R9 390 vs GTX 970 - Not just benchmarks, Talking about being Future Proof and support

AriaA97

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Jun 25, 2015
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I'm going to spend maximum 350$ for my new graphic card for my new PC.

Before creating this thread I've read most of other similar threads but none of them answered my questions.

I saw benchmarks of R9 390 that performed better than GTX 970.

But Nvidia has some nice features like GameWorks, MFAA, PhysX, etc.

I also heard Nvidia has better drivers and support while AMD drives has some problems.

R9 390 has 8 Gigabytes of RAM and that makes it more future proof than GTX 970.

So which one should I buy?

Thanks in advance :)
 

BradleyJames

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first things first, i gotta say im an nvidia guy so im gonna try to be impartial. Im not impressed with what nvidia did with the vram issue on the gtx 970, so i probably wouldnt buy one of those. They do have some nice features in gameworks, but they seldomly work properly.

Now for amd, the r9 390 is a rebrand of a 290 with a bit more ram, which i dont like either. i really dont like either card to be perfectly honest. of course, that is just my personal opinion.
 

eddnav

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Jan 16, 2011
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Yes, this is the exact problem we are facing. I NEED to buy a decent GPU to replace my broken MSI 7950. But this crappy stalemate in which both the 330$ cards have MAJOR flaws it's not appealing at all. Why can't these two companies get their act together? it's 2015 for god's sake. Lesser, crappier companies such as cellphone makers seldom make us deal with this BS like these two buffons.
 

AriaA97

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I have exact problem too. But for my new PC I have to buy a 350$ card. I wanna know should I give more attention to features or frame rate.

I was going to buy GTX 970 because everybody said it'll have DX 12.1 support, But Nvidia updated GTX 970 specs after releasing GTX 980 Ti, and DirectX support was 12 API.

So that very new MAXWELL also has same DX 12 support as R9 390 :??:
 
To be clear there is no Direct X 12.1. When nvidia comes out with 980 and 970 that is just the temporary name nvidia put on it because a lot of DX12 info not being finalized yet by MS. Right now there is only Direct X 12. But inside direct X 12 there is feature level 12_0 and feature level 12_1. Right now only Maxwell gen 2 (all 900 series) have the required hardware for feature level 12_1.

Some more info were released by MS recently and I see it only add confusion to the public. Even worst that info was used by fanbois from both side to claim their respective favorite hardware have the advantage against the other when they don't even understand what they were talking about.
 

paulocosme

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im not a fanboy but i always prefered amd to nvidia..i had nvdia but i always come back to amd, using a 7770 now.
But now im also looking for a new GPU and i think amd really isn´t a option right now, 300 series is all rebrands, no new tech..just some minor changes to old chips..in my opinion the only good AMD option is the fury.

With this in mind, i think the GTX 970 3,5 vram "problem" (which i don´t see it as problem at all) is nothing compared to rebranding of old cards which most were already rebrands, at least GTX is new tech, has DX12 full support and it consumes like half the energy..plus i don´t think that R9 390 will have the power to put those 8gb vram to good use, but i might be wrong, that remains to be seen in future games.

I don´t like saying all this but i think a gtx 970 will perform like the same or better then a r9 390 because its a much more efficient piece of hardware. If your thinking futureproof like 4k gaming then forget the gtx 970, but i don´t trust that a R9 390 will perform at those resolutions too :/
In my case im going to stick to 1920*1200p for a at least 3 years so im 90% sure im buying the GTX 970 this time, just gathering €€´s now eheh.