What gpu company do you favor?

Which gpu company do you favor?

  • Nvidia

    Votes: 68 39.5%
  • AMD/ATI

    Votes: 44 25.6%
  • About evenly split between the two major gpu vendors (intel does not count)

    Votes: 60 34.9%

  • Total voters
    172

tybert7

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 23, 2007
Messages
2,763
First, some qualifications. Over the years, which gpus have you owned and used in your own personal systems?

If the list is heavily weighted towards nvidia, choose nvidia, if amd/ati, choose them, and if you happen to be a switch hitter, using about as many nvidia cards as amd/ati cards, choose that option.


My list:

-some 7000 ati card, saw some water effects in morrowind that this card did not support (needed the 8000 series ati cards or higher at the time, so I jumped up to a...)

-ati 9600 xt
-nvidia 7600 gt (that fanless fatality branded card (ran worse than the fan version))
-ati x1800 gto
-ati 4850
-amd 6870
-amd r9 290

6 out of 7 cards belong to the ati/amd camp. I favor that company clearly. You all? What does your gpu history suggest about your preferences?
 
I would say I'm evenly split. I get the card that best suits what I'm looking for at the time.

These are the cards I've had over the years.
Geforce
Geforce 4 Ti4600
9600xt
9800 Pro
X800 Pro
7950 GX2
GTX 260
HD 5870
GTX 680
 
Always have gone Nvidia from back in the MX400 days, never had a card fail and never had any driver issues.
 
I usually buy the best performance/price ratio. AMD clearly has the edge on this one. For consumers like me, it doesn't seem like nvidia want my business with their pricing.
 
Always have gone Nvidia from back in the MX400 days, never had a card fail and never had any driver issues.

This, i have been using nvidia exclusively due to the fact that i have never had one fail on me. ATI makes great cards, maybe one day i will get one.
 
Trident, Cirrus Logic, Hercules, Matrox, ATI/AMD, 3dfx, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, S3, SIS, and I'm sure others. Over the years I've used them all. Okay, I'm an aging fart so I probably skew the data. Over the past 10 years, I've had both ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards. My last 3 cards have been a Geforce 780 Ti, a Geforce 660 Ti, and a Radeon 6850.
 
How about the 'whatever I think is the best deal at the time I need it' camp? This is a subtle but important difference from your third option. This 'favoring' mentality is stupid. The tech world changes very quickly, and your brand loyalty doesn't mean squat. You won't be repaid for it in any way. Blindly choosing a vendor just because they've done good for you doesn't do you any favors. You should weigh each side's pros and cons carefully each time you intend to buy.

Anyway, this is my history:
Edit2: Also some 16MB VRAM ATI card before that.
Edit: Now that I think about it, I think I had an MX440 at some point. It was a piece of crap. Or 460? IDK too long ago.
7800gt
9600gs (laptop)
5850hd
780 gtx sli
7870ghz (backup computer)

If I had built my latest rig later, it would have definitely had a pair of 290's in it rather than 780's. Worse drivers or no, the 290 prices were really good for the past month or so. At the time (this was several months ago) I was returning a 4gb 760 sli pair to Microcenter (several days after the original 30 day period, and they rook them) after seeing that the Nvidia prices had dropped rapidly. I didn't have much of a choice in the matter as AMD's cards weren't out. Granted even if they were I wouldn't have bought those noisy stock 290's. I spent too much on my noctua fans to just go and shove something like that inside. Nowadays you can buy 290's so cheap you can use the rest of the money to go and get G10 with an aio and a pair of noctua fans though lol.
 
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I aim for the "price/performance sweet spot", brand is irrelevant.
 
I go with best bang for my buck.. which for the most part has been the AMD side. I have had cards die from both sides, and shitty drivers from both sides as well. If NV would get more competitive price wise and would stop their questionable practices with closed standards tech I'd give them another chance.
 
I buy the one that is interesting to me. It doesn't have to be the best bang for the buck or the highest performance, I like to try everything. I greatly dislike fanboys and the annoyance they cause during any reasonable discussion.
 
I've used both and have no problem using AMD but i just prefer Nvidia. EVGA is my preferred brand based on their build quality, options and features and customer service and they don't make AMD cards so that sways me. And Nvidia drivers just seem more refined.

So yeah I'd have no problem running another AMD card especially since they're offering faster cards for a good bit lower price than a conparable Nvidia card I very well may end up running one again soon cause I'm getting itchy about a GPU upgrade and the 290x coming close to a GTX 780Ti but at $200 less, it's very tempting.

I don't have a problem with a little brand favoritism because these are toys for us and a hobby we do for fun so it's only natural that we get a sentimental favorite. No different than having a favorite sports team.
 
