The next gen consoles use AMD, does that mean I should too?

[Dustin Fox]

I've been hearing a lot about how all of the next generation consoles all use AMD hardware. And i honestly have no room to have an opinion because I'm fairly new to PC building... but I am having a lot of trouble deciding between AMD and NVIDIA cards.

I want to know your OPINION on the next generation consoles using AMD and what that means for the future of PC gaming. Also, help me out, does all of this mean I can get a more "future proof" videocard with AMD as opposed to Nvidia?

Thanks in advance!

 

[sam_p_lay]

Yeah there are a lot of people talking about this, and obviously we can only know for sure when the time comes.

What we can do though is to just look at it with some common sense - ultimately it's the game developer that is responsible for the optimisation of their games. nVIDIA and/or AMD can assist with that, but it's the developer that does the work. Any games developer will want to maximise the number of people who have access to their game and therefore won't cut out over 50% of the market through lack of optimisation. According to the Steam hardware survey, over 50% of Steam's users are using nVIDIA hardware, while 30% use AMD. Far too many nVIDIA users to not optimise for.

 

[coozie7]

Broadly agree with sam_p_lay: I can't see a dev cutting that many out of the market.
It's a matter of economics and quality: To fully optimise code is time consuming and tricks that work on one chip or architecture can be counterproductive on another so no, I do n't think they'll 'optimise' their code as well for Nvidia as long as the games play reasonably well
which is to say they offer a reasonable gameplay quality.
The difference? Minimum, after all we can all play Nvidia optimised TWIMTBP games on AMD hardware, they just perform a little better with Nvidia chips.

 

[desecravity]

If history repeats itself, then no, it should not matter whether you choose the red or the green team for a future proof build. The current generation of consoles use Nvidia chip sets, and currently there is no disadvantage to using an AMD card. In fact, certain games actually run better on AMD drivers (BS Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3)- although this is a separate topic of discussion entirely.

Choose AMD cards if you want more bang for your buck. Choose Nvidia cards for superior drivers and PhysX. It should be noted however that AMD are releasing very good drivers with the catalyst releases. So really, its just a matter of preference at this point. Certain games run better on AMD cards, certain on Nvidia, but like I already mentioned, this is mostly due to drivers.