Pros and CONS of ATI vs Nvidia GPU

[+Thom Vee Subscriber²]

On the comparison of AMD and Nvidia, watch this video.

If you're not concerned about ray tracing, AMD is cheaper than Nvidia.

[Noir Angel]

On 23/11/2022 at 16:38, jnelsoninjax said:

Does anybody have any insights on the Intel Arc GPU's?

Would avoid for now. The performance is woefully inconsistent, the drivers are buggy as hell, they're basically unusable if you don't have Resizeable BAR support, and they don't run DX 9-11 and OpenGL titles all that well.

[hellowalkman Reporter]

Some great deals especially on the 6600, 6650 XT, 6750 XT and 6800 XT:

https://www.neowin.net/deals/thanksgiving-2022-gpu-deals-amd-rx-6600-6650-xt-6750-xt-6800-xt-6900-xt-cheapest-ever/ 

I think now is the perfect time to grab one as they are insanely good value.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 24/11/2022 at 09:46, hellowalkman said:

Some great deals especially on the 6600, 6650 XT, 6750 XT and 6800 XT:

https://www.neowin.net/deals/thanksgiving-2022-gpu-deals-amd-rx-6600-6650-xt-6750-xt-6800-xt-6900-xt-cheapest-ever/ 

I think now is the perfect time to grab one as they are insanely good value.

That or wait til black friday or cyber monday. Coming up

[spikey_richie]

I don't know if this is still the case, but I always found ATI drives really unreliable. Nvidia drivers have been mostly solid, over the years.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 24/11/2022 at 14:55, spikey_richie said:

I don't know if this is still the case, but I always found ATI drives really unreliable. Nvidia drivers have been mostly solid, over the years.

Lately? I've heard the opposite.  

[Dibbler]

Just my recent experience of trying an AMD 6800XT.....

 

Moving from a 1080Ti I was initially impressed with the AMD purchase, the drivers UI were, imo, most pleasing and seemed to offer many option easily accessible. But I got to a point of having issues not with AAA type titles but with some Indie games that I would typically play. Textures sometimes being an issue, with flashing, but, mainly, general performance being very poor. At times worse than the 1080Ti. Posting over in their forums didn't offer any working solution and, with regret, I went over to a 3070. From the start that performed as expected and, thankfully, supported with an expected uplift in performance in the Indie titles that the AMD card had so much issues with.

I do not think that it was an hardware issue but that of driver type support with some lesser known games, at least for me, where I have found Nvidia cards to be better supported.

I really did want the AMD card to work, it had so much going for it, but for me it was refunded, sadly.

 

 

[hellowalkman Reporter]

On 25/11/2022 at 16:44, Dibbler said:

Just my recent experience of trying an AMD 6800XT.....

 

Moving from a 1080Ti I was initially impressed with the AMD purchase, the drivers UI were, imo, most pleasing and seemed to offer many option easily accessible. But I got to a point of having issues not with AAA type titles but with some Indie games that I would typically play. Textures sometimes being an issue, with flashing, but, mainly, general performance being very poor. At times worse than the 1080Ti. Posting over in their forums didn't offer any working solution and, with regret, I went over to a 3070. From the start that performed as expected and, thankfully, supported with an expected uplift in performance in the Indie titles that the AMD card had so much issues with.

I do not think that it was an hardware issue but that of driver type support with some lesser known games, at least for me, where I have found Nvidia cards to be better supported.

I really did want the AMD card to work, it had so much going for it, but for me it was refunded, sadly.

 

 

Curious to know were those OpenGL titles? AMD recently released a driver update which massively improves performance in games and apps using that API.

https://www.neowin.net/news/amd-2271-driver-has-major-opengl-optimizations-and-windows-11-22h2-support/

I confirmed the performance upgrade on my own 4650G using Superposition.

[Dibbler]

 

On 25/11/2022 at 12:32, hellowalkman said:

Curious to know were those OpenGL titles? AMD recently released a driver update which massively improves performance in games and apps using that API.

https://www.neowin.net/news/amd-2271-driver-has-major-opengl-optimizations-and-windows-11-22h2-support/

I confirmed the performance upgrade on my own 4650G using Superposition.

 

To give you an example here is a screen or two relating to the game Workers and Resources Soviet Republic....(over 1600 hours played so far and my go to game)

 

1080Ti...

 

 

in the above screen the GPU was actually limited using Riva Tuner to 100FPS.

 

Here is the 6800XT.....

 

 

at 52FPS - FPS stats at top right of screen

 

the results within the driver panel at the time.....

 

it consistently performed around half that of the 1080Ti. That was with a new install of W 10 and then, on another drive, a new install of W 11. 

Drivers etc were tried and help tested. Still it was as is shown.

Within that games support forum there are several others who have experienced poor performance, corruption with graphics and problems with stability, all with the later versions of AMD's top end cards.

I had similar issues with the game Medieval Dynasty. Subnautica was also problematic. Patron seemed to have some flashing textures, iirc. But at that point, with a two weeks Windows of ease of return approaching, I refunded and reluctantly, but with relief at the outcome, bought an MSI 3070 GPU.

I genuinely would like the option to consider AMD again, if I only played AAA type titles perhaps that would be possible. But it didn't work for me.

I can imagine that some Indie developers with limited budgets do not have the ability to check many PC configurations and if their games are working with the vast majority of GPU's on the market (Nvidia) then that limits somewhat their commitment to focus their efforts in resolving issues.

 

 

Edited November 25, 2022 by Dibbler

[hellowalkman Reporter]

On 25/11/2022 at 18:46, Dibbler said:

 

To give you an example here is a screen or two relating to the game Workers and Resources Soviet Republic....(over 1600 hours played so far and my go to game)

 

1080Ti...