I started off with 3dfx Voodoo 5 and transitioned to Nvidia when they bought them out. I probably owned one card from every Nvidia product line release until I bought an ATI 9700 Pro. From there I swapped back to Nvidia for the 9000 series. Grabbed an ATI 5850 from a XFX group buy on the forums here and was impressed with the quality of the card and drivers.

Was very happy until I wanted to try SLI (Blame Kyle for writing mesmerizing reviews) so I bought GTX 460 SLI at launch. It worked fine for the most part, but SLI didn't work for the games that I wanted to play (anyone remember APB?) I was pissed that I gave my 5850 to my nephew as it was remarkably faster than one 460.

From there I purchased a HD7950 at launch. Procured a GTX 570 and GTX 670 from my other nephew since he couldn't make his mind up, and discovered that they weren't nearly as good as my 7950 doing OpenCL. I love tinkering with open source projects so I relegated the GTX 670 to hybrid PhysX for awhile.

Dumped the 570 and 670 for a second HD7950 to try CrossfireX. Ran into the same problem as before with SLI where it didn't work for my favorite games like Warframe. CrossfireX does seem to work in more titles than SLI did as you can force it on sometimes, but I haven't tried SLI in awhile, so maybe it has improved.

Now I'm debating a single R9 290 and HD7950 CrossfireX. Watch Dogs is making me lean towards the R9 290 as it barely has the memory footprint to keep up with the game and my HD7950's stutter really badly in that game. My buddy's GTX780 stutters just as badly so I don't feel bad. ;) Thinking of sticking one of the 7950's into my main rig as a dedicated rendering card and sticking the 2nd one into my living room PC. Niece is building a PC so maybe she will inherit one instead. :)

As far as reliability goes, all of my cards have held up to this point. My PC runs 24/7 nowadays so the fact that the HD7950's have held up is remarkable. One of my fans on my Sapphire card did die, but like I said it's been running 24/7 since launch overclocked. Worst thing I have done to it was do suicide runs @1800+ on the memory. Damn thing is built like a tank. :)

Next upgrade that I'm looking at is Devil's Canyon 5.5GHz on air and if I do that I'll probably go with the upcoming Nvidia lineup to mix things up again if it has decent OpenCL support. I took my FX-9370 to 5.1GHz before, so the only thing that excites me is the prospect of a bigger number. If Nvidia's mainstream lineup is gimped with 3GB cards again, I'll stay put with AMD as I've had very few problems. In the end it's all about the fun you get out of your hobby, and I can say that I've gotten plenty of that!
 
I briefly went green recently... for a long time I was sort of forced to buy the cheapest video card I could just to make a build actually happen. My honest opinion is that Nvidia GPUs are well engineered from almost every aspect--in the end I'm back to red for a reason that I couldn't quite put my finger on until I tried the gradient banding test at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/. I like accurate colors and messing around with photographs so I have a nice cheap 27" monitor that is also good for gaming set up. I have calibrated it carefully using a colorimeter that wasn't free, but something just... wasn't quite right using the 2 GTX 780s.

I'll let someone famous explain it:
AMD uses a higher precision lookup table and temporal dithering to emulate more shades.

It's kind of a big deal. Pretty much all displays have smoother grayscale gradients and more accurate colors using Radeons, apparently. But for folks who don't calibrate their monitors I suppose it's not quite as important. Still... for all people talk about how great Nvidia's drivers are. I find them to be lackluster. I've never had significant issues with either companies drivers, but it makes little sense to me that temporal dithering apparently works on Nvidia cards in OSX... again, this is ToastyX talking not me, but it doesn't work in Windows. Maybe he will figure out how to fix the shit for them. If anyone could it would be Toasty.

Besides this issue of bad 8-bit banding from the internal gamma LUT on the green side, there's been this issue of improper gamma over DisplayPort on Nvidia GeForce cards that I'm not sure ever got solved. It's literally unusable on every display I've tried--destroys the greyscale, iirc.
 
AMD seems to make/sell most cost effective models. They run fine, but their software support has always been behind.

Nvidia always seems to price their stuff higher, but their software support is better, and in my book that sells the cards.
SLi was also a big seller for me. Been using it since it started with the GeForce 6800 :D
 
I only recently starting building computers but both cards I have purchased have been from nvidia. Although if the R9 295x2 was available when I was putting my computer together I would have easily chose that card.
 
3dfx Voodoo 3
Nvidia GeForce 3
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
Nvidia GeForce 6800
ATI Radeon HD 4830


That's my upgrade path. So I guess I bounce back and forth. My next GPU is probably goin to be R9 270X.
 
