Ok, I know it might not be easy to answer, because everyones experience is different, but hear me out Currently I want to upgrade my Radeon 7870 to a faster card. Here are the choices: AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon R9 380X nVidia GeForce GTX 970 R9 390 is fast, but power hungry and hot. Since I'm using mATX case and prefer maximum silence with decent cooling that leaves me with two other choices. R9 380X price is good, it's quiet and has traditional memory design. Also Radeon cards for me run super stable. That means ZERO crashes, freezes, strange slow downs or anything like that. It just works. But it's only up to 50 percent faster then my current card and AMD drivers lack Adpative VSync. GTX 970 is fast, up to 100 percent faster than my current card. Quiet, power efficient and runs cool. Basically on R9 380X level but faster. Also has Adaptive VSync. But its more expensive and has weird memory config, which in theory (and probably most of the time in practice) is good, ie 3.5 GB of traditional fast memory and 0.5 GB of slower, but still faster then system RAM additional memory. HOWEVER reading nVidias comments it seems drivers employ some kind of heuristics to manage and decide what goes in which partition. That leaves cards performance very dependent on driver heuristics quality. Long time ago I had my last nVidia card and while I've come to expect stellar stability from Radeon I don't know about Geforce. I keep reading about weird monitor disconnects, driver crashing and restarting on it's own, games slowing down after some time etc. but people still give it 5/5 stars like it's expected?
I ahve been experiencing a lot of driver problems, low gpu usage with my rig(lol can´t believe with my config I have that problems) in some games, the latest drivers reduced the performance in some games, in conclusion nvidia drivers are going downhill, next time I will buy an AMD card r9 4xx and sell my pos gtx 980
Nvidia drivers on the whole have been faultless through the years.....AMD was ALWAYS the wild card for drivers
I bought a gtx 970 1 month and I'm happy with it. Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 runs better than the R9 390. BUT i'm still thinking that it would be a better decision to buy a R9 390. Why? 3.5gb of vram vs 8gb. Games are vram hungry now, specially online games, Wildstar its eating 4gb of vram with textures in High, i can't play it at Ultra Textures. Rainbow Six Siege needs 4gb minimum with Ultra Textures at 1080p. So i'm pretty sure future games will need 6gb of vram soon. R9 390 has a similar or better performance on 1080 compared with the 970, so just imagine that is a 970 with 8gb of vram. nvidia drivers are fine, new one has terrible performance on DX9 games like Trove online. But games like Witcher 3, Batman Arkham Knight, AC: Syndicate, Fallout 4, are perfect. PS: I'm using my card OC'ed to 1531~1560. Games like Fallout 4 drops to 40fps in some zones. AC Syndicate drops to 50fps while driving in some zones too. So i'm pretty sure the R9 390 performs really similar.
Fallout 4 runs better (less fps drops) on nVidia because AMD drivers have higher DX11 multi core overhead. This is one area where AMD drivers lack technically. They improved DX 11 single core overhead, but MT staid the same. Maybe they are trying to skip DX 11 MT optimization altogether and wait for DX 12 to be used more often where Radeon cards perform as well or better then GeForce. It is my understanding why some games, like Fallout 4 and AC Unity have bigger fps drops on AMD, although AC Unity might be improved now. But most games are not affected. Still I agree R9 390 is a good card and may even have long life driver wise, depends on how much GCN arch will be changed with Arctic Islands. Look at 7970 for example - it still performs well. Although R9 390 eats electricity for breakfast
970 is equal to 390, you can choose both and won't regret , nvidia has better drivers mainly due to dx11 overhead or minimum overhead vs AMD. If history repeats itself, then GCN gotta eat maxwell alive, look at kepler, once the mighty 780ti was faster than 290x by 10-15%, and now it quite opposite... Either way u can't go wrong, i think i would pick the 970 as it overclocks super well.
Latest couple of driver sets have been perfectly stable for me, however this year drivers have not been that great, nvidia has been taking more time than usual to fix problems. Black Ops 3 also had problems maxing textures and shadow maps on the 970, one wonders why they keep asking $400 here, it´s just not that good.
each system is different. Got 970/980/980ti. Sold the ATI 390.. just to hot..but got a awesome deal on 980ti. The 390 was a tad faster then the 970 and had 8gb. The one that uses the one system wanted the 970 not 390 so sold it. ME..never had any problems on 3 systems with ATI or Nvidia..so you wont go wrong no matter what you pick. To many blame drivers when its their system NOT the drivers. I have 3 systems and I am not lucky.. I know what to look for.
