41 replies to this topic

[Catamount]

AlphaToaster, on 22 March 2016 - 03:42 PM, said:

I recently purchased an eVGA GTX 970 4GB from BestBuy after a long conversation with the sales person there. From our conversation he mentioned the R 390 is going to out perform the GTX 970 by a good +30% with DX12.

I picked up the 970 because it came with The Division for free and I am not on DX12 yet. I am also an eVGA fan because I have had good luck with warranty support from them, but seriously looked at the R 390.

We don't really know yet. Those results are from a very tiny sample of DX12 software (by which I mean sample of one: Ashes of the Singularity), and while GCN has some hypothetical advantages (and some smaller hypothetical disadvantages as only Maxwell 2.0 supports DX12.1 currently), well we'll just see if they actually materialize as more demanding DX12 games come out or more current demanding games (Ark, Star Citizen, etc) gain DX12.

It'll definitely be fun to see how much, if any, DX12 shakes up how well these cards stack up against each other.

Edited by Catamount, 23 March 2016 - 05:56 AM.

[Rykiel]

With more information having come in over the last few days on both AMD's and NVIDIA's releases for this year, and with your caveat that you will be gaming @ 1080p, you might as well get a GTX 980 (if you've already upgraded your PSU). They can be found new for around the $400 mark at Newegg, Amazon, and other online retailers (assuming you live in the US). Going used is a good option, too, if you can find it.

I really don't think that AMD's Polaris and NVIDIA's Maxwell (Q2/Q3 2016) will be anything to write home this year. Q1/Q2 of 2017 is when HBM2 will finally make a big play, and that should be when AMD's Vega/NVIDIA's "top-tier" Titan or GTX 1080 Ti? will come in handy. Given that you will probably be using NVIDIA's DSR (nice quickie solution that works, for the most part, easier and better than AMD's VSR), GTX 980 is again probably your solution. (HBM2 really is useful in 4K resolutions, not so much at lower ones).

The only possible take from Polaris in the middle of this year is if the power savings really is as good as AMD claims -- if it is, check it out once it hits (from review sites like HardOCP, TechPowerUp, Anandtech, etc) and if the price/performance/power efficiency beats that of a used GTX 980 (which usually runs around $330-$400), I'd go for it.

I'm coming from a big, fat, single-card R9 390s in Crossfire/running at 4K perspective, so I personally will probably pass up this year's cards and wait for next year. (still annoyed that MWO doesn't really support Crossfire -- haven't been able to get it working no matter what hack I use, lol)

Edited by Rykiel, 28 March 2016 - 05:30 PM.