AMD for me. :D The last Nvidia card I used was a 6800 AGP.

X800 Pro
X1900 Pro
2 x 2900 Pro
2 x 4890
2 x 6950's
XFX R9 290

I have very much enjoyed watching the power usage at idle go way down.
 
The one that offers best bang for the buck. I don't have brand loyalty. I have wallet loyalty :)
 
I've been happy with Nvidia more often than not. I like their driver panel, the ability to use my TV's 3D glasses if I want, and how often new drivers are released. I absolutely loved the 9800 Pro I had for years and years, but have had so-so experiences with ATI since.
 
Trident, Cirrus Logic, Hercules, Matrox, ATI/AMD, 3dfx, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, S3, SIS, and I'm sure others. Over the years I've used them all.

Me too man!

I voted nVidia since I've usually bought nVidia over the past few years.
 
I've been building my own computers for about 13 years now. When I first started, all I ever used was Nvidia. My first GPU was a 3dfx Voodoo 3 and Nvidia bought them shortly after that. Thus, I continued to use Nivida. Around 2006, I had a 6800 GT AGP that died and I didn't want to build a whole new rig. So, sticking with AGP, I replaced it with a Radeon HD 3870 AGP. I was very pleased with the card and have been using Radeons ever since. Basically, I used to be an Nvidia guy but now I am an AMD guy.
 
The one that offers the best performance for my budget. All things being equal or close though I buy nvidia. 2 reasons, evga and better drivers.
 
Couldn't care less, the more competition the better. I generally go with what I feel is the better deal at the time.

FX 5900XT - shit card, but that entire generation was bad
6800NU - Decent card, made HL2 great. Beginning of the end for single slot high end cards
8800GTX - I actually still have this card framed, I consider it to be a big architectural step forward the likes of which we haven't seen in a while. Pixel pipelines -> shaders cores, etc.
8800GT M - mobile laptop GPU, was fantastic in its day. Still can handle most Unreal 3 engine games as well as things such as diablo 3 or WoW decently well.
2x 4870 - Decided I didn't like crossfire at all and really should have gone with the soon-to-release 5870. Learned what microstuttering was with the help of fallout 3.
7970 - Bought it in January of 2012, longest lasting GPU I've ever used by far. Performance actually increased a large amount (10%) with driver changes and advances (think it was 12.11 that really made a difference). The recycling into the 280x was actually really good for me too as I still get a large amount of driver support 2 and a half years after I bought the thing.
7970M - AMD is much much cheaper in the mobile segment, or atleast it was at the time.
270x - for madvr HTPC/fun with crypto mining. Card is great, the MSI fans are complete shit. Had to drill both of them a couple of months apart to add lubrication.


Overall I've learned a few lessons. Going for high performance is better for me in the long run, as I don't mind gradually turning down settings depending on the differences. NEVER BUY A GPU WITHOUT COMPETITION. Both nvidia and AMD are awful when there's no competition. Remember when the 4870 came out and nvidia had to slash prices basically in half? Remember when the nvidia 600 series came out and the 7970 immediately dropped $100 in price? Always wait for both sides of the generation before buying.
 
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I don't have any real preferences, honestly. I'll buy whatever the best performing GPU happens to be when I'm in the market for a new one, as long as the price is right.

Current GPU is an AMD HD7990, but my previous GPU was a nVidia GTX295. My laptop is also running a nVidia GPU (Quadro). Over the years, I'd say that I've owned an equal amount of nVidia and AMD video cards.
 
AMD seems to make/sell most cost effective models. They run fine, but their software support has always been behind.

Nvidia always seems to price their stuff higher, but their software support is better, and in my book that sells the cards.
SLi was also a big seller for me. Been using it since it started with the GeForce 6800 :D
The driver support of NVIDIA is what sells me on their cards, too. I have been going with NVIDIA cards for the 13 years I have been building my own computers. But I did own an ATi X600 Pro at one point and a laptop I got from university that came with a X1600 Mobility. I was pretty disgusted with their drivers and particularly the half-hearted support of the OpenGL feature set. This always weighs on my mind and is the primary reason I hesitate when thinking about purchasing a graphic card from AMD.

However, I did consider giving AMD another og with the R9 290X this generation. But when I was in the market to upgrade the cryptocurrency inflation was already in full effect. I wasn't going to pay a premium on a product that I had mixed feelings on in the past, so I went Green again with a GTX 780. Looking toward the future and some of the emerging tech, it wouldn't be surprising in the least if I stick with Green going forward.
 
