400e budget GPU, which really is the best?

[Wilian]

I've been really torn between choosing from 970 and the Radeon 390whatever it was.

Reviews for both seem to be okay while more leaning on the 390 side, which on some games have shown to give far superior performance. However there seems to be also plenty of driver related issues.

What to do? D:

Are there any other alternatives?

[Deleted]

I'd pick the R9 390 especially if you run at higher than 1080p resolution. Also R9 390 supports dx12 and gtx970 doesn't. There is also new cards coming out in like 6months or so if you're not in a hurry.

[Wilian]

I'm running at 1680x1050 so resolution itself is not a performance killer for me.

As for waiting, mine has been dying for ever now and only running because of 3 times oven cooking.

In 390 I'm most interested in the performance and VRAM as it seems to be quite future proof with ever increasing texture resolutions but I'm very much worried with possible driver issues that AMD seems to be riddled with. Or performance related incompatibilities with games crafted around Nvidia cards.

As for DX12, it was my impression either card support some tricks of the DX12 while neither support all the featureset completely.

[Deleted]

There is no future proof really with vram. For any 1080p gaming even 2gb is enough nvm 4gb. So that isn't a reason, there is like 1 game out there that it could use more than 2gb of vram @1080p and thats because its shitty optimized, i think it was the new Assassins Creed.

[Tokas]

I was looking for a new GPU recently, did a ton of reading here and there on the internet, watched every youtube video possible I bought 970, bu just because I was able to buy it 80 eur cheaper, but if it were the same price I'd buy 390 in a heart beat. It's just better.

[Wilian]

There is no future proof really with vram. For any 1080p gaming even 2gb is enough nvm 4gb. So that isn't a reason, there is like 1 game out there that it could use more than 2gb of vram @1080p and thats because its shitty optimized, i think it was the new Assassins Creed.

Lots of modern games seems to hog up that VRAM pretty well, be it for bad optimization or whatnot.

[panos20]

R9 390. You'll even have some change left. Similar performance and often faster than 970. 8gb vram is overkill and it will be mostly unused but it's better than 3.5gb of 970, which to be fair will be also mostly unused at 1080p and bellow. Better dx12 compatibility than nvidia cards (no gpu is 100% dx12 compatible atm. Next generation later this year from both AMD and nVidia will be fully compatible). Most upcoming dx12 games are AMD sponsored. And i read that amd is giving the new hitman for free with some selected cards and stores. The only problem with dx12 is that you have to use Windows "Master Spy" 10.