is a sweet spot of around 90 FPS where you can still get the smoothness provided by these monitors, having that headroom is a really good idea to have with nvidia on these titles.

The only way you'll drop to 70 FPS in WoW at those resolutions is if you're (currently) in Stormshield and mythic raids where there's either 100s of people on a tiny spot or a massive amount of spell animations bogging down your CPU making the GPU difference entirely irrelevant because both GPUs are waiting on the CPU to feed them data.

That's why even a basic partial DX12 adaptation into WoW's engine (Driver overhead reduction and multi-threading across CPU cores) would make sure a difference it's unreal to ANY card.

There is still 0 difference between the FPS numbers stated prior because the same numbers on the FPS are reached even with a GTX 950 vs. the GTX 970 during both mythic raiding and stormshield because of the CPU-limitation.
And I'm sure you agree that the GTX 970 is a much more powerful card than the GTX 950... this is why WoW is referred to as "irrelevant".

[jeanericuser001]

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/

I recommend checking this out. These guys do some straight up excellent tests on most hardware on the market. If you want good side by side comparisons on multiple programs this will help alot.

[Bigvizz]

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/

I recommend checking this out. These guys do some straight up excellent tests on most hardware on the market. If you want good side by side comparisons on multiple programs this will help alot.

Those charts are old they don't include the R9 300 series cards, let alone the new Crimson Drivers.

[jeanericuser001]

They do however cover the cards he is currently needing data on. They can give a side by side comparison with multiple configurations tested. What is the point of giving charts for cards that he may not even be interested in when in fact this does cover what he needs. This is like someone asking for advice on their car and suddenly you want to talk about things for a hummer.

[Artorius]

They do however cover the cards he is currently needing data on. They can give a side by side comparison with multiple configurations tested. What is the point of giving charts for cards that he may not even be interested in when in fact this does cover what he needs. This is like someone asking for advice on their car and suddenly you want to talk about things for a hummer.

No it isn't, because things change. You can't compare graphics cards with outdated charts, that only works for Nvidia cards because they mostly don't get better with time.

[jeanericuser001]

You two are letting your fanboyism affect your objectivity. The charts are designed to give him data based on which SPECIFIC card is better while you want to wax on and on about your favorite brand which has nothing to do with what he is looking into. Besides I trust toms data as they provide data across multiple fields of examination and help you to find out critical data that might be useful. They will eventually release the 2016 charts but due to the fact that only 3 months have passed so far into the year its not exactly wise to release a chart for the whole year when its barely out of the first quarter. Once again objectivity is critical.

[Fascinate]

No it isn't, because things change. You can't compare graphics cards with outdated charts, that only works for Nvidia cards because they mostly don't get better with time.

You need to chill with your AMD fanboyism, and that's exactly what you are doing. I am only playing devils advocate for nvidia because ive seen you and many other people on this forum literally say "do not buy a gtx 970" and thats just pure bad advice, and you are doing a disservice to the people asking. As i pointed out earlier in this thread there are reasons to suggest a 970 over a 390:

1 Gameworks titles. Again, its a shame nvidia went this route but thats life. Scenario: someone loves fallout, hasnt played a PC game since fallout 3 and needs a new GPU to to play FO4. They come to this forum and see all these people stating never to buy a gtx 970 so they grab a r9 390 and have an overall poor experience (as evidenced in the video i linked) when they could have had a much better time with a 970.
2. They play MMO's. I have played nearly every MMO since 2004, not one of them plays better on AMD. Sure they are playable on AMD just fine, but why would you suggest an AMD card over nvidia at the same price if you can get higher FPS with an nvidia card?
3. Power consumption. This one really depends on how much you game and what the cost of electricity is where you live. At 15c a kwh you could easily save 50 bucks a year with a 970 over a 390 that isnt negligible.

