the post above is a bit confusing so i will clear it up a bit, nvidia and amd gpus do NOT need to be matched with a amd or intel cpu, nor are there any features you gain by matching them. however at the moment nvidia cards are slightly more powerful then a radeon card at the same price point. the 290 and 970 preform almost the same at 1080 but at 4k the 390 begins to pull away with the extra vram.