Radeon graphics - Yea or Nay?

[Frybert]

I've encountered nothing but problems with ATI. Your mileage may vary.

[Camacha]

On 01/12/2015, 18:55:18, Space Cowboy said:

but last I hear Radeon was a no go basically.

That is a great way of judging people's trustworthiness when it comes to advice. