I know people that had/have AMD cards and their more or less fine. It's always been more of a bang for the buck type of thing than allegiance. Personally though, if an AMD card holds the best performance to price award, I'll wait until an nVidia card dethrones it before upgrading.

But that's only because of my fear of the unknown.

Someone want to enlighten me about what's wrong with AMD CPUs? I recently just upgraded to a FX6300 and haven't had any issues with it.

They have significantly lower performance per clock to Intel's offering and the socket AM3 lineup lacks more modern features like PCI-E 3.0 (along with being extremely power thirsty by comparison). That being said you won't find a cheaper 8 core CPU, just don't expect it to do wonders in less threaded applications even against a 4 year old Sandy Bridge i5.

Like someone else said, they're the cheap brand, Walmart brand if you will...but now that the 970 is out there I really see little reason to bother getting one unless you're seriously that short on cash which in that case just wait till you can afford the 970,it has the best value on the market right now

AMD cards are generally okay but have always been plagued by driver issues and weird problems like that. Nvidia really doesn't have those problems as far as I can tell and are pretty rock solid all around. As far a performance goes, I would put AMD and Nvidia more or less on the same level within their respective price ranges, however performance really depends on the specific game. Even though the cards are relatively neck and neck, some games are optimized for specific cards so I would look at game benchmarks for what you want to play and go with the card that runs the best.

That being said, it's hard to beat the GTX 970 at current prices, especially with how well some of the upper-end 970s overclock.

Without going into specific details, Intel has been kicking AMDs ass for the last 8 years or so with CPUs. There is nothing out there that can really touch the current Intel i5 and i7 series. AMD is just way behind on the tech side. Even their 8 core models can't really stand up to a basic 4 core i7 from Intel. I see no reason why someone would go with AMD over Intel these days. Even when considering the price, Intel isn't that much more expensive and what you get in performance is pretty huge.

It's a shame really. I remember the old Athlon 64 chips that put AMD on the map with the mainstream. There was a while there where Intel couldn't touch them with those 64-bit CPUs and Dual Cores. It was great when they were competitive with each other because it drove the prices down. Nowadays AMD is considered a "budget brand" when you can't afford an Intel. I really hope AMD starts making good stuff again and actually starts being competitive.

With highly threaded applications they tend to do fine. It's just that most applications aren't highly threaded, and per core they just don't perform as well.

There's also the higher power draw for similar performance leading to either bulkier or noisier cooling solutions. Also Intel's chipset drivers are just sturdier in general.

For low powered systems I do like the A10-5880K for the price though. Built a couple of'em for friends who mainly want a media/internet capable box and some light gaming, like wow or starcraft 2 or whatever.

I think you are overestimating the amount of people that have even dual screens, let alone triple. Those Steam hardware surveys make for some fascinating reading.

Yeah, but you've got to take into consideration that people who are using Steam on laptop or really old PC which don't support Eyefinity or Surround displaymodes are not your typical customers for a brand new, current generation gaming GPU. Same goes for the overwhelming amount of users running steam on store bought PCs with low-end graphics cards.

Personally, I got a Nvidia card if only because I'd heard that AMD drivers are kind of a nightmare. I want to say most PC developers test their games on Nvidia cards, but even then, performance is still pretty good on AMD cards. I guess we all wish we could have actual competition between GPU makers in order to make better decisions.

The issue with AMD is that their quality is highly variable. I had one machine (that runs Linux) with an AMD card in it and it has no problems. I had another machine where depending on which game you ran first would garble the colors where driver update after driver update and even a firmware update didn't fix it and threw it out for a much more stable Nvidia.

I don't fault people for going with AMD because of price but I will never again because I don't want to waste my time since I can spend a little bit more and get an Nvidia instead.

I've had great luck with both brands. (semi-modern) Moved from a 4200Ti to 2x 8800GT SLI to a 5870 to 2x 6950's (one ended up being moved to my "steambox"), and just pulled the trigger on a shiny GTX 970. Go where the value is. Both sides work just fine right now driver wise.

Current setup: desktop: GTX 970, steambox: radeon 6950, laptop: 650M.

If you don't mind the increased power draw, heat, and noise compared to the nvidia equivalents, there's nothing dumb about going with AMD GPUs. Right now is actually a pretty good time to pick one up, Seeing as the 970's price point has severely fucked with AMD's pricing structure.