I get that looking forward the 390 SEEMS to be the smart choice simply because it offers double the vram, and a possiblity dx12 compatibility will be better.....but speculation like that is not a good way to suggest to people who need a video card now. We truly dont know what dx12 is going to be yet, and dont confuse dx12 support with dx12 exclusive we wont see an exclusive dx12 title for....i bet 1.5 years or more.

[Artorius]

You two are letting your fanboyism affect your objectivity. The charts are designed to give him data based on which SPECIFIC card is better while you want to wax on and on about your favorite brand which has nothing to do with what he is looking into. Besides I trust toms data as they provide data across multiple fields of examination and help you to find out critical data that might be useful. They will eventually release the 2016 charts but due to the fact that only 3 months have passed so far into the year its not exactly wise to release a chart for the whole year when its barely out of the first quarter. Once again objectivity is critical.

Or you can actually use something up to date and do things the correct way. Old reviews are not a representative of hardware's current performance, advising someone with outdated reviews is literally the same as giving false information because they don't reflect reality anymore.

Here, pick a recent review and then go to the summary tab.

[Bigvizz]

You two are letting your fanboyism affect your objectivity. The charts are designed to give him data based on which SPECIFIC card is better while you want to wax on and on about your favorite brand which has nothing to do with what he is looking into. Besides I trust toms data as they provide data across multiple fields of examination and help you to find out critical data that might be useful. They will eventually release the 2016 charts but due to the fact that only 3 months have passed so far into the year its not exactly wise to release a chart for the whole year when its barely out of the first quarter. Once again objectivity is critical.

Not a AMD fanboy or a fanboy of any manufacture really, you post junk and I call it how I see it. Those charts you posted are out of date even for the GTX 970 (due to driver updates since then) which the OP is asking about.

[jeanericuser001]

A difference of a few months doesn't automatically mean a massive change. Even then the data you provide is based only on a limited sampling of various recent cards. Toms covers everything from the high end to the low end. This way you get a broad sampling of everything across the market. A broad sample can help you to determine all options not just the expensive $500 card but also the card at half the price which may offer performance near to that same card. Again fanboyism is clouding your judgement. Besides I trust toms as they have been in the business for over 10 years and some of my most successful hardware that has lasted me the longest has been thanks to a toms review. Besides if you explored toms more you would find other reviews as well. Its not just old stuff.

[Evildeffy]

You need to chill with your AMD fanboyism, and that's exactly what you are doing. I am only playing devils advocate for nvidia because ive seen you and many other people on this forum literally say "do not buy a gtx 970" and thats just pure bad advice, and you are doing a disservice to the people asking. As i pointed out earlier in this thread there are reasons to suggest a 970 over a 390:

1 Gameworks titles. Again, its a shame nvidia went this route but thats life. Scenario: someone loves fallout, hasnt played a PC game since fallout 3 and needs a new GPU to to play FO4. They come to this forum and see all these people stating never to buy a gtx 970 so they grab a r9 390 and have an overall poor experience (as evidenced in the video i linked) when they could have had a much better time with a 970.
2. They play MMO's. I have played nearly every MMO since 2004, not one of them plays better on AMD. Sure they are playable on AMD just fine, but why would you suggest an AMD card over nvidia at the same price if you can get higher FPS with an nvidia card?
3. Power consumption. This one really depends on how much you game and what the cost of electricity is where you live. At 15c a kwh you could easily save 50 bucks a year with a 970 over a 390 that isnt negligible.

I get that looking forward the 390 SEEMS to be the smart choice simply because it offers double the vram, and a possiblity dx12 compatibility will be better.....but speculation like that is not a good way to suggest to people who need a video card now. We truly dont know what dx12 is going to be yet, and dont confuse dx12 support with dx12 exclusive we wont see an exclusive dx12 title for....i bet 1.5 years or more.

Point 1:
Fallout 4 works perfectly fine on an R9 390, just extreme God Rays and Tesselation can't be met properly.
The core function and even the effects change nothing so your example is moot.

