NVIDIA VS AMD for (mostly competitive) gaming

phastasmn · March 13

Where I live, I can get a 7900XT for not much more than a 4070 Super. I only use the GPU for playing games. In AAA games, even though nvidia has better frame generation and ray tracing capabilities, I think the 7900XT still beats the 4070S due to raw performance. I expect this to be even more true when games start requiring more VRAM, as the AMD GPU has way more of it.

However, I mostly play competitive games. There, you'd think AMD should have even bigger advantage, as RT and DLSS are irrelevant. But system latency generally matters more than FPS in this type of games. And according to latest Battlenonsense's video, nvidia reflex is way better than AMD Anti-Lag+.

I think if I got the 7900XT I could keep it for longer before upgrading. Since reflex/antilag is just software/firmware (I think), when can we expect AMD to catch up? For now I would probably just manually cap FPS. Which GPU should I get? I will use a 4k240 monitor.

TLDR

Would you buy an otherwise worse (for gaming) GPU just for nvidia reflex?

Brooksie359 · March 13

Maybe I am looking at the wrong benchmarks but the ones I see from nvidia are pretty underwhelming. I mean the difference between it disabled on a 60hz vs enabled on a 360hz monitor is only 10s of milliseconds and I would imagine a large part of that is simply the change from 60hz to 360hz. This isn't even taking into account tick count of the server and your in game ping I would imagine by the end it isn't that significant.

Eigenvektor · March 13

9 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

10s of milliseconds and I would imagine a large part of that is simply the change from 60hz to 360hz.

10s of milliseconds can be very noticeable. 50ms is a noticeable hitch.

But yeah, higher frame rate on its own should already reduce input lag.

MrSimplicity · March 13

As much as I hate AMD, I would still recommend it for anyone trying to save a buck. Or just comparing price to performance. A 7900XT is supposed to be on par with a 4080 and even kinda close to a 4090 (whether it is or not is a different story). So if you can pick one up for a reasonable price over Nvidia then I would go with that. However as far as what your specific use case is, I'd go with a 7900XT only because between the 2 it will have a better shot at running that 4k240 hz monitor than a 4070s. 1080p/1440p is still the sweet spot for gaming since 4k still costs too much to run effectively. So unless you're going to run your games at a lower resolution you're not going to hit that 240 mark regardless.

Brooksie359 · March 13

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

10s of milliseconds can be very noticeable. 50ms is a noticeable hitch.

But yeah, higher frame rate on its own should already reduce input lag.

10s of milliseconds between 60hz and 360hz and the setting on is extremely underwhelming. I would imagine if you used amds version it wouldn't be a big difference and again you are only taking one part of the input lag into account in a large chain of input lag. The difference between 10ms and 20ms is alot more noticeable than say 60ms vs 70ms.