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The Nvidia 970 vs AMD 290 question!

Mrjobby

Mrjobby

Mrjobby

Associate
Joined
25 Jun 2008
Posts
637
Hey guys.

I think my rather long in the tooth 7950 could do with a upgrade and I see that within a reasonable sum of money the card would be a 290 or a 970.

Now I don't and never have really cared for power consumption so that doesn't matter too much to me, its likely going to be stuck in a hex core Xeon rig and used for a few hours a day. I have a HX850 so got power to spare.

I am looking at the Powercolor PCS+ version of the 290 as it is only £209.99 with free del and free games, games I actually want. Great big cooler to tame the heat too.

The Nvidia option is trickier, as I would be spending more but it would be slightly quicker, cooler and potentially quieter. I did like my silent 670's!

The Galax would possibly be my choice but the games don't interest me much.

Been trying to decide for a few weeks now, what do people think?
 
If you want performance for as little cost as possible get the 290.

Otherwise flip a coin, can't go wrong with either.
 
Do you play any games that support PhysX (Batman or Borderlands mainly recently), if so go for the Nvidia. Do you play any games that support Mantle (Battlefield 4, Thief), if so go for the AMD.

Other than that, as Ayahuasca said, flip a coin or go for the one that is the nicest colour. You really can't go wrong with either choice as they're both great cards.
 
I can vouch for that powercolor PCS+. Bought it the other week and have been seriously impressed with it. Fantastic build quality, quiet and haven't seen more than 63 degrees from it yet. I was in the same situation and couldn't decide between the 290 or 970. Reaaly glad I made the decision to go for the 290. for £209.99 it really is a steal.
 
I'd get a R9 290 but if you are interested in G-Sync then the GTX 970 might be worth getting, I use Mantle when playing BF4 so for me it is worth going AMD atm.
 
To be honest I think you have answered your own question

Mrjobby said:
I am looking at the Powercolor PCS+ version of the 290 as it is only £209.99 with free del and free games, games I actually want.
Click to expand...

If there are 3 games you want from the list and Civ beyond earth, coupled with the £38 cheaper.
 
okay here it is honestly.

i went from a high ocd 7950 basically a 7970.

i went for the 970 gtx in the end i have no bias to any card manufacture . i just like best bang fr buck and what works the best no hassle.i spent a month looking at the options.

i came down to vapour x 290 or a 970 gtx. in the end the nvidia option is better.

less power faster (forget fanboys its faster) cooler silent. you get a code which you can sell for 20 quid aswell so it comes down to close price wise but nvidia just is a better option and with newer features. with newer drivers coming in youll get even better performance plus DSR .

in some games its close to twice as fast as a 7950 in some i tried its 3 times as fast.just depends. i benched every game i own. at 1080.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
with newer drivers coming in youll get even better performance plus DSR.
Click to expand...

I agree with everything else in your post but this bit above is often quoted by loads of people, unfortunately one of the places that does not quote it is NVidia themselves.

I have used the 9 series quite a bit myself and I find the drivers work fine. They scale every bit as well as on my GTX 690s, GTX 590s and Titans going from one GPU all the way up to 4 GPUs. At 1080p there is nothing that can beat 4 way 980s the performance is blistering, unfortunately as the resolution increases the performance drops off but this is a hardware thing. GTX 690s and Titans also suffer from this to a lesser or greater degree when you reach ultra high resolutions like 4K.

So in short I don't think there will be any wonder drivers coming along in the near future, but we will continue to see optimisations for individual games that we have always had.

The 9 series is already blisteringly fast now.:D
 
290 Ran really hot for me, that was the primary reason for my switch to the 970. Nvidia drivers seem to suck in comparison to AMD drivers though.
 
