AMD vs. Nvidia features

[Imouto]

I may be wrong but isn't ShadowPlay doing exactly the same thing as the RivaTuner packed with MSI afterburner?

 

[Lonyo]

How do you define a "professional"?
Google contaced me (not the other way around) about becomming a Youtube partner og getting Ad sense when I crossed 350.000 views....is that a casual user?

And I tried being "fancy" with editing years ago...to much time waste doing editing than actual gaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDmOFtNx3A4&list=TLw9ObwFth1fPNfYgLZsIr6giGWiGAQ36i

Took me around 12 hours back in the days...I will rather game than waste time being fancy

I'm talking the people who are professionals, and their job is either making videos of games on Youtube, or streaming themselves playing/commentating games on Twitch or other such services.
The people who have webcams and/or greenscreen as part of their stream overlay, and want a composite on their game screen showing their team or personal sponsors.
People who use Xsplit and OBS because of the added functions and features when they are streaming.

It's like Quicksync. It makes something more accessible (encoding or streaming), but for a power user... it's not got all the functionality of the software based solutions using the CPU that people have been using for a long time.

 

[BrightCandle]

The point with most of these technologies is that none of them are really critical. Eyefinity brought something genuinely worthwhile so Nvidia implemented it too. Gsync is clearly going to be very popular, the reviews have been exceptionally positive and AMD has already shown they are early into their own implementation and I fully expect we'll get competition here too.

The other things like ShadowPlay, it may or may not get implemented by both parties, but we can clearly see its not as fundamental. For some people it matters more than others, the people who record and stream, a minority, will care a great deal about this one but most probably wont ever care.

There are also lots of smaller differences in the drivers features that haven't been mentioned, like triple buffering, like openGL extensions, like draw ahead queue, profiles, power management etc etc. But by and large these are all below a threshold of importance for those who have commented. The differences are actually really large, but most of the time all you do is play a game, and the GPU marker when you are doing that by and large doesn't matter much. You aren't going to enjoy a game a lot more because of a special layout of antialiasing, but it might change how you perceive the quality of the graphics a little bit.

I think this is vastness of difference but also the small impact (most people play with the defaults most of the time, I assume anyway) is why most decisions are based on price/performance and features usually get boiled down into an argument of quality of the driver. Its not really accurate to do that but its the overall impression that comes out of all these small and sometimes subtle differences. I think it would be really nice to have a really big roundup review of these differences, looking at the impact they have on IQ and such so that it was more obvious what those differences were, because unless you have owned both cards in a generation you won't realise just how many differences there really are.

 

[Lonbjerg]

I'm talking the people who are professionals, and their job is either making videos of games on Youtube, or streaming themselves playing/commentating games on Twitch or other such services.
The people who have webcams and/or greenscreen as part of their stream overlay, and want a composite on their game screen showing their team or personal sponsors.
People who use Xsplit and OBS because of the added functions and features when they are streaming.

It's like Quicksync. It makes something more accessible (encoding or streaming), but for a power user... it's not got all the functionality of the software based solutions using the CPU that people have been using for a long time.

I would never add my webcam on a gaming video...or my voice...I find that to be annoying...or add a chat to my videos...my videos today are about the gameplay...nothing else.

 

[Gloomy]

Shadowplay is the only good feature on either brand since Eyefinity/Surround, and I find it hard not to see the people downplaying it as having sour grapes.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I may be wrong but isn't ShadowPlay doing exactly the same thing as the RivaTuner packed with MSI afterburner?

You mean the Quick Sync version? If so, nope. I used it several times with my 7950s, and while its better than fraps... It has its own problems, higher fps loss and texture corruption occurs as well as texture quality loss 'blur'.

 

[Spjut]

Not really a driver feature in itself, but Nvidia has longer support for their older cards.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Something I got wrong/forgot?

Zerocore for AMD. I like it a lot.

 

[dipster]

I may be wrong but isn't ShadowPlay doing exactly the same thing as the RivaTuner packed with MSI afterburner?

Yes. Afterburner works with hardware acceleration via Intel hardware (quicksync), so they basically do the same thing, but IIRC quicksync took a hit on encoding quality. I don't know if it matters, or if Shadowplay does too.