 

 

in the above screen the GPU was actually limited using Riva Tuner to 100FPS.

 

Here is the 6800XT.....

 

 

the results within the driver panel at the time.....

 

it consistently performed around half that of the 1080Ti. That was with a new install of W 10 and then, on another drive, a new install of W 11. 

Drivers etc were tried and help tested. Still it was has is shown.

Within that games support forum there are several others who have experienced poor performance, corruption with graphics and problems with stability, all with the later versions of AMD's top end cards.

I had similar issues with the game Medieval Dynasty. Subnautica was also problematic. Patron seemed to have some flashing textures, iirc. But at that point, with a two weeks Windows of ease of return approaching, I refunded and reluctantly, but with relief at the outcome, I bought an MSI 3070 GPU.

I genuinely would like the option to consider AMD again, if I only played AAA type titles perhaps that would be possible. But it didn't work for me.

 

 

 

Thanks for the detailed response. Definitely looks like one of the cores/threads is pegged close to 100% on the AMD system, whereas on the Nvidia one, the load is a much more evenly distributed across more threads. Definitely looks a DX11 driver overhead issue which is a really common legacy AMD issue.

AMD did put out a driver back in May addressing DX 11 performance issues but I doubt it would have helped you much at all. I hope AMD is mending these issues gradually.

[sinetheo]

On 25/11/2022 at 07:34, hellowalkman said:

Thanks for the detailed response. Definitely looks like one of the cores/threads is pegged close to 100% on the AMD system, whereas on the Nvidia one, the load is a much more evenly distributed across more threads. Definitely looks a DX11 driver overhead issue which is a really common legacy AMD issue.

AMD did put out a driver back in May addressing DX 11 performance issues but I doubt it would have helped you much at all. I hope AMD is mending these issues gradually.

One of the advantages of AMD GPUs is they use less CPU overhead as they use async with hardware based schedulers where Nvidia it is software. The above example maybe a bug. This is why CPU upgrades help Nvidia GPUs when you turn on ray tracing as the drivers rely on software 

[Dibbler]

I would typically notice tha tin the Indie games I played that showed the issues I described the AMD card was often showing very little utilisation, to relate with the low FPS. That was very much the opposite when playing with typical AAA titles where the drivers supported the GPU. The GPU would be typically fully utilised and I would get the performance as expected.

Sadly reviews rarely focus on the less than well known titles when reviewing GPU's, and so the only way to test out what I have noticed is to take a risk and buy a card for testing. You just need to make sure that you have a retailer who is known to be decent when it comes to returns.

[jnelsoninjax]

Do you gain any performance increases using AMD/AMD?

[adrynalyne]

On 26/11/2022 at 07:23, jnelsoninjax said:

Do you gain any performance increases using AMD/AMD?

Not really.

[hellowalkman Reporter]

On 26/11/2022 at 21:41, adrynalyne said:

Not really.

May be not entirely true as AMD's new Smart Access Memory (AMD Ryzen + AMD Radeon) is said to work better than AMD + Nvidia with resizable bar. More testing needs to be done though.

[adrynalyne]

On 26/11/2022 at 10:05, hellowalkman said:

May be not entirely true as AMD's new Smart Access Memory (AMD Ryzen + AMD Radeon) is said to work better than AMD + Nvidia with resizable bar. More testing needs to be done though.

https://www.windowscentral.com/amd-smart-access-memory

It's pretty hit and miss and sometimes slows you down. Considering the wins and losses, I would call it a draw unless you only play games that benefit from it.

 

Edit: Also, the OP is/was using an X470 board from another thread. Does he even have the hardware to support SAM?

Edited November 26, 2022 by adrynalyne

[hellowalkman Reporter]

The Windows Central data is pretty old. I heard TechSpot say more recently that AMD SAM is better sometimes compared to ReBar.

[sinetheo]

On 26/11/2022 at 08:23, jnelsoninjax said:

Do you gain any performance increases using AMD/AMD?

There are some optimized AMD titles such as World WarZ, Assasin's Creed Valhalla, and Borderlands that tend to favor similar speced AMD cards over Nvidia ones. Nvidia titles which use Gameworks are designed to run poorly on AMD are Cyberpunk and Control. I have seen SWTOR have some weird issues with the loading screen on AMD gpus (5 years ago) over Nvidia ones so maybe the parent above with his one example is just a title with no AMD QA work involved.

AMD optimization vs NVidia optimization are different and there is no right or wrong answer on the cards as AMD uses Vortex engines with lots of features but you have to code them vs Nvidia where it uses a distributed title architecture where math needs to be distributed to CUDA cores. If your game engine uses matrix operations with lots of variables that depend on other variables which could be on a different CUDA core then an AMD card will perform better. If your game engine is more simplistic with brute force and less variables are required than an Nvidia card will show better results.

My answer is as someone who uses both is to buy AMD, if you want more value and a good overall experience. One YouTube showed for the price of 1 4080 he built a whole system with a 6800 that is 80% as fast lol.  My answer also is to buy Nvidia if you make a decent income and want the best features. You can shell out a $300 to $700 premium for the best of the best performance, raytracing, dlss, and minimal fuss.

  ... though my faith in Nvidia drivers is being lowered recently this year as I had soo many problems with BSOD by adjusting digital vibrance and other odd issues. 😕

 

Personally I bought AMD/ATI when I was poor and making under 55K when I was younger and started getting back into Nvidia when I made close to 70K and above later in life. AMD can be a cool experience to learn about computers to give you a perspective. But if you are rich and game alot then Nvidia is amazing but a rip off in so many ways