I got a new CPU for Christmas (I7 4.2) and before I open my case up ive decided to pick up a new graphics card.

The 970 seems like the best when it comes to performance/price ratio. However I cant shake the idea that an AMD might be the way to go, primarily because both PS4 and Xbone are using AMD graphics hardware and most AAA titles will optimize for one of the two. I'm not worried about it right now as raw horsepower on the 970 should be fine. I'm more worried about sometime down the track when developers are squeezing every little thing out the machines that devs will use solutions that might not work as well on Nvidia hardware.

But then I honestly haven't kept up with hardware in many years.

Is my worry unfounded, or with the off the shelf nature of the 2 consoles make this issue totally irrelevant?

It's not dumb, it's just cheap.

That's why console mfrs decided to use AMD. AMD is cheap.

It's like the Walmart stock of PC hardware. It's not good, it's not bad. It's cheaply made so it lasts about as long as cheaply made things will last which is to say not long. It won't ever be as good as NVidia, either, which we can consider premium in this sort of context (and NVidia has it's flaws sometimes too).

Their hardware sometimes works fine. There are people who rabidly defend them.

So, I mean, it's not dumb. Just cheap.

99% of games are optimized for Nvidia. The only recent game I've played that wasn't was Tomb Raider because of TressFX.

AMD for me has been nothing but problems.

Get a 970. It's unmatched in pure value.

@cornbredx said:

Console makers decided to use AMD because they're basically the only manufacturer that can produce an x86-based system-on-a-chip. Even if they wanted an NVIDIA card, it would've been practically impossible.

This and also AMD has poor driver support.

Nothing wrong with AMD (I use an AMD CPU and GPU with zero problems), but a 970 is the best bang for your buck card right now. The fact that there's an AMD in the consoles means next to nothing.

Glad to be done with AMD with the 970. It is nice to game without having my secondary display get garbled. It is nice to have the graphic card control panel launch more than 5% of the time without crashing.

I can't imagine the consoles have anything to do with the performance of certain video cards on PC. I don't know, truthfully, but that doesn't really plausible. I'd go with the Nvidia, however. I have found that they are just more reliable.

you can get amd which is cheap and good. or you can buy nvidia which is expensive and exactly the same as amd.

Don't buy into the Nvidia hype. I have a 7870 and I've yet to have an issue, even with new stuff. Nvidia does have a ~5% advantage, but not enough to matter. If you can afford it, get it, but don't knock AMD because of stupid fanboys and marketing.

I recently had a R9 290 die due to the classic memory overheating issue, I got a revision 1 card without realising it. Whilst that problem is fixed now I have since gone to a 970 and I have to say it runs SOOOO much better than the 290 now, I was having wierd driver issues with the 290 (like it didn't want to run at full clock speeds, even at 50 degree's) where as the 970 works perfect and runs cold in my case.

I wouldn't go to the hawai chipset with amd again, they just run far too hot and use far too much power this generation.

You can get which chipset you want. Whatever advances developers will get out of the AMD chips in the consoles, it will primarily benefit AMD's APUs and not the GPUs. I think AMD's reasoning behind getting into the console game, was to further push their APU agenda on the PC market. They know they can't compete with Intel on raw performance, so they're looking to APUs instead. PC gaming is doing fine when it comes to optimization regardless. We've seen an increasing number of good ports and it's not because of how similiar to PCs the consoles have become. PC gamers are onboard with digital distribution now and publishers make a bigger effort to make sure PC versions work now that people are actually paying for games again. Well, some publishers anyway.

That said, the 970 is the best deal at the moment. If I were to build a PC right now, that's what I would get. When I built the PC I have at the moment, the Radeon 7970 GHz was the best deal. Whatever is the best changes all the time between Nvidia and AMD.

AMD graphics are ok-ish, that of course if you don't mind the excessive heat and power usage they have.. now if you had gotten an AMD CPU then I would say yes, very dumb indeed.

I don't know enough about the AMD cards to give a good opinion on them, unfortunately. However, I can say that I received a GTX 970 (Gigabyte G1 Gaming, to be exact) for Christmas and have been blown away with how awesome it is (upgrading from a GTX 460). You can't go wrong with this card.

The 970 is the way to go, a 290X with equivalent performance uses twice the power at the wall to get there and with the stock cooler spends half it's time throttling bellow it's own full clock speed.

I have AMD/ATI hardware and it's worked fine 99% of the time but you should probably go with the 970.

