JohnCoffey wrote:
The 970 and 980 are pretty lightweight cards spec wise. They are fast because they have such enormous clock speeds, but, those sort of clocks are not possible when you start adding in loads of extra features. The memory bus and bandwidth for example on both the 970 and 980 are fucking shit when compared to AMD cards. I've just checked it and it seems that all of a sudden the 970 is supposedly the min requirement. They've changed that.
From what I have been seeing and reading lately (and it could all be FUD and completely wrong) the AMD 390 in both VR and DX12 will beat the 970 very easily, due to the fact it's a much more 'grown up' card than both the 970 and 980. Articles like this -
http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-290x-fast-ti ... r-gtx-980/And Ashes of singularity (DX12)
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/08 ... or-nvidia/Seem to show that Nvidia literally did what was best for DX11 at the time. Obviously they have been doing this since Fermi, given that it really was a hot mother fucker of a kitchen sink. Since then they have basically ripped out anything that wasn't of importance (like Double Precision and so on) and that is why their cards can be ran at enormous clocks, off setting the fact that they have removed all of the heavy gear.
The problem is that with DX12 and VR that stuff is very important. And, due to AMD's much more grown up and mature design their cards are better for these new upcoming techs.
Example. GTX 970 memory bandwidth max = 224gbps. AMD 390 memory bandwidth max = 384gbps.
Initially this was not a problem, until of course you go up to 4k. That's when the cracks start to appear, even in DX11.
I'm not sure you can really criticise Nvidia for producing cards that worked well with the API of the time, which was DX11. Perhaps AMD were designing with some future-proofing in mind but I'm not convinced that's a great idea for something that gets outclassed/replaced as often as graphics cards do. AMD have been notoriously poor on DX11 so I'm not surprised they're really banging the DX12 drum.
There's also no getting around the fact that AMD's cards consume a ridiculous amount of power compared to their Nvidia counterparts, in terms of efficiency Maxwell was, and is, fantastic.
All that said, if AMD are the clear winners in the DX12 era then I'll have no problem making the switch back to them. I was AMD for years (or ATI as they were then), until Nvidia had the better cards on offer. (See also CPUs, I was AMD for years there too before ditching them for Intel once the Core Duos came around.)
I'm not sure where you're getting the clock speed stuff from though, 390s tend to run in the 1050-1100MHz range, 970s in the 1100-1200MHz range, hardly a massive difference.
In the here and now (i.e. the DX11 era) all an AMD card has to offer is being bigger and more power-hungry than an equivalently performing Nvidia card, with very little between them in terms of price. Yes that might change once DX12 goes mainstream, but all we have for now are synthetic benchmarks and tech demos.
There may be more work that Nvidia can do with their drivers for DX12 on existing hardware, and their Pascal hardware is due to hit around the middle of this year I believe.
I certainly wouldn't switch from Nvidia to AMD based on what we can see at the moment, but will keep an open mind.