Point 2:
Anecdotal evidence really and only applicable (IF true) on low end rigs... make up what you're trying to pinpoint down here in relevancy .. high end or low end?

Point 3:
No, this myth has been debunked continuously.. unless you are literally playing 24/7 for a full year you are not even going to see a 10 USD difference in a year's time.
That's how little difference there is between the 2 in regards to power bill.
With the coolers out there from all brands not even heat or noise is an obstacle with the 100W higher power draw.
Technically people could retort with the level of coil whine the 970s have over ANY other card.

Last paragraph:
DX12's capabilities (as explained) is NOT speculation, it is a cold hard fact that AMD have the better performing cards on DX12.
This is not subject to change with the GTX 900 generation in the future period, doesn't matter how much one would like it to be.
Software CANNOT improve that which is physically missing on the hardware.

Explain to us in detail how DX12 is speculation in any form or way as it's an API, it's pre-determined what it's capable of and not.
Yes there can be made improvements but it will NOT change anything when the core basic functionality (Asynch Compute) is physically not present on a card.
As for time schedules .. look into more games I'd say.

[Bigvizz]

A difference of a few months doesn't automatically mean a massive change. Even then the data you provide is based only on a limited sampling of various recent cards. Toms covers everything from the high end to the low end. This way you get a broad sampling of everything across the market. A broad sample can help you to determine all options not just the expensive $500 card but also the card at half the price which may offer performance near to that same card. Again fanboyism is clouding your judgement. Besides I trust toms as they have been in the business for over 10 years and some of my most successful hardware that has lasted me the longest has been thanks to a toms review. Besides if you explored toms more you would find other reviews as well. Its not just old stuff.

Just going off what was posted, on top of that tech in general can experience massive changes in a matter of months either due to hardware changes or software changes. Next time be specific on what you link rather than painting with a broad brush, also try looking at other websites Mr. Tomshardware is not the end all be all of Computer Hardware Info. /nuff said

[Fascinate]

I am not gonna bullet point reply to you because i made my points, but you fail to recognize them sir (its easy to go to a kWh calculator or look up benchmarks for the major mmo releases in the past 5 years). I will say you are hanging onto this asynch compute far too tightly to your chest. No game devs are going to code a game in a manner that puts 65% of the PC gamer market (guessing nvidia has about 65% market share if you exclude on board solutions) at a disadvantage. If it does happen its going to be YEARS from now when a gtx 970 isnt a relevant gaming card anyways.

I didn't give nvidia enough credit it seems, as of a year ago they had 76% of the add in GPU market share:
http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...ics-cards.aspx

[Sorshen]

A difference of a few months doesn't automatically mean a massive change. Even then the data you provide is based only on a limited sampling of various recent cards. Toms covers everything from the high end to the low end. This way you get a broad sampling of everything across the market. A broad sample can help you to determine all options not just the expensive $500 card but also the card at half the price which may offer performance near to that same card. Again fanboyism is clouding your judgement. Besides I trust toms as they have been in the business for over 10 years and some of my most successful hardware that has lasted me the longest has been thanks to a toms review. Besides if you explored toms more you would find other reviews as well. Its not just old stuff.

Did you actually check the links provided or you're just ranting on...

[Artorius]

You need to chill with your AMD fanboyism, and that's exactly what you are doing.

It doesn't matter how you look at it, AMD is currently offering better hardware unless you're buying a GTX950.
It also doesn't matter whether I have a personal preference for AMD, that's because I'm disgusted with Nvidia's business model and I'd rather not support a company like that. Nvidia would make games "nvidia-exclusives" if they could, they'd literally fragment the PC community just like consoles are.

They also need to lock you at their environment when there are clear viable open options that work at any vendor's hardware.

OpenCL? No, CUDA.
FreeSync? No, G-sync.
Nouveau? No, proprietary drivers. "Nvidia, fuck you."
Gameworks? YES GAMEWORKS!!! HBAO+, TressFX, Hairworks, PhysX, Tesselation, VXAO. Let's abuse everything that we know don't work as good at competition's hardware to give us an edge instead of designing better hardware!!