You look at AMD's numbers and you can see that they are basically giving the chipsets away for free. There is a reason why AMD ( AMD Income Statement ) makes around $100,000,000 less profit per quarter than Nvidia ( nvda Income Statement ) despite having a higher gross income than Nvidia.

Apparently, Nvidia was asked to supply chips for the PS4 and gave the business away to ATI because they did not like the margins Sony was asking for (Nvidia Gives Away PS4 Chipset Deal).

By the way, didn't they make TressFX to be open sourced or something similar so even though AMD developed it, Nvidia can still take advantage of the tech anyway unlike PhysX which is only limited to Nvidia cards?

I have used an AMD card for about 4 years now with no problems. I've never once had driver issues, poor game optimization, etc. My card is getting older now, though, so that's a negative. But that's just because it is many years old.

This. I just got a 970 after 5 years with an AMD card. It worked great at first, but the driver support was always behind Nvidia and there was ALWAYS little issues that I could never fix.

@gaspower: Its not that AMD cannot take advantage of PhysX, they just refuse to. If you google Nvidia Gameworks ( a set of free API's and testing tools that Nvidia is giving away for free to developers) you will see lots of information about how it is running on Android, PS4 and Xbox One already (including Physx SDK, PhysX Clothing, PhysX Destruction, and PhysX Flex). Apparently AMD refuses to support anything Gameworks because Nvidia will not make it open-source and AMD thinks that is bad for the industry (They Might Be Right On That One). So it is not like PhysX cannot run on AMD, its that AMD refuses to implement it because it prevents them from having total control over how their drivers operate.

Nvidia Gameworks is the reason why so many games are considered to be optimized for Nvidia cards. Think about it, why would you spend the thousands of hours coding a fur engine when you can just plug in one that doesn't cost you a penny? Is it optimized for ATI cards, I doubt it, but that is not Nvidias fault, it's ATI's for being stubborn.

Here is a link to a story about ATI's beef with Nvidia

My first gaming PC had a AMD GPU and CPU and what a mess that was. Since over a year ago I have used Nvidia and I haven't had any issues at all.

I've gone with nVidia since my first build and I haven't looked back. In late 2006, I kept hearing about issues with ATi/AMD cards, so I didn't get one. I did use an AMD 64 processor in that first build though, but after that, I switched to Intel.

I haven't had any issues with my 7950. If I needed to upgrade I might go with a Nvidia, but its keeping everything on high at 60 just fine for now and I don't have any crashes (since I replaced my POS motherboard that died)

Whilst the issues with AMD cards and their quality, both in terms of hardware and driver support, are largely hyperbole, AMD being the graphics manufacturer for the consoles right now effectively has no bearing on how PC games run. Although the similar performance of the NVidia cards come at a premium, you make a trade-off of not needing to have as much power to drive the card, nor does your case need to run as cool. The 290X is a great card that's going to be right for a specific subset of people (I've been plenty happy with my 7870 which was in a similar situation at the time, it idles low and the power consumption isn't an issue), but right now the 970 is pretty much the best way to go for most people looking for a new GPU in this market. The brand specific optimizations for games usually fall on gimmicks like PhysX or TressFX, which any good PC game will allow you to turn off, and mostly balance out the performance; sometimes AMD cards run better, sometimes NVidia cards run better, but it's often a crapshoot and unless something's really wrong, the difference is usually negligible.

I'd also like to point out that the Maxwell architecture in the 900 series comes with full DX12 support while the current AMD architecture is only feature level DX11.2.

It's not too dumb to get an AMD video card, it's just dumb to buy their crappy CPUs.

@ninnanuam: Devs are much more likely to swing to Nvidia in terms of game optimization and features (like PhysX and some Anti-aliasing methods). Nvidia tend to be better in terms of features, drivers and optimization. That said it wont make too much difference either way for the vast majority of cases. AMD provide better bang for your buck but Nvidia tend to provide cards that run cooler, quieter, with less power and have better driver, optimized games etc in a lot of cases.

My 5 year old 470 is still going strong and can still play new games on medium settings, that's pretty impressive. I'm probably gonna stick with nvidia.

My AMD video card has worked flawlessly for years, but looking at what Nvidia offers these days, I would change to them in a heartbeat. Also I am seeing lots of non-gaming related things that support Nvidia only features...

Thanks for all the help. After reading everyone's response I realised that there probably wouldn't be a reason not to buy the 970.

I decided to go with the G1 970, Amazon have just shipped it.

As someone who used nVidia for years, starting with a 8800GT all the way to a 580 GTX, and getting a r9 280x october of last year, let me give you my advice:

Do not. Get. A fucking. AMD card. Ever.