I'm been a PC gamer for like...two years now? I don't pretend to actually know very much about what PC components are best, but reading this thread makes me feel pretty good about my i7 4790k and gtx 970.

I've always been a Intel/Nvidia man, I had rig with an AMD CPU years ago (Athlon 1000mhz IIRC?) and I always had issues with it. I bought a HD5850 when they were new for whatever reason and had nothing but issues, I was probably just unlucky both times but I think it's better to spend the extra and go with Intel/Nvidia anyway.

The amount of junk in this thread is astounding. I expected much better from the GB community.

AMD drivers are pretty stable right now. For some reason, people keep spouting the same bs about drivers(in the early ATI days, the drivers were very flaky). No one ever mentions Nvidia's driver woes?

Before the current crop of Nvidia GPUs, AMD was the card to get. You could get an AMD that was 10% slower than a Titan for half the price. Now, Nvidia definitely has the better cards(they better have the better cards, it came out way later), but also more expensive.

The whole games optimized for Nvidia or whatever is also a pile of bullshit. If that is the case, why is AMD competitive in almost every single game? Just go to Anandtech and look up the benchmarks for when the R9 series came out. They beat out everything but the Titan.

If you want to spend the money, go Nvidia right now because they are better.

The thing with graphics is its always a flip flop market. One is always better for a time unless there is a massive screw up.

I have never had a positive experience with AMD drivers. Not once, ever.

The one thing I'll say about AMD is: their hardware is pretty good, but their drivers usually suck ass. So if you go that route, look for some custom drivers.

@lettuceman44: Kind of because AMD still has issues, software side. Every once in a while, my AMD Catalyst Control Center would stop launching, crashing upon execution every time. Sometimes, a full uninstall, cclean, driver sweeper would resolve this. Sometimes, it wouldn't and the next driver would resolve the issue until another update broke it. On my triple monitor setup, if I displayed flash/silverlight video content on my right monitor, there'd be a chance that my primary and left monitor would go crazy, displaying crazy garbled video noise. Rolling back to old drivers fixed this, but then I was using old drivers. Which turned out was a good thing, since I could start running my VMs again that were hard locking my system.

The hardware's great, and when I was just using my PC to play games or surf the internet, it worked great. But I just ran into too many quirkly issues that'd keep showing up every time a new driver package came out.

I'm happier with my current Nvidia card than I've ever been with an AMD card. It's hard for me to compare them directly right now, because I don't have an AMD card equal to my Nvidia.

You mentioned optimization, so here's something for thought. I'm currently developing a PC game and a majority of the work will be done on machines with Nvidia cards. The reason is pretty simple... Cuda. Cuda is not something I think about as a performance increase for the end user, but rather as a performance increase and time reduction in production. Things like explosions or destruction are often precomputed bits of physics made into an animation to save on performance for the player. Making these animations in software like Maya, or even Blender is much quicker using an Nvidia card. Using Nvidia for that will likely result in optimizing more towards Nvidia, simply because the majority of development will be done on machines using Nvidia cards. It's not an anti-AMD viewpoint, or a shady business deal, it's just reality.

AMD's Mantle seems cool. But, my game is being made with UE4, which will not support Mantle as it is a MAJOR feature that can only be used by a fraction of the market. Things like PhysX on Nvidia cards are used for minor things in the game that typically have easy fallbacks in place and PhysX can technically be used with an AMD gpu.

I would pick Nvidia based on the DSR feature alone at this point. I'm gaming at 1440p on my 1080p monitor and it is awesome. AMD has VSR, but it's not as good, or as well supported. Plus, my SLI 970s use around the same power as a single 290x.

However, there's absolutely nothing wrong with AMD. It's just that, **right now*** at the highest end Nvidia has the upper hand. An R9 290(non x) will beat or practically stalemate most all Nividia GPU, and it will do so for less than $300. That's hard to argue against if your someone that doesn't care about power consumption, or extra, mostly unneeded features.

I've been using a AMD R9 270 for a while and its been perfectly fine. I haven't been gaming long on PC but i've had two GPU's die on me. Both Nvidia cards, and one of them (560ti) had constant driver problems. Not to say that AMD is perfect on the driver side but Nvidia also has plenty of problems of their own. In my experience at least..