Sapphire/MSI r9 390 Gaming vs. MSI 970 GTX Gaming

[SteveGrabowski0]

Their current most recent drivers are terrible. Meaning they too, just like AMD, are nothing special. Nvidia themselves just illustrated that their driver team isn't superior in any way. Malfunctioning drivers is worse then badly running ones, especially when you need several fixes to fix the broken stuff.

 

390 requires no OC to be better. And you can OC the 390 too. Honestly though, i havent seen any good reports on 390 OC yet, so how well it OC isn't fully exploited yet, mostly because not a damn soul bothers to buy it and buys the not so OC friendly 290X instead.

 

Yeah, Nvidia's last good driver was 350.12. I'm not installing a new one until they fix their crashes in Chrome. I can't believe it has taken them this long, the 350.12 driver came out more than two months ago. They were all pretty solid until that Witcher 3 driver 352.86.

[Prysin]

Where are you guys finding decent 390 benchmarks? I saw Techspot's, but I can't trust them when they're saying the R9 390 smokes the GTX 970 on Witcher 3 at 1080p with Hairworks on. No way this can be true with all the whining AMD did about Hairworks. I haven't to see a second source that can back that up after all I heard about Hairworks crippling AMD cards.

AMD has redone a lot with the 300 series, especially 390/390X

 

390/390X now features not only faster memory, but also better data compression, so those 8gigs are being used better (honestly, even with 4 gig that card would be amazing with the data compression).

the 390 smokes the 970 by like 6-9 FPS on average while costing the same. Some games more, some games less, as usual.

 

Hairworks "workaround" for AMD is to force x16 Tesselation in CCC. That overrides TW3s default x64 which helps A LOT. Personally i cannot tell the difference between x16 and x64 at 1440p. If it wasnt JUST the hair, but tesselation in the rest of the game isnt too prevalent. It is there, but hairworks is the most tesselation heavy of all features it seems.

 

Also, TW3s AA seems to be default at 8x (i turned it off ingame and forced 8x in CCC. Same visual effect as using ingame AA settings with "use app settings" in CCC) Turning off AA or forcing x4 helps performance a metric ton while retaining a fair share of visual fidelity.

[arronleeds]

Yeah nvidia have literally fooked us in the butt with not just the 3.5gb but now the drivers, what's worse is ever since the last two drivers, my fps on battlefield 4 dips a lot more than what it ever did before. It's not my gpu as firestrike comes back fine every time. For the chrome part it always crashes now urgh... The best driver was 347.09.

[PancakeGaming]

I'd go for r9 390.

[DarkSmith2]

Yeah, Nvidia's last good driver was 350.12. I'm not installing a new one until they fix their crashes in Chrome. I can't believe it has taken them this long, the 350.12 driver came out more than two months ago. They were all pretty solid until that Witcher 3 driver 352.86.

its already fixed for days now....

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/849203/geforce-drivers/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-353-38/

[SteveGrabowski0]

its already fixed for days now....

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/849203/geforce-drivers/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-353-38/

 

I'm not installing hotfixes, I only want official drivers. They said the same with the hotfix for the driver before this too.

[Sam Z Man]

Just went on sapphire's website and it says that recommended PSU is 750W. What the ....?

 

For now R9 was a favorite, because I saw some games like dying light, codAW and others can use more than 3,5GB of VRAM, but 750W as recommended is crazy. I mean I could SLI 970gtx at that power

 

 

They recommend 750W because they are making a blanket statement so someone with an overclocked FX-9590, 10 HDD, and a bajillion fans.

[EvilWiffles]

If you are inpatient, don't go the AMD route. They take months for new drivers and sometimes they don't actually work well.

[Sam Z Man]

If you are inpatient, don't go the AMD route. They take months for new drivers and sometimes they don't actually work well.

 

There drivers are actually good recently, and lately Nvidia drivers have gotten bad, the only thing that sucks if you're impatient is there crossfire driver support.

[EvilWiffles]

There drivers are actually good recently, and lately Nvidia drivers have gotten bad, the only thing that sucks if you're impatient is there crossfire driver support.

 

Well, last time I was using AMD GPU's, it took over 3 months for any driver to come.

[Sam Z Man]

Well, last time I was using AMD GPU's, it took over 3 months for any driver to come.

 

They stepped up their driver game in the past 2 months, currently they are putting out drivers faster and better than Nvidia.

 

There is no good gpu for having the best driver support, it can always change at anytime. 

[EvilWiffles]

They stepped up their driver game in the past 2 months, currently they are putting out drivers faster and better than Nvidia.

 

There is no good gpu for having the best driver support, it can always change at anytime. 

 

Well, considering the lifespan of a GPU isn't that long to begin with. It's quite a big deal.

I'm glad they upped the game on drivers though. It would've been nice if they upped it before I made the switch to my current GPU.

[Sam Z Man]

Well, considering the lifespan of a GPU isn't that long to begin with. It's quite a big deal.

I'm glad they upped the game on drivers though. It would've been nice if they upped it before I made the switch to my current GPU.

 

Yea I cant wait until they finally bring on multi gpu freesync support, they said it was coming in the 300 series release so it might already be here.