smeezekitty said:
Many NVidia users seem to think NVidia can do no wrong. I suspect there might be underreporting in the reviews.
That said some Radeon cards have been shipping with bad memory modules which leads to the artifacts/black screens etc.
They are still the minority but there is probably a slightly higher DOA rate. The good news is if you get a good one, the failure rate seems to be pretty nominal
Last I heard, ATI's failure rate was 13%, and Nvidia's is around 9%.
R9 290's do have a higher percent, and some cards even had bad BIOS versions shipped with them. I know some people go to the ends of the earth, and the card still misbehaves but here, common example:
I have had 2 software issues, and both were fixed myself without raging on Newegg's reviews with 1-stars:
1. Youtube/twotch causing BSOD. Fix: update google chrome, Manually install latest Flash Player and Shockwave player.
2. Just this week, installing Driver 14.9, I had my Display Driver Crash and it blackscreened for I think the second time in the last 9 months I've owned this card. It repeatedly crashed the driver after going from 14.7 to 14.9 latest driver.
Fix: Updated my Mobo BIOS... SEriously... that was it, took 10 minutes to fix permanently...
That being said, for some reason over 6 months Me and my friend had an 8350 and it would get low fps, like 40-80 in BF4. I tried swapping out hardware, drivers, windows installs, Overclocking the CPU, better cooling, unparking cores, tweaks and quickfixes, nothing helped. GPUI usage would drop and so would FPS.
Only fix was getting the 4790k, and now all games run perfect and GPU is always 100% used. Never saw the issue again since.
My friend still has his 8350 and has the same seemingly "bottleneck"
Here, watch mine in action, no reason it should have done this to my 290, but not to people's 780's: (sorry for shaky footage, recorded on a Samsung S5)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq9dSLOElX4&list=UU4WCR...
Yet, my other friend with an 8350 and 780 and everyone else on the internet with a this combo has little issue running 60+ (or maybe the Nvidia users just don't notice they bottlenecked) in games I bottled in. Many signs pointed to Nvidia's drivers just cooperating better with FX 8-cores...
Radeons are just more finicky cards and instead of fixing the issues, people give bad reviews.
So I think its a mix of Radeon users not setting their PC's up right/not maintaining them, and another Mix of Nvidia cards just usually working under most software configurations. Also, R9 290's did have a failure rate, but I see many users making MULTIPLE 1 Star Review and using the reviews section as a forum to get help... How fair is that? why is that unregulated?
Meanwhile, a lot of typical simple Nvidia reviewer: it's fast, plays my games over 60fps. 5 stars. (not an exaggeration, just read some of them all)
Take away from this wall of text what you will.