NVidia vs AMD Platform

[zachmullin]

With the new AMD Polaris refresh cards dropping a few hours ago, the midrange debate between NVidia and AMD has sparked again.  

 

The numbers and FPS gains are out there, so today I wanted to compare the PLATFORMS of the GTX 1000 series and the RX 500 series.  Before these new AMD cards dropped I was going to definitely buy a 1060 6GB in the next few weeks, but now I would like to here some people's opinions about the cards (not raw performance and numbers, but about the platform, software, etc).

 

One thing that I read about when I was looking for a card TWO generations ago was that AMD's OpenGL driver implementation was horrible. People reported that in the particular OpenGL title I was looking to play, cards like the 380 and 290 had unplayable frame rates at the lowest setting, while cards like the 750ti and 950 could easily play the game. Has this changed at all? 

 

(OpenGL game is X-Plane 10 {now 11} by the way)

[zMeul]

for AMD, OpenGL is still a problem - and they're not going to fix it anytime soon, if ever

[mrzoltowski]

I have always been team Green, but that is because I am in the high-end spectrum of use cases, I don't just game with the cards, I use several NVIDIA GPU's for CUDA accelerated rendering and simulation. I think AMD is great for Mid-range gaming and a great price. 

 

Saying that I have a feeling AMD might shake things up again with VEGA, like they have with the new Ryzen line, which is great for gaming but has much wider content creation ramifications. Im looking out for VEGA to see how it compares with NVIDIA in the heavy weight arena of cards and if prices are low enough might integrate it into my pipeline.

[samcool55]

Well openGL is dead and is now Vulkan which does work better on AMD cards. 

 

Apart from that, I used to recommend the 480, and now i would recommend the 580, it's similar or faster, the potential performance improvement in DX12 and vulkan is bigger, extra 2GB Vram and freesync. It does consume more power tho. But that's about it?

[DocSwag]

I would recommend 580 since it's more VRAM and similar performance, but AMD OpenGL performance sucks so...

[bakidota]

the 1060 from nvidia is still superior imo, consumes 30-40% less power than a 580, furthermore the 580 consumes as much as a 1070 which was out a year ago so amd cannot keep up even after an entire year, also if you check all the benchmarks you can even notice that a 580 consumes even a bit more power than a 1070 which is just sad. Also check gamers nexus benchmarks because their testing methodology is far more superior and accurate. You will notice that a 1060 pretty much beats a 580 in all the games except doom and sniper elite. Dont fall for vulkan, this api is only present in doom 3 which came out a year ago which came out a year ago, also if you do your research you will see that vulkan has been out for years now and only one triple A game is out with this api. So yeah 1060 is a no brainer here, there are a few exceptions tho that is if you are a bit coin miner, or you care about doom 3 and sniper elite so much that you cannot resist. Also the new title prey will be heavily amd optimized so if prey is too much kawaii for you buy a 580lol.

 

edit: i see alot of ppl mentioning more vram on the 580, well thats irrelevant for gaming, for other applications like rendering avatar or bit coin mining it might be worth it

[ivan134]

2 hours ago, bakidota said:

the 1060 from nvidia is still superior imo, consumes 30-40% less power than a 580, furthermore the 580 consumes as much as a 1070 which was out a year ago so amd cannot keep up even after an entire year, also if you check all the benchmarks you can even notice that a 580 consumes even a bit more power than a 1070 which is just sad. Also check gamers nexus benchmarks because their testing methodology is far more superior and accurate. You will notice that a 1060 pretty much beats a 580 in all the games except doom and sniper elite. Dont fall for vulkan, this api is only present in doom 3 which came out a year ago which came out a year ago, also if you do your research you will see that vulkan has been out for years now and only one triple A game is out with this api. So yeah 1060 is a no brainer here, there are a few exceptions tho that is if you are a bit coin miner, or you care about doom 3 and sniper elite so much that you cannot resist. Also the new title prey will be heavily amd optimized so if prey is too much kawaii for you buy a 580lol.

 

edit: i see alot of ppl mentioning more vram on the 580, well thats irrelevant for gaming, for other applications like rendering avatar or bit coin mining it might be worth it

That's quite a lot of nonsense in one post. "Look at only one benchmark that confirms my bias and ignore every other one for no good reason. Let me also not mentioned that he used one of the lower clocked 580s, tested a whole bunch of GameWorks games and that the performance difference in most of them was less than 5%"

 

The Doom that came out isn't Doom 3 and we are getting 2 more Vulkan games this year; Prey 2 and Quake Champions. Star Citizen is also moving to Vulkan. All current Serious Sam games have been switched to Vulkan coming Serious Sam games will use Vulkan. The 480/580 still smashes the 1060 in dx 12 games. Oh, and let's not forget that 480/580 + freesync is still a helluva lot cheaper than 1060 + GSync.

 

@zachmullinNvidia is still better at OpenGL, so you're better off going with a 1060 if that is your main game.

 

EDIT prey 2 wont be using vulkan

Edited April 18, 2017 by ivan134
wrong info

[bakidota]

52 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

That's quite a lot of nonsense in one post. "Look at only one benchmark that confirms my bias and ignore every other one for no good reason. Let me also not mentioned that he used one of the lower clocked 580s, tested a whole bunch of GameWorks games and that the performance difference in most of them was less than 5%"

 

The Doom that came out isn't Doom 3 and we are getting 2 more Vulkan games this year; Prey 2 and Quake Champions. Star Citizen is also moving to Vulkan. All current Serious Sam games have been switched to Vulkan coming Serious Sam games will use Vulkan. The 480/580 still smashes the 1060 in dx 12 games. Oh, and let's not forget that 480/580 + freesync is still a helluva lot cheaper than 1060 + GSync.

 

@zachmullinNvidia is still better at OpenGL, so you're better off going with a 1060 if that is your main game.

 

EDIT prey 2 wont be using vulkan

hi there, my post is pure facts. I do aloooot of research about both amd and nvidia before recommending anyone anything. I've been using amd and nvidia products in the past and I like them both but for you to say that i talk nonsense is in fact nonsense. First of all gamers nexus testing methodology is far more superior than most out there that is a known fact you cannot deny that, also there are also alot of other benchmarks on the internet stating the same. Second of all if you ever watched the video you will see that he used a very high quality reference cards regarding the 570 and 580, also he overclocked them as far as they can go. By the way no one cares about serious sam games because they are not new and you will get ridiculous high frame rates regardless of the api you are using. Aaaand about quake champions no one cares about the api here either, quake champions is an esport game that doesn't have fancy graphics and the frame rates will go through the roof regardless of the gpu you are using. The only valid argument here is the Freesync which in fact is helluva lot cheaper.

[ivan134]

2 hours ago, bakidota said:

hi there, my post is pure facts. I do aloooot of research about both amd and nvidia before recommending anyone anything. I've been using amd and nvidia products in the past and I like them both but for you to say that i talk nonsense is in fact nonsense. First of all gamers nexus testing methodology is far more superior than most out there that is a known fact you cannot deny that, also there are also alot of other benchmarks on the internet stating the same. Second of all if you ever watched the video you will see that he used a very high quality reference cards regarding the 570 and 580, also he overclocked them as far as they can go. By the way no one cares about serious sam games because they are not new and you will get ridiculous high frame rates regardless of the api you are using. Aaaand about quake champions no one cares about the api here either, quake champions is an esport game that doesn't have fancy graphics and the frame rates will go through the roof regardless of the gpu you are using. The only valid argument here is the Freesync which in fact is helluva lot cheaper.

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