You may feel like the best way to future proof your PC is to throw in the most powerful Nvidia graphics card on the market, but nothing may be further from the truth. It's been known for a while that Nvidia typically leaves older cards out in driver optimizations, whereas AMD will continue to support its older GPUs for quite some time. This is proven once again my Doom Eternal's performance on older GPUs, as tested by the folks from Hardware Unboxed.
In its testing, Hardware Unboxed found that in pairs of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, where they used to battle neck-in-neck at their release, AMD's GPUs today come out with significantly higher performance than Nvidia's counterparts in testing Doom Eternal.
Take for example the GTX 780 and its main competitor from when it was out seven years ago, the almighty AMD Radeon R9 290. Back then, the two battled closely with one or the other winning at different games, but in Doom Eternal we see something completely different. Whereas the GTX 780 is able to put down an average of 45 FPS, the R9 290, pushes out 116 FPS on average -- that's more than twice as fast as Nvidia's card!
Kepler cards really appear to have suffered as they've aged, and though Nvidia closed the gap a little with its newer GPUs, there are still huge performance gaps between what used to be very competitive cards.
We would say there's no excuse for Nvidia to leave its older cards out given that they're a much bigger company than AMD. However, let's be honest: can we really expect eight-year old GPUs to be receiving driver optimizations for the latest modern games?
Not really, and we shouldn't expect this from AMD, either. Nevertheless, if anyone from AMD is reading along: hats off to your driver dev team. We wholeheartedly appreciate your work.