The never ending battle, Geforce vs Radeon, whee!

[Lespedeza]

Yay, off to another "ermahgerd, no, X is better!"-thread!

 

No, seriously.

I am thinking about tinkering on a new system which will be kind of a long-term-project. I am not asking whether to buy a 260x or a 750 ti or something like that.

What I want to know is: Where are the general differences between Geforce- and Radeon-cards. I know that both have their own features, upsides and downsides, but... where does a normal guy like me start to feel or see a difference?

 

Everywhere I looked somebody got bombed with some fancy names for the features and a "Geforce is useless, better stick with Radeon" and two posts below somebody said "lol no Radeon is stupid Geforce ftw!", without really saying something about how it affects the gaming experience.

 

Most of my friends seem to favor Radeon-cards but mostly bring arguments like "I like it better than Geforce, because.. well, I've used Radeon all my life". The only one who could name something was another friend of mine who switched from Geforce to Radeon, because he spends most of his time with BF4, so.. hey, Mantle!

 

 

Well, I don't really have the money to buy 14 cards and compare them all, that's why I was hoping to get some answers from people who tried both.

As I said, I don't want to know which one out of two cards is a better run for me, but a general idea about the major differences between Radeon and Geforce - and how they affect the experience of a guy who really likes wasting time with games but doesn't do so 24/7.

[helping]

 

 

If you want Gsync, shadowplay, shield, Nvidia. If you want Mantle and eyefinity, AMD. Otherwise observe benchmarks, choose which costs less for best performance.

[Vitalius]

I say a major difference is FPS consistency. Here's my post about it. 

Check the bottom for a TL;DR. Though that's obviously for top tier GPUs where only minimum FPS matters for most gamers, imo. 

If you think that's just fanboy BS, check that I did use both older and recent reviews proving that what I said is true.

[Scionyde]

Neither! Real men play on Intel integrated graphics!

 

This doesn't answer your question, but if you're planning a new build, I would just get a rough idea of your budget and what your other components will look like, and then just see what the best card is for your remaining money.

[Osmium]

AMD has much better open CL performance and it has a much larger frame buffer/usable memory bus. Nvidia at least this generation has better performance in games and they do not suffer from inflated prices. Right now I would recommend team green just for the prices.

[brownninja97]

Agera

 

period.

[Hans Christian | Teri]

I like NVIDIA so I stick with NVIDIA.

 

Aaaaaaand the award for the most constructive post of the year award goes to--

[Bluethulhu]

Nvidia

• G-Sync
• Shadowplay
• Shield support
• CUDA acceleration
• PhysX

AMD

• Eyefinity
• Mantle
• Cryptocoin mining
• OpenCL acceleration

I feel like Nvidia has the lead as of right now because coin mining has caused a massive price spike on AMD's cards. The best way to shop for a graphics card is to compare the price/performance ratio as @helping said.

[ForsakenLive]

@Lespedeza

I think you should Google search every technology/feature name on the list above and evaluate for yourself.

Both are great companies with great products, go with the one with what you consider has better features.

Raw-performance-wise regarding the price different cards can come up. Talking about budget, monitor resolution, and uses will allow us to tell you which card can be better for you.

[TERAFLOP]

Almost all GPU features make 0 to little difference.

Things like AMD's TressFX & Nvidia's PhysX aren't very common in games and contrary to popular belief you can run both whether you have an AMD or an Nvidia card.

TressFX runs on the GPU via DirectCompute but is faster on AMD, PhysX runs on the GPU on Nvidia and on the CPU on AMD but is faster on Nvidia.

 

CUDA has almost become obsolete with almost all new software adopting OpenCL, Shadowplay doesn't offer enough of a performance difference versus things like DXtroy and OpenBroadcaster to make an actual difference in gameplay recording.

 

If you're mining crypto then you probably know what you're doing so I'm not going to talk about that much, but AMD GPUs have been traditionally anywhere from 2X to 4X faster than equivalently priced Nvidia cards.

 

If you want to play with a shield you will want an Nvidia GPU, if you want to stream to your Steam Machine, then both AMD & Nvidia work equally well.
If you want to go multi-monitor then both are equally good, if you want more than 3 monitors go with AMD.

If you work with monitors that support a wider range of colors (10bit per channel) then you will want an AMD card, since only AMD cards support this feature on their consumer cards, Nvidia only adds it to Quadro cards which are significantly more expensive than GeForce.

If you enjoy modding games like Skyrim or perfer to play at higher resolutions then you are better off with AMD cards at the higher tiers.
At $300 and above you get more memory & a lot more memory bandwidth with AMD cards (R9 280X vs 770 , R9 290 vs 780, R9 290x vs 780 Ti)

Now to come to the most important metric, which is performance, this is fairly simple to assess, look at benchmarks from Anandtech, hardwarecanucks & Tom's hardware.
Make sure to look at new benchmarks since drivers do improve performance with time.

I've used both Nvidia & AMD cards for the past... 11 years interchangeably,  99% of the time you notice absolutely no difference between the overall experience.
Occasionally you will get excited to see the AMD or Nvidia logo at the beginning of the game, knowing that you will get an ever so slight advantage.

But overall there isn't much of a difference, set a budget for your self and look for the best performing card in that budget.
Good luck, hope this helps.
 

[Cryptonite]

I say a major difference is FPS consistency. Here's my post about it. 

Check the bottom for a TL;DR. Though that's obviously for top tier GPUs where only minimum FPS matters for most gamers, imo. 

If you think that's just fanboy BS, check that I did use both older and recent reviews proving that what I said is true.

yeah, though in my case that doesn't work at all, Nvidia is priced a lot lower than AMD's counterparts and people still fanboy over AMD cards for some reason, just like they fanboy over $400 (cost over here) Asus motherboards while they use a single GPU solution while they could buy something for around $100 - 200 that could do the exact same thing they want and even sometimes look better.

[Lespedeza]

@ForsakenLive

Heh, I just did that, and when it comes to features.. nothing really means much to me. I don't want to play on multiple screens, I don't want to stream anything, and neither Mantle nor G-Sync are widespread, so.. heh.

 

@TERAFLOP

Hah, thank you! Maybe I'm looking on the wrong sites, but this is the first time someone actually cleared things up for me!

 

 

So in the end, if I don't want to play around with fancy things like a rather strange looking handheld or a wall of screens, everything comes down to how much the piece of plastic covering the card costs and how much I like how it looks? Sounds like blast processing to me.

That's actually easier than I expected.

[TERAFLOP]

@ForsakenLive

Heh, I just did that, and when it comes to features.. nothing really means much to me. I don't want to play on multiple screens, I don't want to stream anything, and neither Mantle nor G-Sync are widespread, so.. heh.

 

@TERAFLOP

Hah, thank you! Maybe I'm looking on the wrong sites, but this is the first time someone actually cleared things up for me!

 

 

So in the end, if I don't want to play around with fancy things like a rather strange looking handheld or a wall of screens, everything comes down to how much the piece of plastic covering the card costs and how much I like how it looks? Sounds like blast processing to me.

That's actually easier than I expected.

I also forgot to mention TrueAudio. It's an audio processor that AMD has in its R9 290X, 290, 260X, 260 cards & 7000 series Kaveri APUs that calculate where various noise in the game are coming from to give you their accurate position.