Videocard - which to buy?

Since the recent demise of my Radeon 7970 I have decided I need a new video card. I've really got my eye on the GTX970 for a couple reasons:

1) What if I ever want an Nvidia Shield? Integration is great
2) Radeon died way too soon, time for a change. Never had a GF card die on me
3) Every site I visit say it's the best bang for your buck.

Now, here's where things get difficult. I see that people list a ton of pros and cons regarding the brand of card. MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA. Is there really a best one over the other? Should I stop overanalyzing and just get whichever is cheapest? Cheapest is currently the EVGA at $299.99 with MGS V for free when it's released. Others range in the $330 area.

I also have been reading up on this large class action lawsuit due to misrepresented memory on the 970 cards. Is a normal user like me going to notice that the last 500MB of memory is significantly slower?

I don't hear much fanfare about the Radeon cards. I haven't shopped around for quite some time, is it best to stay with a GeForce card?

*shrug*

I can see reason 1 being valid, but both cards can die suddenly and I would argue that the 970 is not the best bang for your buck right now. I think the radeon 390 is at the moment. Ultimately it's up to I don't cheer lead for either brand and I've used both extensively over the last 15 years. Shield integration is a valid point and if you think that might be a thing you should definitely lean nvidia. The 390 runs a tiny bit hotter and requires a little bit more power but it's really not that big of a difference. The 390s also come with 8GB of memory. If I were picking one from each (me, myself, my opinion) I would go with either

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...

In the end you can't go wrong with either one and they're both good cards.

Thanks for all the help Gumbie! I've now come to realization that both cards are great and it's more personal preference. I'm leaning toward the Radeon card now for a couple reasons:

1) I'll probably never own an NVidia Shield so choosing a GF over ATI is not valid due to this
2) The class action lawsuit against NVidia
3) Future proofing. It seems like the Radeon has the ability to be good into the future for a bit longer than the GF card.
4) I flipped a coin and it came up heads (which happened to be Radeon)

What really surprises me, and I guess it's a good thing, is that there is no clear cut winner. I've found videos that say the GF is a better card, I've found videos that say the Radeon is the way to go. Neither is a clear-cut runaway winner though. As you said, I can't go wrong with either of the cards.

There has hardly been a moment in time where there was ever a clear cut winner in the GPU field. Each company has had a window at times where there was no real discussion on which card to buy but that usually only lasts a few months.

I haven't seen a game benchmark yet that suffered because of the slow top 500 MB on the 970. In fact, in most games, the 970 seems to perform within a few frames of the 980 (non-ti) if you're running at 1080p. I don't know if it's the best buy for your money, but the fact that is runs on very little voltage and is quite cool is a huge selling point for me.

complexmath wrote:

I haven't seen a game benchmark yet that suffered because of the slow top 500 MB on the 970. In fact, in most games, the 970 seems to perform within a few frames of the 980 (non-ti) if you're running at 1080p. I don't know if it's the best buy for your money, but the fact that is runs on very little voltage and is quite cool is a huge selling point for me.

For 1080p it's a fine card. You have to push settings really high and generally go up to 1440p to start seeing it struggle.

You can make Shadow of Mordor kind of crush the 970 at 1440p if you want to, for example, using the higher res textures and a high levels of Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. There are other games that can push it hard enough too, if you just gotta have all the bells and whistles turned on and cranked up.

Right now though, who's card is better for you depends on kind of a variety of things. Your budget is the main factor, as each has different places where they have the better bang for the buck, but then there are other considerations to be made depending on other circumstances. Like... if you're doing a small form factor build and want to put in one top end videocard, the R9 Fury X is actually pretty slick. Built in CLC cooler, that stubby short little PCB, and generally quiet operation give it a fair bit of versatility.

And it's slightly better performance than a regular GTX 980 in the meantime.

Sure, Nvidia still wins that top end battle with the 980 Ti, but you aren't cramming one of those into certain cases that you can probably get a Fury X in just fine.

Then there's the Non-X Fury that is slightly more expensive than the regular 980 but still offers similar or reasonably better performance depending on the game while also being, at least in the case of the Sapphire card, almost unbelievably quiet even under heavy load.

A lot of options out right now for a variety of potential end uses.

Good time to be looking for a videocard, methinks.

AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia so long that the fact that the 390 is a decent competitor to the 970 has not really caught on. AMD needs to market the crap out of it. It doesn't help that Nvidia has really pushed into the middleware and dev support territory more effectively than AMD. More developers seem to be adopting Nvidia-specific optimizations and technology. That might matter for you if you in the short term, but oftentimes these middleware bells and whistles are a bit faddish. It's been a while but I when I owned AMD I found their software to be lacking all around. I was not impressed by their control panel suite's ability to handle an HDTV. That could very well have improved by now.

The GTX 970 is a really good card and the 500 MB bottleneck is not really a big deal. The class action thing is amplified on the internet by angry tech heads. The R9 390 is a really good card and its lack of visibility is more to do with the lagging reputation of AMD than the performance of that particular hardware. Hopefully AMD markets hard to making the race exciting again. Conversely hopefully this class action lawsuit doesn't scare anyone from Nvidia. If I stopped using every company that had a class action lawsuit levied against them I'd be naked, starving and living in a cave.

Thanks again for all the help guys. Went with an MSI R9 390. Luckily it was free 2 day shipping on Newegg so now I just have to be really patient

DeThroned wrote:

Thanks again for all the help guys. Went with an MSI R9 390. Luckily it was free 2 day shipping on Newegg so now I just have to be really patient :)

Nice, let us know your impressions when you get it if you don't mind