When I first built my gaming PC, I put an AMD HD7770 in it. It was a fine card, just above mid-range, played pretty much everything, didn't have any problems with it. Later I put an HD7870 in it and I eventually had to send that thing back, I had so many issues out of it. Screen just crashing on me, having to restart my computer, got blue screens, super hot. I sent it back and got it replaced with another 7870 and I have gone back to not having any issues with it.

What I'm saying is, you'll probably wind up with an AMD card that plays just fine, but I'm going with NVIDIA next time because of all the issues I had with that first 7870. Also, games tend to be optimized for NVIDIA first and AMD second, and some games just have issues with AMD cards in general. idTech 5 games tend to have issues on AMD machines, though personally I've played most of Rage and all of Wolfenstein twice and experienced no issues.

They are roughly equal, anyone who tells you otherwise is likely to be a fanboy/girl.

Given the choice Nvidia is usually smarter because Physx is much more common then any AMD specific thing.

AMD doesn't really do exclusive features, they've always (quite admirably) focused on universally applicable enhancements which help push forward game technology.

Equal in what? Driver support? Nope. Performance? Yeah maybe. Bugs with games? Nope.

@privodotmenit: 4-5 years ago you were correct. I'll give you that much.

I have had no problems with my 7850. It runs things pretty well for the price.

I still am, there's a reason AMD aren't the preferred option for just about anybody.

If you're only looking at pure performance than the price premium for Nvidia cards is a little more than the performance premium (sometimes there isn't any) but Nvidia cards are often quieter and cooler. There are some gamers who plop on big ear cans and don't mind the droning Of an R9 290 but even considering the great performance of the most recent generation of AMD cards the new Nvidia 900 series are the best option by every metric.

Most games are optimized for Nvidia because Nvidia are scumbags who you should not support unless you need to cut your electricity bill down massively because AMD graphics are powerhungry. AMD processors get to run at full potential on Windows 8 and above (yeah wtf) and it's not bad for a budget but for those of us who need core strength in processors there's no choice but to go with scumbag Intel.

And unless you go CrossFireX the AMD drivers will be significantly more stable and reliable in games than modern day Nvidia, I say as an owner of 3XXX-7XXX AMDs and 6XXX-7XX Nvidias.

As a someone who is using triple-screens and would also like to hook-up TV for watching streaming video, I'll have to disagree. Nvidia display management is so archaic that you can't even switch between triple-desktop and Surround mode without 3rd party script. As for hooking up the TV, there's just no easy way to do it that doesn't involve manually re-building the displaygroups everytime you want to switch over. On the AMD card I had before, it was just a matter of creating a desktop profile and assigning a hotkey.

When it comes to driver reliability, it's pretty much even for both manufacturers. I'm getting glitches in DA:Inquisition with GTX 780 when running latest drivers, but switching to older drivers fixed it. Also one of the longstanding issues with Nvidia cards has been microstutter on DirectX 9 titles even when not running SLI, fortunately that hasn't been an issue I've had to deal with.

But currently the Nvidia GTX 900-series is the optimal choise because AMD's R9 200-series is generation older and meant to compete with GTX 700-series. Both GTX 970 and 980 have excellent efficiency with a decent performance per dollar.

That's a pretty specific issue, as for DX9 titles I haven't had that problem. I wouldn't really say the driver situation is even as Nvidia's stuff just seems to work better with less launch week hiccups as most games are designed around Nvidia, this also means you generally get better performance at least until AMD write new drivers.

I don't have much of a problem with AMD cards myself, I just don't see much reason to buy them, unless they are offering a card with equal performance to a Nvidia for $100 less. I liked my HD4870 at the time.

AMD runs fineish on windows. Get what gets you the most bang for your buck.

That said, if you ever plan on doing anything that requires opengl accelleration in linux, stay the hell away from AMD, their linux drivers are complete dogshit.

i've had an AMD HD 5850 for almost 5 years.

zero complaints.

Many people are running triple-screens nowadays, especially in simulator communities. Not being able to easily enable/disable Surround mode is not what I'd call a minor or very specific issue.

i don't think i should regret mine. sounds like the difference would have been negligible if i went with i5/780 vs 8350/r9 290. plus i can always OC (or maybe thrown in a 2nd r9 290...).

only had it a few months too but no driver or other issues with the r9 290 (so far)...

I'm glad you posted, since I just bought an R9 290 for Christmas. This thread had me sweating.