 

[f1sherman]

NV things I miss the most:

** G-Sync!!! ***

1) NV inspector
2) downsampling/custom resolutions
3) PhysX
4) Shadowplay

AO - meh don't care about it

AMD features I enjoy the most

*** GPU MINING ***

Playing hardcore Gaming Evolved titles(Hitman, Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider)
Looking forward to: Mantle, TrueAudio, Thief

 

[dguy6789]

AMD cards also feature higher frame rates in games than Nvidia

 

[McLovin42]

All you need to know in the end is AMD is garbage overall compared to Nvidia. This is coming from a builder/reseller of both products.

Its not just about framerates.....its about the quality of the hardware itself(how reliable it is/RMA rate), the quality and support of the drivers......visual quality.....etc etc.....Ive got a pair of 6990m cards in my CLevo laptop.......Ive had to RMA them out a half dozen times in under 6 months. Upgraded to 7970m's..........same thing...............Ive RMA'd countless 7950's and 7970's............issue after issue.......tons of PR/vaporware....its endless, its been going on for a decade.

Nvidia overall is much much better. I would take an Nvidia card that cost 20% more with 20% less performance in games over a competing AMD product just for the reliability, stability and piece of mind.

Warning issued for inflammatory language.
-- stahlhart

 

[akugami]

All you need to know in the end is AMD is garbage overall compared to Nvidia. This is coming from a builder/reseller of both products.

Its not just about framerates.....its about the quality of the hardware itself(how reliable it is/RMA rate), the quality and support of the drivers......visual quality.....etc etc.....Ive got a pair of 6990m cards in my CLevo laptop.......Ive had to RMA them out a half dozen times in under 6 months. Upgraded to 7970m's..........same thing...............Ive RMA'd countless 7950's and 7970's............issue after issue.......tons of PR/vaporware....its endless, its been going on for a decade.

Nvidia overall is much much better. I would take an Nvidia card that cost 20% more with 20% less performance in games over a competing AMD product just for the reliability, stability and piece of mind.

Anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal.

Having built multiple systems over the years with both AMD and nVidia GPU's, I've only had to RMA one AMD video card and I had two nvidia cards die on me out of warranty. And that's with roughly 15 builds for self or friends over the last 5 years.

But can you rely on my experience as evidence? No, because nVidia cards do not fail at twice the rate AMD cards do, at least not on a normal basis. These things also tend to go in cycles where one company may have a few issues. Maybe you didn't realize nVidia had to budget an extra 150-200million for high gpu failure rates in 2008 and of course the infamous video card killing nVidia drivers.

 

[McLovin42]

Anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal.

Having built multiple systems over the years with both AMD and nVidia GPU's, I've only had to RMA one AMD video card and I had two nvidia cards die on me out of warranty. And that's with roughly 15 builds for self or friends over the last 5 years.

But can you rely on my experience as evidence? No, because nVidia cards do not fail at twice the rate AMD cards do, at least not on a normal basis. These things also tend to go in cycles where one company may have a few issues. Maybe you didn't realize nVidia had to budget an extra 150-200million for high gpu failure rates in 2008 and of course the infamous video card killing nVidia drivers.

First off your just an end user, and I have no idea how good your building skills are, the protocols you take, and generally your overall compentency level. At our business, we warranty our custom builds, so we have to have competent techs doing the job and the sample level size we have is based on THOUSANDS of cards over a decade plus......not 2-3 cards from an enthusiast who may or may not very very compentent at building a rig.

Regardless, for a decade plus, AMD RMA/Defect rates have been more than triple Nvidia on a yearly basis for us. The physical hardware, the chips etc just are not of the same quality. Standards are just not as high. AMD caters to making a cheaper physical product with less software support to help it undercut its price structure against competitors like Nvidia and Intel.

No matter how you want to spin it, its been that way for a very long time.

 

[Gloomy]

Someone needs a disclaimer in their signature. :thumbsup:

 

[stahlhart]

Go have your pointless anecdotal argument somewhere else. Thread closed.
-- stahlhart