This last comment might sound satirical, but there's truth to it.

I am only playing devils advocate for nvidia because ive seen you and many other people on this forum literally say "do not buy a gtx 970" and thats just pure bad advice, and you are doing a disservice to the people asking. As i pointed out earlier in this thread there are reasons to suggest a 970 over a 390:

I'm not exactly sure where you're going but let's see...

1 Gameworks titles. Again, its a shame nvidia went this route but thats life. Scenario: someone loves fallout, hasnt played a PC game since fallout 3 and needs a new GPU to to play FO4. They come to this forum and see all these people stating never to buy a gtx 970 so they grab a r9 390 and have an overall poor experience (as evidenced in the video i linked) when they could have had a much better time with a 970.

Gameworks is one of the reasons why you shouldn't buy Nvidia. It pollutes the games with crap that make them run worse and barely look better. Although I'm not sure who's worse, Nvidia or the developers who allow Nvidia to mess with their games.

2. They play MMO's. I have played nearly every MMO since 2004, not one of them plays better on AMD. Sure they are playable on AMD just fine, but why would you suggest an AMD card over nvidia at the same price if you can get higher FPS with an nvidia card?

Because the single most important advancement for MMOs are the new low-overhead APIs that are arriving and AMD has better performance with them than Nvidia. I don't think people are buying new graphic's card every year so I'll recommend something that will perform better down the road.

3. Power consumption. This one really depends on how much you game and what the cost of electricity is where you live. At 15c a kwh you could easily save 50 bucks a year with a 970 over a 390 that isnt negligible.

@Drunkenvalley went through this electricity price difference in the past and we got to the conclusion that it's negligible. You also can't compare the power consumption looking only at the card's consumption because Nvidia cards stress the CPU more causing it to consume more power, you should look at the total power consumption from the wall.

I get that looking forward the 390 SEEMS to be the smart choice simply because it offers double the vram

The extra VRAM is the most irrelevant aspect of the 390.

and a possiblity dx12 compatibility will be better.....

It's not possibly better, it is better. Nvidia lacks the hardware, you can't add hardware with driver updates.

but speculation like that is not a good way to suggest to people who need a video card now. We truly dont know what dx12 is going to be yet, and dont confuse dx12 support with dx12 exclusive we wont see an exclusive dx12 title for....i bet 1.5 years or more.

It's not speculation either. D3D12 API is complete and it's the vendors jobs to support it, not the other way around. We have benchmarks, we have the reason why Nvidia is bad at it, we have everything we need.

Do you want more evidence? Okay.

I usually post performance normalisations comparing GTX 680 and HD7970 on launch and then GTX 680 and R9 280X at a later date, if that's what you mean?
For instance, their relation upon GTX 680's release:



And their relation upon the release of the R9 Fury:


(GTX 680 release with ~8.79% more performance, but now, 280x which is essentially the same cards with minor tweaks (less tweaks than between GTX 680->770 for instance) has ~13.85% better performance)

Hardware, period. AMD's hardware suits better in DX12, better compute throughput, hardware scheduler. Has lower latency in DX12, Vulkan and in turn also Virtual Reality (if you care about that).

If you didn't keep up, recently (well over 6 months) found that Nvidia's hardware can NOT support asynchronous compute despite being advertised that. It has no proper scheduler so it relies heavily on the software to do so which impacts performance and frame latency. Ashes of the Singularity's implementation of DX12 shows performance increase with AC on on AMD hardware and performance decrease on Nvidia's just because of these differences while DX12 shows performance increase (small or big) on every card when AC is off, so don't say this is a bad implementation. Hitman's DX12 shows the same thing.

To illustrate (well link images).
This is the 980 Ti's frame time in VR.


