And then I thought, what is everyone else using? So yeah…what kind of graphics card are you guys using? I’ve always been on team red (ATi / AMD), my laptop had a Radeon 9000, and then there’s my gamecube i used to have, and then the card i’m using right now is an HD 4850.
I also want to try out this thing. I GET THE FIRST VOTE
Note: in general, $200 is about the point where you get to enjoy your card the longest. The price-to-performance curve has a fairly flat area between $100 and $200 and time has us constantly sliding down the curve.
But I know a budget is a budget sometimes.
It would also be interesting to know what you want to do with the card… and windows versus linux, etc…
For example, if you want a card where you can easily see all the different ways the your game will break if you step a little off the path… then ATI cards are great… because they will fall over at the slightest provocation. If you just want to get work done day-to-day and sort out those issues later then nVidia tend to be more solid performers.
My card isn’t the same but it’s very similar, an R9 290X. Sort of a “protest” purchase but I haven’t really had any problems or felt like I needed to go green for the extra bit of performance yet.
Don’t ask me about money, apparently I pour it into this stuff like it grows on trees. Also sitting by a completely unnecessary PC I built (a slightly more obnoxious R9 390X Strix, although not as obnoxious as NVidia’s top of the line stuff)… which I’ve barely used (bit of a story).
I personally hate ATI/AMD. Got so many bad experiences with them except for the ATI rage pro almost 20 years ago (…oh man…time’s a bitch).
Drivers are usually pretty bad for opengl while decent for directX. The upgrade software is also pretty bad…
When it comes to shaders dev, AMD drivers are pretty unforgiving. They strictly stick to the spec, which can be useful for you as some gamers can be fool enough to also have an AMD card ;). Though you may found yourself having to rollback drivers because the new ones broke something… (happened to me).
Nvidia on the other hand, while it has its quirks, works pretty well for a gamer. The driver update software is a no-brainer “click here to update” software, which IMO is what you want as a human being.
Nvidia is very nice to sloppy shader devs, as it will tolerate many small mistakes if you don’t ask it to be strict. While it’s nice, it can be a problem once you deploy your app to other hardwares. Note that in JME when you specify a version over 1.0 in your shader, the version is added to the shader and this has the effect of making the drivers do a strict compilation against the glsl version.
Wait a second, that’s how the Intar-web turned into a cluster#$%&! Ignoring and screwing up the specs (well, one reason I guess)! I hate encouraging unreadable code sloppiness like that, but the newer generation seems to love it (crazy!).
Yeah, I can’t argue with the better experience you get with NVidia. And with a larger market share, developers are probably catering to them a little too - not a good recipe for a competitive market.
Now since the green team finally overtook red in the poll like I thought it would, we need to put in the obligitory Linus Torvalds Nvidia complement (NSFW):
Hopefully I’m not the only Linux guy in the thread…
(I’m not actually this dogmatic about these, but I do enjoy trolling on the topic.)
Yeah well, Linus Torvalds is probably not the most easiest guy to work with too, so I guess they share the blame.
It’s just that HE can afford to say fuck you to NVidia…
But he is right, nvidia is a hell on linux, while meanwhile amd invested in the opensource drivers, and they are coming close to par to the commercial one. (I work jme3 exclusivly on linux, and amd is great for that)
Imho AMD did actually develop nice cards in the last 5 years, but their driver team was never able to bring the raw performance on the screen. Now, with async compute, vulcan they managed to offload the optimisation work to the engine devs.
Nv on the other side is pretty ban at supporting all but the newest generation of cards.
And to the *nix topic. I dont care if a driver is open source or not. It should just work!
As last, @FloppidyDingo i would not buy a gpu with only 2 gb of ram nowadays. Maybe you can get a used one if you have a tight budget
Currently I’m still Team Red.
