Nvidia Clears the Air About GameWorks

[Tierney11290]

Truth be told, two 290x smoke two 780 TI at 4k for 350$ less. Not also that, but multi-gpu solution is way better with AMD which is also shared by HardOCP.

Most people (yes, I'm guilty) say that SLI is better, or at least more reliable, than CrossfireX.

I am going to have to completely agree with this statement. I for one have had two AMD 7950's and crossfire was garbage. There was a lot of stuttering (frame-pacing didn't help much) and the cards ran way hotter than they should have (common with not only AMD cards, but two card setups). I decided to sell my two cards for about $300 each and ended up getting one Nvidia 780. That one card ran my games way better than the two. I then decided to get another 780 and it is far superior than the Xfire cards. I don't see the 290X doing much better with Xfire considering most of the issues are with the drivers, which haven't been improved much for Xfire. The only advantage I see the AMD card having is the fact it has a 4GB interface, which is nice for higher resolutions, but I would still pick Nvidia over AMD for 4k.

And where did the "$350 cheaper" come from in the original post? From what I've seen on several sites, the 290X is about $600 whereas the 780ti is about $700. That's only a $100 difference and the performance is much higher. Don't get me wrong, AMD is amazing bang for the buck, but Nvidia clearly has better drivers and cards. I still enjoy AMD products (still have the 8320 CPU!), but Nvidia is the clear winner when it comes to GPU's.

 

[Strunf]

AMD are just poor losers... why would nVIDIA release a tool that is optimized for AMD, it seems pretty obvious to me that there's no way in hell nVIDIA would be able to optimize code for AMD GC without having someone from AMD work with them, they don't even need to cripple AMD when you optimize your code for a specific architecture all the others will be default look crippled.

Also this is old news, back in the days there were like 4 or 5 competitors on the GC market and games were optimized to either of the cards and sometimes didn't work on the others... it's not nVIDIA problem that AMD is all over the place and can't be focused on graphics alone, AMD is like a jack of all trades, master of none.

 

[rds1220]

for a decade straight, NVIDIA has done the GPU engineering and AMD/ATI has cloned and patched what they could in their drivers. NVIDIA has shown they know more about the hardware and the developer frustrations than their competition. Intel is always busy over charging / trying to take over the world. AMD (who like) is always trying to find new revenue streams and NVIDIA is always perfecting what they have to make using their products easier.

There is a reason Intel GPU's suck...they are extremely late to the market and the best and brightest have been bought up by NVIDIA and AMD.

Your right there is, Intel doesn't care about graphics they care about core performance and they are doing a damn good job of it too. APU's are a waste you get mediocre video at the cost of crippling core performance.

 

[VENAXIS]

I'm sorry but Nvidia's comments are not clear AT ALL. They're more of a mystery waiting to be solved than clear answers that are put on the table. I learned not one damn thing from this article other than the said accusations by AMD. This circus from Nvidia's side, if anything, is playing the cat and mouse game in a dark room.

 

[Mathew Reuther]

I see a lot of hate for AMD here and I just want to share my experience as a long time enthusiast who by virtue of having a family has had to budget carefully for upgrades.

Loads of accusations in these comments about how AMD isn't very good and they're just jealous of nVidia, but in the years since both were available (as ATI, then, before AMD bought them out) I have only had two nVidia cards, for a very specific reason:

AMD(ATI) has consistently delivered excellent price/performance ratios.

My current card is an AMD HD 5870 which I bought in 2009 when it was new tech. I wanted fast, I wanted single GPU, and I wanted something I knew I could go with for years (so not too cheap.) For about $400 over four and a half years ago I have a card which is close to equivalent to something like a 750 Ti or an R7 265, both of which are considered solid cards for mainstream gamers.

I plan to replace my card this year (this one has lasted me longer than any previous model) but if I were to buy today, the choice would be pretty clearly between an R9 290 and an R9 290X in terms of price and performance. The 290 is superior in ratio, and the 290X in absolute performance. Both are single GPU (I prefer working with one GPU because you get more reliable average performance) and look poised to deliver strong performance in the years to come.

Now, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that nVidia makes good cards. I loved my nVidia cards when I used them, because I bought according to my core principles: price/performance and single GPU. Neither went as long as my HD 5870, but neither were budgeted at the same level. (One was a mid 100s card, one just over 200.)

The fact of the matter is that both companies make strong cards. We should all be thankful for that, because it does mean that we have a choice when buying. Slamming AMD for slow drivers is, in my experience, a bit unnecessary. While their "official" release schedule is clearly slower than nVidia's, the beta drivers and incremental versions they have released during my use (and I remember when Catalyst was new, and long before then) have been sufficient to handle my fairly rampant gaming needs. 😉

 

[cd000]

"There seems to be this thing that people are saying now -- maybe folks who haven't actually worked with drivers -- don't realize that you can actually do in most cases game optimization without having any access to the source code. We do this all the time. Every time you see a new driver that boosts 10 percent performance in this title, 99 times out of 100 the driver engineer that did that improvement never looked at a line of the game's source code."

Really? You can optimize for a game without even seeing it or the code, how does that work?

 

[alextheblue]

AMD was at its best before they bought ATI (socket A to socket 939) and Nvidia was making their chipsets. Remember Nforce boards? It took AMD forever to get their own chipsets up to that level after buying ATI. ATI and Via were both making chipsets for AMD as well but Nvidia stood head and shoulders above them with, wait for it, their drivers!

As an owner of a few nForce boards, I can't say they were issue-free. They were good boards for the most part after a few major driver revisions, but they weren't "head and shoulders above" the competition. Oh, and I'm still waiting for a reasonably functional hardware-assisted firewall. That was a selling point that never really went anywhere. I had to shat-can that and run ZoneAlarm anyway. 😛

You could do quite well with non-nForce chipsets if you knew what VIA and AMD chipsets to buy, and which to avoid. For example: KT133? No way. KT133A? Solid. Had to do a bit of research. The main reason I bought nForce is that they were slightly better performers, although that bit me once on an overly-aggressive DFI Lanparty board (stability issues).

 

[The_Icon]

Such a long and stupid defence from nvidia representative. Facts are there, Nvidia loves proprietary stuff that just hurts gamers overall.

 

[Mac266]

Such a long and stupid defence from nvidia representative. Facts are there, Nvidia loves proprietary stuff that just hurts gamers overall.

Just put up your "I'm an AMD fanboy" sign already!

 

[rds1220]

Such a long and stupid defence from nvidia representative. Facts are there, Nvidia loves proprietary stuff that just hurts gamers overall.

Just put up your "I'm an AMD fanboy" sign already!

I was thinking the same thing.