GTX 950 vs R7 370 - How is the GTX faster?

[myocardia]

Correct. I remembered wrong.

Don't feel bad, you had every detail except the generation spot on. It was the GTX 770 that flew off of the shelves @ $400+.

 

[sm625]

GTX950 is roughly 3 years newer in design terms. Also, its die size is roughly 10% larger. Given these two attributes, one would expect roughly 20% more fps. Memory compression and very fast GDDR5 speeds helped to alleviate what would otherwise be somewhat of a memory bottleneck.

 

[Silverforce11]

Given the state of the R9 290 drivers the GTX 970 looked good. Now, we see with even MORE mature drivers, the R9 290 STILL had room to grow and is now definitely a faster card.

The problem with AMD isn't the hardware, it's the drivers/timing. The R9 290 with fully mature drivers would be great.

Nvidia gets a LOT out of their hardware day 1. So it looks great then and doesn't "grow over time"(Because they get most of the performance out when it matters.... the day a product comes out).

AMD takes forever to mature the drivers. If we throw the R9 290 drivers from when the GTX 970 came out vs the GTX 970 drivers then, now, the GTX 970 would demolish the R9 290.

More like recent games are developed ground up for GCN on the consoles and we are seeing the benefits.

You see the R290 often pull ahead of the 970 in newer titles. In older titles it hasn't improved.

AMD's drivers don't +performance in older games by that much, it's just a matter of benchmark sites adding new games to their list, removing old games.

Come DX12 era, the r290 will often be well in front. Would you say it's AMD's drivers maturing? No, that would be silly in fact, rather, games are being made to target GCN specifically, especially so in the DX12 era.

What you can say is that GCN is a very forward looking uarch, it was made for an era that comes later, years later than it's debut, because in many ways, it was actually a uarch made in collaboration with MS & Sony for their consoles, and the PC platform lacks low level API that consoles have. In essence, it's running crippled all this time, until DX12/Vulkan.

 

[tweakboy]

LOL GT4 wo.,,

 

[reallyscrued]

Well with all that in mind...I'll be returning my R7 370 I purchased for $140 before $10 rebate for this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127904

I suppose I'll be happier. Weird, never thought nVidia would provide more bang for buck.

 

[Yuriman]

Well with all that in mind...I'll be returning my R7 370 I purchased for $140 before $10 rebate for this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127904

I suppose I'll be happier. Weird, never thought nVidia would provide more bang for buck.

When an AMD card doesn't drop in price for 3 years, it's inevitable. I don't think 28nm has become significantly cheaper to build, and NV is now getting more performance from a smaller die with their new architectures.

I say this while having only run AMD cards in my primary desktop for close to 14 years.

 

[Zstream]

Well with all that in mind...I'll be returning my R7 370 I purchased for $140 before $10 rebate for this:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127904



I suppose I'll be happier. Weird, never thought nVidia would provide more bang for buck.

The AMD 270 was the best bang for the buck at the time. You can easily overclock the card to be a 270X and that will beat the 950.

 

[tweakboy]

For you 960 GTX is good choice and great price it has.. thx gl