GTX 970 vs. R9 390

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rshafer

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May 22, 2014
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I know we'll have to wait until benchmarks are released to know more about card performance, but I am wondering what the community thinks.

So, it appears to me that the R9 390 should outperform the GTX 970. And it is also slightly cheaper. I know the 970 is more efficient. However, is there something else I'm missing?
 
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I'm currently debating between the two. Over the past few years I have preferred AMD GPUs as they have delivered better quality enhancements to videos and my cards often migrate down to our media center PC. My monitor is 2560x1440 and while power efficiency is nice I'm buying for performance:

http://www.techspot.com/review/1096-star-wars-battlefront-benchmarks/page2.html

The cards seem very evenly matched with the 390 marginally better at 1080p and at that resolution I would probably choose the Nvidia card (mainly because I haven't owned one for a while). However moving up to the higher resolution the AMD card appears to pull ahead. For me and the games I am likely to play using my monitors native resolution the AMD card is a winner, but I could hardly say one card is far superior to the other. £20 or a title I was intending to buy could easily sway the decision.

 
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i using 1440p screen to and i wosnt happy whit 970 for gaming aat that resolution so i sold it and got 980ti .. now i had 970 but mostly cos i got it 7-8 month before r9 390 come out ... today i would go for 390 its simply gives more then 970
 
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Have you got a link to this information about power usage?
 
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Go with whichever one is cheaper at 1080p.

If 1440p is your res go with the R9 390.

Done deal!

If you can find one get a R9 290 or 290x for $100 less. (This is the way i went, but I'm not sure if you can still find the 290 deals.) In Canada the 970 and the 390s are going for $420-450. I got my 290 for $300, new. No contest.
 
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Just in case anyone checks out this thread in the future, I've been researching the two as I picked up the new evga gtx 970 Super Clocked with the new ACX 2.0 cooling system. I was curious as to whether I made the right decision without researching into AMD's cards at all after a bad experience with my second hd 6870 (granted they were cross-fired and my first one on its own was a total beast). After a couple days research I would say look a little deeper into the r9 390x as it might actually be better. The guys flaming it in this thread are fanboys. Read through overclock's forums and the 390 with it's vram not only outperforms on higher resolutions, but it is also built for DirectX12 as well which is a pretty big deal. The 390 does use a truckload of power in comparison to the 970 but in the end if you have the power and good cooling who cares about how much power you're using if it's a little more for better performance? The 970 does have fast driver support but definitely check out the R9. As of now I got my 970 SC ACX 2.0 on sale for just over $300, but the R9 390 is also the same amount now so price points aren't really a big deal between the two. The 970 does use a special compression for vram but if you're going to use it's ability to produce 4k I'd definitely lean toward the R9. From current benchmarks even for 1080p though, the R9 does trump the 970 by a decent margin. Hope this helps. :)
 
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I bought an R9 390 for the VRAM, it plays everything at max at 1080P.

Allegedly the 970 may be better at 1080P, (depending on the game, and the reviewer) but the 390 has a clear lead (in many games) once you move up to 2K (2560x1440) what you get with Nvidia is driver stability. So if you upgrade your drivers constantly this may be an issue, (I don't) also you do get some extra bells & whistles with Nvidia GameWorks in some PC titles, (Witcher 3 for instance) but you hardly notice the sleek furry coat on the bear as he's trying to kill you to be honest. Geralt's hair and Roach's tail move just fine without GameWorks. On the flip side ATI has TombRaider which has added bells & whistles. "Horses for courses" as they say in England :)

There is also the concern that Nvidia appear to have optimised for Direct X11 in hardware, and this appears to backfire badly in Direct X12, but there's only one game so far. May just be a dud. I made my choice already. Good luck with yours.
 
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This thread is very outdated but I am going to post this anyway. Yes it is true you can get PhysX on non-NVIDIA GPUs, but if you do not have an NVIDIA GPU then PhysX will use your CPU. From there it is pretty self-explanatory
 
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I just struggle to see why it matters when every game I run is GPU bound, not CPU bound. Even if it monopolised one core would that matter? Surely what matters at that point is how weak your CPU is?

