one gtx 980 ti or two r9 390 crossfire?

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photonboy
One GTX980Ti hands down IMO.

You'll get a higher frame rate with the R9-390's in Crossfire however it can stutter and not all games even support it at all. Unfortunately in the Crossfire benchmarks you only see games with support so it's not clear how many do not work at all (a list anybody?).

The GTX980Ti will be quieter and dump out far less heat into your room. These are rebadged GPU's remember.

There's also other reasons like PhysX etc to go with the NVidia solution.
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photonboy

photonboy

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One GTX980Ti hands down IMO.

You'll get a higher frame rate with the R9-390's in Crossfire however it can stutter and not all games even support it at all. Unfortunately in the Crossfire benchmarks you only see games with support so it's not clear how many do not work at all (a list anybody?).

The GTX980Ti will be quieter and dump out far less heat into your room. These are rebadged GPU's remember.

There's also other reasons like PhysX etc to go with the NVidia solution.
 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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Just wait until June 24th and the AMD Fury X GPU will be on the market. Then see where that lands performance-wise. Supposed to be faster than the 980ti, but have to wait for release and benchmarks to find out for sure. A single card is a simpler solution, but it really depends on the resolution you are running to determine if crossfire is a good option.
 
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N3rdR4ge

N3rdR4ge

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mainly i want to be closer to 144hz on my single 1080p monitor. but i prefer quality and longevity. i didnt realize the fury x was out in a few more days. i might as well wait to see what that has. i read there is only 4gb vram on it though.
 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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It is 4gb, however the throughput is supposed to me much higher than GDDR5, so just have to wait to see if it becomes a limiting factor. If what AMD says is true, Fury X should be impressive. 4096-bit memory bus width...

Note: The Fury X comes June 24th and the Fury comes July 14th.

Anand has a good amount of info in a chart here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1984-amd-r9-390-380-benchmark-review/Page-2
and
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeon_r9_290_crossfire_review_benchmarks,18.html

I don't have a one stop link yet showing an average performance comparison but we can draw a few conclusions:

1) In the Witcher 3 (no NVidia Hairworks enabled) a GTX980Ti is 56% faster than a single R9-390. Thus, you need 56% Crossfire scaling to simply match it, however even if you get that which is quite possible it may not be as SMOOTH so subjectively a worse experience.

2) 2xR9-290:
You can look at a few games from this benchmark. I linked to CRYSIS 3 which shows almost 72% scaling which is fairly good (for supported games).

*HOWEVER, when i looked at yet another benchmark (sigh) Crysis 3 got nearly IDENTICAL frame rates on the GTX980Ti as what you'd get with a 2xR9-390 setup (again subjectively may have more stutter with Crossfire).

Summary:
Rough analysis but in the BEST case I'm not seeing much real-world advantage so far for a Crossfire setup. Factor in PhysX, heat, noise, MFAA, DX12_1 (more feature support for DX12 on 980Ti) and it's really not looking like Crossfire makes sense.
 
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N3rdR4ge

N3rdR4ge

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im reading this article

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2015/06/18/amd-radeon-fury-x-benchmarks-full-specs-new-fiji-graphics-card-beats-nvidias-980-ti/

but im thinking 6gb is a better solution. even though i may be slightly behind in overall speed the extra 2gb would help make the 980ti handle newer games down the road that may require more than 4gb vram. as it is witcher 3, gta5, shadows of mordor can already utilize all 4gb on my 1080p monitor with max settings.

what do you think? i want to be as future proof as possible. a second 980 ti is a prospect when the money is available.

 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Memory bandwidth is not an issue. Don't drink the kool-aid.
Seriously, memory has two purposes:
1) Store enough data, and
2) Be fast enough so the GPU isn't waiting.

If memory bandwidth was an issue then overclocking the GPU would serve no purpose since there would be a bottleneck. Well, we know the GTX980Ti Hybrid from EVGA could clock up to 1600MHz and many air-cooled cards over 1400MHz (and video memory as well).

So what you should really care about is that it's only 4GB which doesn't currently matter much but likely will for some games in the near future.

And BENCHMARKS (though again the 4GB won't be much factor there yet).

*AMD has been talking "4K this and 4K that" and hyping up scenarios where they're supposedly better at 4K. Then what do they do? They come out with rebadged R390/390X cards with 8GB of VRAM and new Fury cards with only 4GB.

Great, so on the old cards that are less useful for 4K gaming they put in more memory, but on the new cards they use less so thus running into a VRAM bottleneck potentially.

Got a triple monitor setup and want the best cards for that? Tough choice if going AMD. Go with 2x(390X 8GB) or 2x(Fury X 4GB)??

I think perhaps 2x(GTX980Ti 6GB) is the best choice there.
 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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I'd still hold off before judging the 4gb. As I understand it, HBM is not about speed but how the memory is accessed. As for not being enough, again, things are in real flux right now, new memory, DX12, I wouldn't even try to predict how much memory would be needed in the near future.

The reason for "only" 4gb is a current limitation of the HBM technology, which unless it's overcome, nVidia will be restrained to when it begins using it as well.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Even if HBM made a small difference vs using GDDR5 for the same GPU (I'm not convinced it would make much difference if any) that still doesn't solve the problem of what happens if a game wants to use more than 4GB of VRAM.

If the game wanted say 5GB of memory then it would start swapping data between VRAM and System RAM which then slows things down. Which is EXACTLY why we got major stuttering in Watch Dogs when it was released. Even with 3GB cards; it just took a bit longer driving around to saturate all 3GB before swapping started happening.

(It's the same thing as what happened when games would load data from the hard drive instead of buffering everything to system and video memory)

So AMD is pushing 4K gaming heavily but then produces a card with insufficient memory to handle that in some scenarios now and definitely in the near future.

DX12?
First of all, it's going to take a long time before that's the most used API for games. Even that, using the ability to share memory only benefits Crossfire scenarios.

There is a "TILE SHARING" option to manage streaming from System to Video memory but again it depends on if that's used. The game would have to be pretty SMART to dynamically move stuff it doesn't need back to System memory without using valuable GPU cycles to do so. I don't think this is going to happen for a while but we'll see.

I'm pretty sure Tile Sharing only exists under the DX12_1 subset which rules out everything before the GTX900 series and the new Fury cards from AMD. So would it be a worthwhile feature to implement? I guess it depends on how easy it is. If it's built into the game engine (i.e. UNREAL 4) maybe it will be common though I see a lot of potential for stuttering.
 
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buster-dog

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2 390's will kill the 980 ti,....... however get a more powerful gpu, or maybe go with 2 970's ............. but the 300 series are not just a rebrand, they have been improved and are more efficient
 
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A

Arnav Bhatt

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single 980Ti. and I bought an R9 390. don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my purchase as I'll be using it for 1080p gaming exclusively, and the card is more than enough even with a 650W PSU. but at higher resolutions or multi monitor setups, I would always go with sli, IF, a single GPU wasn't enough.
 
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N3rdR4ge

N3rdR4ge

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So i'm revisiting my old threads and I thought i'd update this one quick. I ended up with the GTX 980 ti and have no regrets. The lower power consumption is pretty nice. Games look and run fantastic on my 1440p gsync monitor. I realize after doing some research how inferior two cards would have been. I think 6GB vram should be enough for quite a while. I'm still liking Nvidia's features a good amount more than AMD since my R9 290 days.

Just counting down the days till Fallout 4...
 
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