AMD cards just work for me and nothing has ever gone wrong here, unlike some people here who had bad experiences with AMD. The only problem I have is, that most programs that support GPU rendering (looking at you, Blender) only offer AMD GPU rendering in “experimental”, while for nVidia cards it just works.
But regarding price for performance, AMD wins, RX480 for the win ;). Currently I’m rolling with 2 years old R7 265, but planning on upgrading to RX480 soon.
re: Performance, it always feels like AMD performance is specific to the common paths used by benchmarks. As soon as you try to step any way out of that line then performance drops off a cliff.
Always seems like nVidia will take more abuse and just say “Yeah, whatever, man… I got your back.” Good for experimenting with stuff… bad for ultimately deploying to wider audiences.
But I’ll admit that I’m still bitter about a whole decade of ATI claiming to support OpenGL when they could barely spell it. However, the fact that so many of my game bug reports amount to “I upgraded my AMD drivers and now your game doesn’t work anymore.”… I’m going to continue to be bitter. The number of nVidia-related reports I get are a footnote at best. (Though in that regard, intel is the clear ‘winner’ for number of bug reports… easily more than half.)
Nvidia, Fuck Yeah!
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, Yeah
Nvidia, Fuck Yeah!
Good drivers are the only way, Yeah
It’s the dream that we all share
It’s the hope for tomorrow
CUDA Fuck Yeah!
Drivers Fuck Yeah!
Shadowplay Fuck Yeah!
PhysX Fuck Yeah!
Inspector Fuck Yeah!
3D Vision Fuck Yeah!
Low Temps Fuck Yeah!
High Price Fuck Ye- shit.
Let’s just say I had an AMD card that died under warranty, had to wait 14 days for the “authorized” shop to replace it, and then the replacement died because its fan broke after a few months as well.
I own both cards, but NVIDIA can really suck my 12 inch d*ck (just based on their business practices).
They ultimately damage the industry. Look @ OpenCL for example. They do not even support the OpenCL 2.0 spec (which was released over 3 years ago), they have the tech they just want you to use their own CUDA framework instead. AMD already support OpenCL 2.1, but if you want to target as many platforms as possible then you are stuck with 1.2 (because of NVIDIA). It sucks to be behind the times because of them.
I sold my soul to Windows soooooo yeah… And mostly I’m just looking for something good for casual gaming, I don’t need anything fancy. And of course it has to be able to run the games I’m working on. And I like how if you make a mistake with ATi cards, shit hits the fan. I already made the mistake of making a game compatible with my computer only, I don’t need to do it again.
I’m the exact opposite. I treat money like (insert racist joke here).
What he said.
That’s my only complaint. But…THERE’S AN UPGRADE SOFTWARE?
That’s all I can afford! And I’m running a used card right now. It’s the whole reason my room smelled like cigarettes for a week once. This one has 1GB, and has had no issues so far. And I got this one for free.
Yeah when I saw the price for the 480, I almost fell out of my chair. In a good way. Still can’t afford one sadly.
Ha!
I have an 8400 GS in my closet. It’s my backup for if the HD 4850 dies on me. A pretty crappy backup though. And I should make a game that works with AMD cards only
Yeah that video talks about the kind of thing I mean by “developers catering to NV”. If NV is causing this stuff to happen on purpose, they’re evil. AMD has their own issues but appear more community and freedom friendly. “With every technology I’ve looked at, AMD offers a fairer, open-source alternative. [NVidia]… hardly ever fights on a level playing field.”
I think this issue gave me a “complex” causing me to love/hate mobile tech (even though I use it pretty heavily!), because of how it’s damaging the PC market. Once people realized they don’t need to buy PCs to get by, the market shrank, and apparently there wasn’t enough room left for AMD to stay as competitive. If anything we needed a 3rd dedicated graphics alternative, not a less competitive market. Intel could probably do it, but there’s little financial incentive now. #pcmasterrace
I hate encouraging unreadable code sloppiness like that, but the newer generation seems to love it (crazy!).
