AMD/NVIDIA GPU Debate Confusion

[ShushImGaming]

I need a little bit of clarification from someone who knows much more than I do on the subject of AMD vs NVIDIA GPU's. 

 

Context - my PC has started crashing fairly consistently. It's 4.5 years old and I feel like a new system is the least hassle. I am however trying to keep my budget reasonable as I only really play WoW and LoL, with some other games like Elden Ring/ Star Citizen sprinkled in occasionally. 

 

CPU for new build - Ryzen 5 7600, maybe 7600x

MOBO - Asrock B650 Lightning (no wifi)

 

GPU Options I've found:

RTX 4070 (NOT the Super or TI) ~$550

RX 6800XT ~$430

RX7800XT ~$500

 

I really feel like the AMD cards are more than adequate for my purposes, and on paper they certainly LOOK better, but when I research them there's a lot of people saying they're trash due to driver issues. Can anyone articulate those issues a bit more for me? 

 

I would also appreciate any input on these 3 cards in general. Pro's cons etc, I don't want to spend the 550 for NVIDIA with 4GB less VRAM, however if someone can explain the difference I may do that instead. 

 

Thank you

[Shimejii]

How much is the 7900 GRE in the store?

 

If you dont care for Ray tracing, you are fine with either GPU, just get the best fit to your budget. IF you do like RT (you only mentioned WoW and LoL) then stick with nvidia.

 

Also have you cleaned it recently? A lot of the time 5 year old GPUS/CPUS require a proper cleaning, and they need to be repasted. Usually a pretty easy process.

[ShushImGaming]

Thanks for your reply. 

 

The 7900GRE is coming in at ~500-550 depending on manufacturer in the USA, do you think that's a better value? 

 

As far as RT goes I've always kind of felt that super high end graphical things like that are a little bit lost on me. Most of my favorite games are cartoony (WoW, LoL, Borderlands) and the only nicer looking games I'm into are Fallout, Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate, and the next Elder Scrolls once it finally comes out. 

 

The vast majority of my time is spent in WoW, the most important factor for me is reliability for that purpose since I do competitive play and don't wanna crash and lose rating.  

10 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

How much is the 7900 GRE in the store?

 

If you dont care for Ray tracing, you are fine with either GPU, just get the best fit to your budget. IF you do like RT (you only mentioned WoW and LoL) then stick with nvidia.

 

Also have you cleaned it recently? A lot of the time 5 year old GPUS/CPUS require a proper cleaning, and they need to be repasted. Usually a pretty easy process.

 

[Shimejii]

1 minute ago, ShushImGaming said:

Thanks for your reply. 

 

The 7900GRE is coming in at ~500-550 depending on manufacturer in the USA, do you think that's a better value? 

 

As far as RT goes I've always kind of felt that super high end graphical things like that are a little bit lost on me. Most of my favorite games are cartoony (WoW, LoL, Borderlands) and the only nicer looking games I'm into are Fallout, Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate, and the next Elder Scrolls once it finally comes out. 

 

The vast majority of my time is spent in WoW, the most important factor for me is reliability for that purpose since I do competitive play and don't wanna crash and lose rating.  

 

yeah the 7900 GRE tends to be the best in the 500$ price tier if you dont care about Ray tracing

[Dedayog]

16 minutes ago, ShushImGaming said:

I need a little bit of clarification from someone who knows much more than I do on the subject of AMD vs NVIDIA GPU's. 

 

Context - my PC has started crashing fairly consistently. It's 4.5 years old and I feel like a new system is the least hassle. I am however trying to keep my budget reasonable as I only really play WoW and LoL, with some other games like Elden Ring/ Star Citizen sprinkled in occasionally. 

 

CPU for new build - Ryzen 5 7600, maybe 7600x

MOBO - Asrock B650 Lightning (no wifi)

 

GPU Options I've found:

RTX 4070 (NOT the Super or TI) ~$550

RX 6800XT ~$430

RX7800XT ~$500

 

I really feel like the AMD cards are more than adequate for my purposes, and on paper they certainly LOOK better, but when I research them there's a lot of people saying they're trash due to driver issues. Can anyone articulate those issues a bit more for me? 

 

I would also appreciate any input on these 3 cards in general. Pro's cons etc, I don't want to spend the 550 for NVIDIA with 4GB less VRAM, however if someone can explain the difference I may do that instead. 

 

Thank you

Stop listening to the people who mention AMD drivers.  I have 4 of their cards... 7900XTX, 6900XT, 7900GRE, and 6650XT.  All are without issue completely.

 

NVidia has slightly better tech and of course Ray Tracing.  If that is not important to you, get AMD as they perform better for the same price.

 

It's that simple.

[WereCat]

The AMD cards are fine. I never really had any major driver issues. I had minor driver issues on both NVIDIA and AMD, it's normal.

 

Most major AMD driver issues I had:

Read Dead Redemption 2 while using Vulkan had major VRAM leak, game crashed every hour or so.

WoW failed to launch in DX12 mode, just got a black screen. Works perfectly fine with DX11.

 

That was long ago and has been probably already fixed anyways.

 

The RX 6800 XT definitely makes the most sense here as it's typically just a bit behind 7800 XT in newer games while it can actually outperform it in older games and considering the cost of 7900 GRE the 7800 XT makes little sense in that context.

 

Honestly, given the games you play any of these cards is overkill.

[ShushImGaming]

This has been great info thanks all of you. I figured there was a little bit of bandwagoning happening with the NVIDIA fans here. 

 

I'll probably go with either the RX 6800 XT or the 7900 GRE depending on what my cart rings up to. 

 

Very appreciated and holy smokes you guys reply fast. Very appreciated!

[starsmine]

anyone who says AMD drivers are trash are living like its still 2007

[Steve Bruce]

Lets best honest, the RTX4070 isn't the card for RT anyway, so for that price point in makes more sense to go for the card with the best rasterization and most vram.  But that's just my opinion, I prefer to have a higher framerate and have a slightly less beautiful looking picture than have RT on and feel a noticeable difference in performance

[emothxughts]

Given the list of games you mentioned, it's best to spend the least money and get the RX6800XT. None of these games need more than 12GB VRAM (idk about Star Citizen though). I'd only recommend the NVIDIA card if you also dabble in serious streaming and/or AI work, for which its CUDA cores are important.

 

Don't listen to the haters when it comes to AMD drivers, they're rock solid stable, especially if the hardware is bought brand new rather than used. The "driver issues" probably came from faulty hardware rather than the software. I once had two bad blackscreening second-hand AMD cards (good riddance) and one good non-crashing card (but slow, it's an RX550) bought new, all ran on the same drivers. So it's not the drivers then.