Do you prefer Nvidia or AMD GPU's?

This is something I will need to think about when I decide to put together a pc of my own. Though I am currently saving money at the moment hoping to reach my budget of £1000 by end of summer.

I go back and forth. Currently have 7950, will go Nvida next build.

I have good luck with Nvidia's drivers and no issues in years so I stick with them. No real need or reason to change, though I need to learn to quit hoarding my old cards and sell them on Ebay instead.

@lostrib:

Nvidia releases their own branded version,no?

@gamecubepad:

Those bench numbers are not for a normal 390, at 4k with 390x and ultra settings with games like witcher 3 dont even get 20 fps , and with GTA 5 it gets 25 fps, AC:unity 21fps, BF4 29 fps etc , guru3d did PCS+ version of 390 which is overclocked, while the 970 they tested on the site is vanilla clocks. that is not a legit way to see the differences between the two gpus. Also you can get 970's that are higher clocked or overclock yourself to the point that go beyond vanilla GTX 980 or 390x performance wise. Like I said vanilla 390 and 970 perform virtually the same at 1080/1440p. Once you start using higher clock rates 970 will edge out the 390 since you can get many 970 beyond 1.3 ghz(which puts it at GTX 980 level, and some able to 1.4ghz or above.

Once AMD dropped the price for the 390x/390 they had a good price to performance ratio over 980/970. but none of these gpus are enough for 4k with solid 30 fps experience. IMO there is no point in 4k when you have to suffer through measly framerates.

I was a loyal AMD user for a long time, ever since the ATI days... But in recent years, I've been leaning more towards Nvidia.

Nvidia

The only ATI/AMD card I ever had gave me nothing but problems. But to be fair, it was in 2002...not the pinnacle of their driver development.

But i have used AMD CPUs exclusively for the last decade and have had great luck.

Q3/Q4 this year is the perfect time to build. Lots of really great tech coming from AMD and Intel this year.

Yep, what he said. Strip AMD and Nvidia's cards of their logo's and coolers and it would be difficult to tell them apart just by looking at them.

Make a coffee table out of them like this guy

That must have been back around their 9800 series cards from ATi. That is a long time ago. I had a 9800SE, was awesome. You could even softmod them to open more pipelines up to make them equivalent to a 9800Pro.

Benchmarks will vary. Testing the PCS 390 was a perfect way for me to compare with the 970 because that was the brand I wanted due to previous experience with their excellent 7870 Myst and it's HSF implementation.

I can't stress enough that fan volume and temps under load are a huge thing for me now. I literally stepped down from a pair of heavily OC'd XFX 7950s because they were so loud, and there's a certain whine that can emit as well from components that drives me nuts.

Pair that with the fact that the quality 970s with specialized HSFs were $20+ over the PCS at the moment, and the 3.5GB fiasco. I have 8GB of 512-bit GDDR5 VRAM @ 1500MHz(can hit 1650MHz, no reason). That can't be spun as a negative in any manner.

I should have clarified earlier that I wasn't after 4k/30fps at Max settings. I'm pretty adept at tuning settings and some things aren't a huge deal for me to lose. Shadows and hardware AA are brutal and I don't mind going post AA or lower shadow quality. Textures, lighting, and draw distance/pop-in are must-have ultra settings for me.

Verdict: Both cards are great and I wouldn't have gone wrong either way considering my sub-$300 budget. Regardless, it will be nothing more than a stop-gap card until we see next-gen Nvidia and AMD cards. I'm resolute to just upgrade to a high-end rig instead of buying current-gen console and paying online fees.