I'm in a virtually identical situation here. I'm loking to upgrade my 7950 but I'm looking at a R290X as opposed to a vanilla R290 and this is me first choice as it got good reviews, o/clocked out of the box and quiet:

Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card

The other card I'm looking at is any GTX 970 for roughly the same dosh and this one is tempting:

GALAX GeForce GTX 970 EX OC "Black Edition" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express

The only thing I'm concerned about is the PSU , a Corsair HX620 thats a few years old. It should power the GTX970 no problem, but might struggle with the R290X due to it's age. Saying that, I can always replace it later on if theres an issue.
Any opinions?
 
Get the 970 unless you want eyefinity.

Your system should be able to handle the 290x but again I'd go with a 970.
 
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* Do you care about GSync, DSR, or 3Dvision? If so get nVidia.
* Do you want a 1440p 144hz monitor now or in the future? If so, RoG Swift is currently your only option, and the upcoming Acer competitor is also GSync, so get nVidia.
* Do you want to have the option to connect to a 4k TV @ 60hz in the future? If so get 970/980 for HDMI 2.0
* Do you care about heat output? Not so much electricity cost as that's going to be a tiny difference, but my 7970/7990 trifire setup made the room uncomfortably hot. If so, consider nVidia, but this alone isn't really a compelling reason.
* Do you care about VSync? This can be forced in nVidia drivers for DX games, whereas for AMD it's much harder. Drivers can force for OpenGL but not DX, RadeonPro is supposed to work but never did for me. Some games have awful VSync implementations, e.g. Dead Space 3 VSync locks to 30fps. nVidia allow you to workaround via drivers.
* If getting a 120/144hz monitor especially, nVidia drivers allow you to force max refresh. On AMD, some games won't have a 120/144 option. I found games force me to 60hz commonly on AMD, and some (e.g. Crysis 1) will drop down to the lowest your monitor supports (24hz if connected to a TV) with AMD and there is no workaround.

* Do you care about Mantle? If so get AMD.
* How important is price to you? 290 is slightly cheaper.
* Do you like the 21:9 monitors from LG? These are coming with Freesync.
* How likely are you to buy a 4k monitor? AMD tend to do better at this res because of the 512bit bus. If you are thinking a 4k TV, don't get AMD as you have no HDMI 2.0.
* Freesync is coming, but I've yet to see a 144hz monitor over 1080p announced with it. Given time you might get all the advantages of GSync from this.

Your PSU, I'd say, is good for a single 290x, and good for SLI 970/980.
 
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Have to say DSR would be a big one for me now - while I don't use it for every game there are some games where the ability to use it to effectively do AA and preserve higher levels of detail makes them look far more appealing.
 
Rroff said:
Have to say DSR would be a big one for me now - while I don't use it for every game there are some games where the ability to use it to effectively do AA and preserve higher levels of detail makes them look far more appealing.
Click to expand...

Dirt Showdown or Grid Autosport would be two games worth trying DSR on as they don't use much VRAM but do look noticeably better when maxed out at high resolution. Better still a single 9 series card should be able to run it @1080p using DSR no problem.
 
Well I've just pulled the trigger on one of these:

GALAX GeForce GTX 970 EX OC "Black Edition" 4096MB GDDR5

Seems a reasonable price for the performance, lets hope I'm not disappointed, and by the way, whats DSR?:confused:

Just had a look see on the web and it improves graphic quality at lower resolutions, does it work well at 1080p?
 
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Simple really go for the card that's within your budget and has the features you want (in this case the games?)

For me DSR is an absolutely brilliant feature and I use it in all the games I play now. Actually it's the reason I moved from a single 980 to 970 Sli as I liked it so much :p.

I've had 290x trifire and a single 290 in the past and they are both great cards so you can't really go wrong.

Edit: Pieman it's basically downsampling, it gives you the option to render at a number of different resolutions up to 4k (if you're on a 1080p screen). Bare in mind that the performance hit is pretty proportionate, i.e. 4k is 4x the number of pixels as 1080p and performance is roughly a quarter of what it would be at 1080p.
 
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some games it works well like bf4 for eg some it doesnt. remember its upto 4 times the performance hit. so on older games it just enhances them n newer titles just knock aa down and use it.
 
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