GTX 960 4GB or R9 380 4GB (The question is not the performance)

[Mr.Foxx]

Hello guys!

 So I know there is a million post about the 960vs R9 380 around the internet, but none of that answered my true question. I'm plannig to buy a new graphics card that replaces my old friend GTX550Ti and I cant decide. I do seen a lot of performance and FPS test both of this cards and that 5-10 FPS is not really a big deal for me but I have some questions about, basically the good old AMD vs NVIDIA thing. I'd like to say I don't want to look like a fanboy, I found pros & cons about each card. So first of all, in the past 8-10 years I had a lot of problems with AMD things. I HATE THEIR DRIVERS.... I never had so much struggle with anything like those Cataclyst (sm) drivers. I mean you had to find a driver for like each games you wanted to play because each one was optimized for another... that was so annoying, and also a lot of my friends changed to NVDIA because of this. The reason why I'm talkin in past tense, I don't really know is that still an issue or not. Their getting better with drivers or it's about the same? I really don't want to struggle with those again and I read a couple of worrisome news about drivers that actually killed some AMD cards because they accidentaly turned off the fans on the card. And allso I never seen an NVDIA card failing in my envrionment but I had an AMD card that failed on me, and I watched with my friend when his (Sapphire) HD6570's memorychips slowly and painfully died. In the other hand I don't really like NVIDIA's agressive marketing and they just want to monopolizing the market. The Geforce experince is a crap, I hate it, however the drivers were allways fine for me and they do care a lot about optimizing a driver for an actual new game and at the same time you don't have to switch back to a 2 year old driver for an older game. So there's a bitter taste in my mouth about switching back to AMD but as I mentioned I don't want to be a fanboy and I'm open for starting over with the red side, if they do it better now. Also like that the R9 380 have 256bit bandwith insted of 960's 128bit. I found it an important thing. But allso the 960 has CUDA and PhysX. I allso noticed that I play more games that has "the NVIDIA" logo, so I don't know can it be a problem for me. I remember when I had to find somehow a physx.dll that wasn't caused BSOD....
 Now summarizing those things, what do you say, should I switch back to AMD happily or NVIDIA still a reliable and much "painless" solution for me?

Thank you !

[Kirky2k15]

2 minutes ago, Mr.Foxx said:

Hello guys!

  I HATE THEIR DRIVERS... And allso I never seen an NVDIA card failing in my envrionment but I had an AMD card that failed on me, 

1st point Both have had drivers issues in the past and both are fine now

 

2nd point You were UNLUCKY

 

3rd point get whatever is cheaper and offers more performance in this case the 380

[WarWeeny]

Stick with Nvidia imo, once you go inspector, you don't want to go back.

AMD still has shitty drivers, and unlike the post above, i never had any problems with Nvidia compared to AMD.

 

Also, Geforce experience is not a mandatory install, you could not install at all if you wanted to.

[CobbleWalker]

1 minute ago, Kirky2k15 said:

1st point Both have had drivers issues in the past and both are fine now

 

2nd point You were UNLUCKY

 

3rd point get whatever is cheaper and offers more performance in this case the 380

^ Yup, this.

[Kirky2k15]

Just now, WarWeeny said:

 

AMD still has shitty drivers

Does it really??? Proof?

[xAcid9]

7 minutes ago, Mr.Foxx said:

-wall of text-

 I also noticed that I play more games that has "the NVIDIA" logo, so I don't know can it be a problem for me.

960.

[rhyseyness]

I was in a similar position to you a few weeks ago when I got a new monitor (1440p compared to my old 1080p).

I was skeptical about changing to AMD, but I got a 290X and haven't looked back.

It performs better than what I could have got at that price point on the green side.

The drivers were easy enough to install and I am yet to have any complaints.

Hope this helps

[WarWeeny]

Just now, Kirky2k15 said:

Does it really??? Proof?

Look at the performance in the newest games.

Division and Tombraider suffer from performance issues on AMD platforms.

 

Also, AMD drivers offer less in terms of customization in games, Nvidia Inspector can do so much more than AMD drivers/programs could hope to do.

[ybriK]

Oh yea Nvidia drivers during Windows 10 release... those were great times for my 4 clients. Fun times we had... And now I'm getting messages about asynchronous computation... *laughs anxiously*

[ShadowCaptain]

Honestly IMO Nvidia still win from a software point of view

 

AMD are getting there but their software and drivers are not as good in my opinion - however you do get better bank for buck

[Arwanell]

drivers are perfectlly fine for a gamer, don't listen to them

[Darel321]

omg.... you started a riot again probably -.- just get nvidia if you want to pay more.. if not get amd... easy.... and software.. its just damn software... good bad.. its all fanboy based

[Mr.Foxx]

Thank you guys! Helps me a lot

[Kirky2k15]

5 minutes ago, WarWeeny said:

Look at the performance in the newest games.

