Should I step away from AMD GPU??

[Snake3y3s]

I have been with AMD (or ATI or Radeon... whatever they go by now) for eons... First one was a ATI Rage (i think)

 

Problem is that I am in the 3D animation field and have been fine up until now.

I currently have a R9 390 (yes... older tech, but it has served me well) and things have been going well, can still play a few of the newer game titles on full spec without any hiccups.

I am looking to upgrade somewhere soon and I would love to stay with AMD, but 3D animation software is making this a very hard choice.

 

Maya and after effects (and a few other software packages) have been taking advantage of CUDA cores for a while now, with still no love for AMD, I have been waiting for a while when they said that they would be looking into AMD alternatives, but this has still not happened.

Now Nvidia have added RTX to the mix, and a few packages are already taking advantage of this (substance, substance painter, Arnold... etc) with still nothing on the horizon for AMD GPUs.

 

So... should i just bite the bullet and jump ship?

What are your thoughts and opinions? (AND NO...JUST NO! THIS IS NOT A WHICH IS BETTER FLAMEWAR!)

[Kilrah]

5 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

AMD has price:performance going for it

For gaming maybe, but not for those applications that benefit from NVidia's hardware and there is no equivalent support on AMD side.

[Haro]

5 minutes ago, Snake3y3s said:

So... should i just bite the bullet and jump ship

If you need cuda and rt for your workloads

Then I guess so. In workloads that utilize cuda heavily there isn't really a comparison as nvidea will obviously be better. 

AMD currently has its V2 ( even tho it's not even produced anymore ) as their consumer like heavy workstation gpu. The only real special thing about it is the frame buffer 

In tasks that heavily rely on cuda

That frame buffer will be useless. If you really need cuda and ray tracing for your workloads then switch to nvidea 

It really isn't a whole lot different in the real world.

[Levent]

I can easily suggest AMD cards to people who are looking to do some gaming on a budget. AMD promises lots of features but none of them comes out great, their GCN architectures were great it literally hard-carried AMD while they were selling pieces of shit called FX series CPUs. For everything else I suggest Nvidia cards all the way. I have been using AMD cards since I got myself a HD5770 then HD7850 that I used for 8 years (just replaced it recently) and every time I mention AMD I get flashbacks of broken drivers and it triggers my PTSD. I got myself a GTX970 due to Autodesk apps that I use, I dont regret it a single bit.

[5x5]

If the performance increase is substantial, yes. If not, no point in upgrading.

[Mateyyy]

imo AMD's best cores were by far Hawaii (the R9 290 was and still is a beast, and so is the 390 since it's a basically a rebrand) and Tahiti (the 7970 GHz Edition is like 8 years old and is still better than something like a 1050Ti or probably even close to a 1650, and of course AMD went on to rebrand it twice, as the 280X and then the 380X).

Right now though, for top performance (and efficiency, which when you consider that AMD's on 7nm and Nvidia on 12nm isn't a good look for AMD) you're pretty much exclusively looking at Nvidia, and that's excluding feature sets, drivers, etc.

 

Regarding real-time ray-tracing though, it's pretty much guaranteed that RDNA2 will feature that, but so will Ampere in most likely a very improved form compared to current-gen Turing GPUs. Also, because of this, I'd suggest holding out a little longer until later this year for next-gen cards to come out.

For CUDA though, yeah, Nvidia's obviously your only option. But still, I'd wait for Ampere.

[.Apex.]

12 minutes ago, Snake3y3s said:

Maya and after effects (and a few other software packages) have been taking advantage of CUDA cores for a while now, with still no love for AMD, I have been waiting for a while when they said that they would be looking into AMD alternatives, but this has still not happened.

Now Nvidia have added RTX to the mix, and a few packages are already taking advantage of this (substance, substance painter, Arnold... etc) with still nothing on the horizon for AMD GPUs.

The only thing AMD GPUs have going for them is price/performance in Gaming, other than that if you're going to work in normal applications like 3D animation, Video Editing, Machine learning (incl AI), Streaming etc then AMD falls flat on its face, and their drivers are still terrible but I guess if you're only gaming then it might be worth your while but not in your case, I think you would regret your decision if you went AMD and realized how little support there is for the vast majority of applications out there.

[WereCatf]

32 minutes ago, Snake3y3s said:

What are your thoughts and opinions?

AMD GPUs are shit. They're okay for gaming, specifically. Anything else, NVIDIA is the way to go.

[Prodigy_Smit]

52 minutes ago, Snake3y3s said:

So... should i just bite the bullet and jump ship?

Yes you should. Although AMD has better price to performance in gaming, Nvidia just generally has better performance in anything work related and you probably will have more luck with CUDA optimizations in newer software not to mention you also generally get better driver reliability.

[xAcid9]

Need it urgent? Yes, bite the bullet.

Not urgent? Wait for next-gen with improve hardware ray-tracing on both vendors.