 
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Yeah to be honest I don't know exactly how much of a performance hit it is, but I think it's fair to say that it would look and perform better on an NVIDIA GPU. This would most likely be because graphics should be done on the graphics card, and processing on the processor. How would it simply add this eye candy on a processor? Does it use the integrated graphics combined? I honestly have no idea. But if it's done in the processor then you can be fairly sure it would utilise ram which is significantly slower than onboard GDDR5 memory. There are also chances that it would be more unstable for god knows why. Yes it is true most games are GPU bound, but having a strong CPU can reduce stuttering and give a more consistent frame rate, and by having PhysX on the CPU, just gives it more things to do. Not to forget the effort part of installing PhysX on the CPU. If the game supports PhysX then chance are it is better optimised for NVIDIA GPUs so it may completely remove the PhysX part for an AMD GPU. Making PhysX on an AMD GPU system a bit unreasonable. Please feel free to correct any mistakes I made as I am not entirely sure on whether what I have said is true or not, so please do not believe that what I have said will definitely happen.
 
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The R9 390 and 390X have greater hardware, but I believe that their drivers are holding them back. I also believe that NVIDIA's hardware is not as great as AMD's alternative, but that they make more use of the given hardware via drivers and game optimisation. I do believe that this is the main reason of why NVIDIA's alternatives are better in many instances. Anyone can have a powerful graphics card, but if it constantly crashes and runs very hot and poorly then I would not be happy. There are a lot more threads regarding crashes from an AMD card compared to that of an NVIDIA card.
 
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I'm just speaking from experience but as you know everyone has issues with both. In my case the GTX970 was loud as hell, and it for whatever reason didn't perform as well as my R9 290X does. I hear many complaints about the latest Nvidia drivers being horrible. AMD's crimson drivers have been rock steady in my machine. We all have different experiences but I personally love my R9 290X. If you have a better experience with Nvidia than more power to you.
 
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The best form of knowledge is often rock solid experience, and I don't have a lot of that. However. I have a GTX 950 Strix and its drivers are working wonderfully. Nothing wrong with the card at all, and I am extremely happy with it. The GTX 970 is known for its coil whine, and I do believe that it's greatest competitor is the R9 290X but I am not going to give my opinion on which is better as I don't want to start a war. What I mean to say is that sometimes it is best to go by your experience or primary source information. My friend had an AMD Catalyst driver which I guess is not near as good as the Crimson drivers?
 
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For value for money reasons go to R9 390. More Vram more future proof.
For better driver support go for Nvidia. But also consider gtx970 has only 3.5GB VRAM, 0.5 is crapram. But nowday games not neeeding more than 4GB.
 
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XD The 390X is definitely better you mean the r9 390 the r9 390 is good for 1440P and normaly has 10 more fps and better shaders and you can over clock the 970 more but the r9 390 is definitely better and directX12 ect
 
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The only time that the R9 390 is really going to pull ahead of the GTX 970 is gaming at 1440p. At 1080p they are so close that it really comes down to personal preference. The R9 390 is the more powerful card (hardware wise) and Nvidia has the best driver support and works more closely with game developers. I will say that AMDs Crimson drivers have been much better than the older Catalyst drivers and there are usually driver updates 2 - 3 times a month now, which for AMD is very good. The GTX 970 uses less power than the R9 390 and produces less heat, but realistically the power consumption difference wouldn't be more than $.30 - $.60 cents a month (depending on how many hours a day the system is used) in the USA. Heat can be an issue, but if you buy a quality configuration (like Sapphire Tri-X, Vapor-X) then you really don't have to worry about heat.

If you want to try to future proof the R9 390 is probably going to be a little better as it can handle 1440p resolutions better. If you would have to buy a whole different psu (to handle the R9 390) or that extra few cents a week in the power bill is really going to bother you then go for the GTX 970.
 
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The Radeon architecture seems to be making higher fps in DX 12 games .
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/directx-12-tested-an-early-win-for-amd-and-disappointment-for-nvidia/
A fury will easily out perform a GTX 980ti if an R9 290 is so close


Neither will be great for faster renders. For that you need a quadro or firepro . It may also depend on the software you are using . Some software will support cuda, some will support Open CL
 
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