AMD seems to have better price/performance while Nvidia seems to be a little more polished. But I rotate between the 2 fairly often.
 
I buy both. I don't find that my Nvidia GTX 780 have better driver support then my AMD 7970 have, infact, I find the GTX 780 to be more restrictive and therefore have worse support for some of my hardware (like Nvidia locked quad buffer for third party sterescopic 3d programs and I need to apply hack to get full color support over HDMI on two of the screens I have on Nvidia and not on Intel or AMD). I have both 3D vision and AMD HD3D with Tridef. Prefer Tridef due to the ease of configuring the games myself to my liking, more game support, Power 3D function for better performance and their base settings are closer to my liking (a little more convergence)

But for gaming in general, I don't have any preferences and consider both vendors when I buy a card (I own 377 games/208DLC's on my primary Steam account alone according to my profile there, so I have a somewhat broad test base).

Love the noise profile though on the MSI GTX 780 Gaming OC and noise is a big factor for me, so it has a special place in my heart! :cool:
 
^^^
I'm running 3 homebuilds right now. (Started way back with 3dfx voodoo 2...in sli. Woot!) I keep one rig intel/nvidia, one amd/ati, and the other swaps around. Been doing it that way for about 10 years.

I'm due for upgrades. My i4770k has a 4gb 670gtx. That needs to be improved. I'll put that 670 gpu into my fx8350 machine (currently limping along with an hf6850 emergency gap-filler card).

My phenomII 1090T has an hd6870. I was going to xfire, but now I'm leaning towards r9 290. Heavily leaning that way.

I only game 1920x1080 or x1200. For now. So more card is overkill unless we're [H].

Both manufacturers have strengths and weaknesses.

Edited to add: How could I have forgotten my Riva TNT2 Ultra??? Oh, sweet mistress, how memories fade... I think I paid ~$400 for that piece of bleeding edge hardware. The guy behind the counter said he was jealous. I could play X-Wing with everything maxed! Then I added the pair or 3dfx voodoo 2's into the same rig. I could choose between DX or OpenGL! Gaming goodness was mine to behold. :) Now I'm dedicated to single-card solutions. I've learned. Oh, yes: I've learned...
 
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This gen, AMD hits all the price/performance checkmarks and they got my dollars. That said, nvidia isn't out for sure.
 
Thankfully we have two good options, but 3 would be better!

Like most here I buy whatever works best for whatever I'm building. I put a 290X in my brothers on launch day, a 270X in my GF's, and I have SLI 780s. If built a new rig today I'd go with the 295X2, but my next purchase is probably an 880, or maybe a 3rd 780.
 
I've used five desktop GPUs in my personal or shared systems, all of them Nvidia. I didn't buy any but my most recent three myself, so I suppose I technically have not favoured either side. I'm waiting for the next generation to drop before upgrading. If the GTX 870 has a more enticing AMD equivalent, then I'll buy that, or whatever is most effective that I can drive with my two PCI-E 6-pins. I really do like Nvidia's driver features, however.
ASUS GeForce FX-5200 "MAGIC" (AGP, and magic it certainly was not.)
GeForce GT/S?/X? 8800 (I... think. Broke before I really knew anything about computers.)
Zotac GeForce GT 240
ASUS GeForce GTS 450
Zotac GeForce GTX 660
GeForce GT 630M (But that really doesn't count...)
I also picked up a SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7850 as part of my mining experiment.
 
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I think it's a bit of a stretch to call the 780ti "best bang for the buck" type. I feel the 780 wins the bang/buck with nvidia.

Sorry, forgot to upgrade my sig... on the 290 Vapor-X right now. Sold the 780ti, got the $150 pocketed, and after OC to 1200, the 290 easily hits 780ti FPS range :)
 
I definitely favor ATi/AMD. I've only had one nVidia card like a 6800 or 6600 agp (something like that). all my other card's have been amd (9800pro, x1800xt, 3870, 4890). I just bought a r9 290x too. I'm a fan of AMD (not a fanboy though) because it seems like they often are producing the "best bang for yer buck" cards out there. It's nice to save some $$.
 
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I've had a fan shatter on an NVidia card once, but that's more a manufacturer issue. That said I've never had any unfixable issues with either company so I just buy what I like from either.
 
Mostly Nvidia, as ATI (later AMD) didn't have much of a presence in Brazil.

When ATI/AMD started showing up here, I buy what's the best bang for the buck, and that is mostly AMD.

Brands that opted to establish a presence here in the beginning reap the rewards. People have this obsession with Nvidia and ASUS - which was really the only option besides the PcChips "onboard everything" boards back in the day. It's hard to overcome that kind of brand loyalty.
 
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