This is the 960


This is the 380


And this is the Fury


One of the strongest card has relatively the same (if not worse) frame time as a mid low end AMD card and the Fury just stomps it.

And this is consistency.
AMD's


Nvidia's

And about your MMO argument:



Wait the 390 is beating a 970 at a MMO@DX11? Yes. Why? Because they scale better with higher resolutions and improved a lot more since launch in comparison to the 970.

The 970 is indeed better at 1920x1080, but I wouldn't call this difference meaningful either:

[Morssoe]

4-way titan x is minimum for WoW

[Bigvizz]

Holy wall of Text Batman! I think someone needs to be defensive.

[Fascinate]

You clearly just don't agree with nvidia's practices and thats fine for you, but dont put it on other people just trying to buy the right gpu for THEM. Holding onto this dx12 stuff does not back up your points, merely that you lack the common sense that game devs wouldn't allow (psst, neither will nvidia....they got dem deep pockets) this to happen.

Power consumption is a thing, you even fail to recognize that different parts of the world have different costs for electricity and some people game 12 hours a day (i did when i was 14-15). Say you live in denmark electricity is around 40c/kWh. Say you got a 13 year old kid who plays, i dunno crysis 3 all day. At 80w (depending on overclocks, this is a conservative number of how much more a 390 takes than a 970) and 40c/kWh you are looking at 160 bucks per year.....thats a gtx 950 and a happy meal.

[Artorius]

You clearly just don't agree with nvidia's practices and thats fine for you, but dont put it on other people just trying to buy the right gpu for THEM. Holding onto this dx12 stuff does not back up your points, merely that you lack the common sense that game devs wouldn't allow (psst, neither will nvidia....they got dem deep pockets) this to happen.

And you're clearly ignoring all the facts thrown at you because you like Nvidia more. We've said it, we've proved it, we're waiting for your arguments but all you're doing is giving us your opinions. You can neglect DX12/Vulkan/Metal all you want but it doesn't change the fact that they're here and they're here to stay, the problems MMOs have with CPU overhead are going to diminish drastically once they adopt any of the new APIs. If you care about the future, higher resolutions or VR then we've also proved that going with AMD is looking better right now.

Look, I don't buy Nvidia products for personal reasons. It doesn't mean that I can't recommend Nvidia products when they're better, like the GTX950 or OC'd 980Tis, but I won't recommend something inferior to people that don't know any better.

Power consumption is a thing, you even fail to recognize that different parts of the world have different costs for electricity and some people game 12 hours a day (i did when i was 14-15). Say you live in denmark electricity is around 40c/kWh. Say you got a 13 year old kid who plays, i dunno crysis 3 all day. At 80w (depending on overclocks, this is a conservative number of how much more a 390 takes than a 970) and 40c/kWh you are looking at 160 bucks per year.....thats a gtx 950 and a happy meal.

13yrs old kid can very well play his games with a GTX950. He most likely won't even notice the difference between cards...

I'm really not going over this power consumption thing again, it's not your fault or anything but the last time it took nearly 30 pages....
I've mentioned Drunkenvalley at my previous post so maybe he has the math with realistic scenarios saved somewhere.

[Fascinate]

I am at a loss, your hate for nvidia really is blinding you. And no, dx12 isn't "here" we are no where close to seeing an exclusive dx12 title....no where close! dx12 support=/=dx12 exclusive. The onus is on you sir, ive made my points and they sure as hell aren't opinions lol (basic math with a kWh calculator is apparently an opinion).

If you really think a game is going to come out in the next 2-3 years that either:

1. An nvidia card runs at a massive performance disadvantage (40-50% or more) against its price competitive AMD offering.
2. Won't run at all because it lacks the hardware for certain dx12 features.

If you ACTUALLY think this is going to happen you are delusional. You can throw all the benchmarks in the world at me it means nothing, COMMON SENSE trumps here my man this simply WILL NOT HAPPEN PERIOD lol.