neilthecellist wrote...
Sell your AMD card on eBay and get an NVIDIA card. I used to run a repair shop and AMD cards might be cheap to buy, but they're outdated and a result of poor engineering, as a result, a bad long term investment. NVIDIA cards are expensive to buy first hand, but the amount of features you get from an NVIDIA card over-justifies your intial cost (Ambient Occlusion, SSGSA+MSAA at the same time, realistic hair, PhysX, NVIDIA 3D Vision, true AF... AMD cards can do the same, but at an emulating level almost
I am from Taiwan (which is where both AMD and NVIDIA cards are made) and I can tell you first hand why AMD cards are so badly designed, but you probably wouldn't understand without an electrical engineering degree and you might not even care. But the point is, NVIDIA is better than AMD. I am not a fanboy of either, I just like the option that makes more sense.
This is what happens when you assume too much. I've been working in the computer hardware industry and information technology fields for almost 18 years. AMD's driver's are lacking a lot of the time. I won't deny that, but hardware wise, they are different than AMD's but not necessarily less advanced. There are pros and cons to each. Hardware wise, neither AMD nor NVIDIA build anything. Both are design firms. They contract out construction of the ASICs, GPU silicon and board manufacturing to other vendors. Sometimes even the same ones. Flextronics, Foxconn, etc. make boards for both companies. And it's hard to argue for superior NVIDIA quality when there was the G80 debacle, VRMs burning out on GeForce 4 Ti4200's and most recently, GeForce GTX 590's catching fire due to bad firmware.
They are constantly leap frogging each other with new types of antialiasing. So that argument doesn't really hold water. NVIDIA 3D Vision is of no consequence as my 30" monitors don't support it. And at 2560x1600
(or 7680x1600 with Eyefinity / NV Surround) I can't afford the performance hit of 3D. Realistic hair? This is a result of techniques applied to achieve the result. It isn't a feature by itself. Both cards can do this. It is how the game or application achived it, as to which card can do it better. It isn't as if this is one feature and there is only one way to achieve it. PhysX is a proprietary API which has to be licensed and few games really make meaningful use out of it aside from Batman Arkham Asylum / City. And there is a work around to use an NVIDIA card for PhysX while using AMD cards as your primary gaming cards. Sure lots of games support it, but few do anything worth noting.
And technically, AMD cards could do physics effects processing through DirectCompute. However, almost no one is doing that either by choice or because NVIDIA pays top dollar to ensure that game developers do it their way.
And as for NVIDIA being better, this is hit or miss. I've had products from both companies dating back to the early days of 3D acceleration and their entries into that market. I've had good experiences with both, and bad experiences with either. Most recently, I pulled my GTX 580's out of my system because I had issues with SLI and random artifacting which wasn't related to heat, the motherboard, or seemingly anything else. Both cards tested fine, but for whatever reason, I had tons of driver issues with them. Since installing the Radeon HD 7970, I had a few issues with SWTOR which were resolved quickly, and I couldn't force MSAA in the CCC with Mass Effect 3. That's it. I've had zero complaints aside from that. So far this card has been less problematic than my GTX 580's ever were. Though one of my GTX 580s is working perfectly in my girlfriend's machine, and the other is sitting in my test rig.
I'm no fanboy of either vendor, but right now, the Radeon HD 7970 is serving me well. I have no plans on replacing it until the retail availability of the GTX 690. When that comes out, I'll make a decision on that.
Elessar79 wrote...
Yikes! Wasn't my aim to start a spat in here!
I realize my specs are really low, just going to take a while to save up for upgrades. Gonna need a new motherboard to handle the 8GB+ RAM I want (Ideally I'm thinking 16GB) not sure how high to go with the CPU, and I guess I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and get a newer GPU.
16GB of RAM won't really do anything for you gaming wise. As cheap as it is, I would probably go for that myself, but it won't be of any real benefit for simple gaming tasks. As for the CPU, I'd recommend either shopping for a deal on the Core i5 2500K or Core i7 2600K. They can be had for a fairly reasonable sum right now. The newer Ivy Bridge based Core i7 3770K replaces the Core i7 2600K in Intel's lineup, but their availability isn't great and no one is really offering deals on them right now.
As for motherboards, Z77 doesn't offer much over Z68, but it's always wise to get the newer product unless you just find an amazing deal on the older one. Also Z77 will support Ivy Bridge based CPUs out of the box where as Z68 boards will usually require a BIOS update for compatibility.
Modifié par Dead_Meat357, 01 mai 2012 - 05:04 .
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