Division and Tombraider suffer from performance issues on AMD platforms.

 

Also, AMD drivers offer less in terms of customization in games, Nvidia Inspector can do so much more than AMD drivers/programs could hope to do.

I've got rise of the tomb raider and a 290x and I don't have any performance issues... Pretty sure the latest patch resolved the problems but that was square enix's fault not AMDs drivers, not that I had any problems before that patch either

 

Sure AMD have had driver problems in the past but look at the NVIDIA windows 10 launch problems... both are as bad each other IMO

[Mr.Foxx]

I decided that, when I got my pament  I'll just put those 2 card name in a randomizer and wich one shows up, I'll buy that :DDD +I'm a little bit less nervous about the drivers now thanks to you

[astranger200]

380. amd drivers are great now

[papapoi]

i bought this card as well as a gigabyte 960 4gb for my other system and i have no complaints so far.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00VRSERUI/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

 

i used to always buy amd but some of their cards just use too much power and generate too much heat, i'll wait to the new batch comes out and might make the jump back.

 

[Ansau]

Have had an old hd5650, a Nvidia in a laptop for several years and now I have a 285 (which is the same as the 380).

- I've had more issues with Nvidia drivers than AMD, specially in terms of performance. With the Nvidia I was more than a year stuck with the same old driver because the newer ones were giving me less performance.

With AMD this hasn't happened, and is not like the little experience I had with the old HD. Performance has been very consistent since late 2014, and with the new Crimson I've experienced a lot more smoothness (something AMD has lacked in the past). Crimson is a real step up.

On the other hand, Nvidia has had tons of hidden issues this past year, or performance downgrades is less known games, specially with the introduction of Windows 10.

- AMD and Nvidia failure ratio is similar. AMD got bad fame due to a bad batch of HD7000 and some issues with previous gpus and cheap manufacturers, but nowadays they're fine. In fact, Nvidia has had more issues in the recent past in form of coil whining.

You shouldn't take an entire brand as bad for a bad product you had. Gpu's are very complex electronic devices, so it is normal their failure ratios are much higher than cpus or ram.

 

In conclusion:

- Nvidia delivers a more refined software environment, with more settings to play with, and the expectations of day 1 performance. But at the same time, there have some annoying issues they shouldn't exist with such brand. 
Another bad point is their gpus get outdated very quickly, and Nvidia is prompted to jump to the new architecture and build the drivers around it, with the previous generations being outperforming by a lot for no apparent reason, and even losing to the same AMD chips once they were competing (example are GTX 760 now struggling to surpass a 270x when it was facing a 280, or the 680 that was winning a 7970 when launched and now is performing around 10-15% less, or even the 960 that was winning the 285 at lauch and now is being beaten by a 380 by a 10%).

Expect Maxwell to fall miserably when Pascal is launched, specially the 960 with the tiny 128bit bus and the 970 with the 3.5GB issue.

 

- AMD delivers a less refined product, but more robust in terms of hardware. You get more raw power, but less software extras. This raw power allows the gpu to live longer and stand newer games for more time. But their gpus consume more power and run hotter, requiring larger coolers and fans at higher speeds, and, while they're getting better, their software support is still not as good as Nvidia.

 

The future is bright for both brands. Nvidia has a true monster with Pascal, and with their experience of driver polishing and the low power achieved with Maxwell they can have a really shiny performance in DX12. AMD sees in DX12 the solve of their cpu bottleneck of DX11, and we've already seen that GCN sees a huge bump in performance with it, making gpus that are 3-4 years old performing extremely well. And with the new Polaris is supposed to put all this experience of GCN to the next level, plus solving the power consumption issue.

 

But concreting in the 960vs380, the 380 is a better choice in pretty much all aspects. Not only it performs better, with DX12 the jump becomes wider, so much to a point where with a 960 you might need a lower setting level to get the same fps than with a 380 (like it already happens in the Hitman Beta).

Software is in both very good and stable, and it's not like in the past where Nvidia had tons of tools they were impossible to get with AMD. GeForce Experience? Raptr. Shadowplay? PlayTV or OBS. DSR? VSR. TXAA? SMAA, FXAA, built EQAA... Gameworks? GPUOpen. Gsync? Freesync.

The only reason I find to get a 960 is if you use software that takes advantage of CUDA or if you play some bad optimized games where you get crazy more performace with the Nvidia one (Project Cars I'm looking at you).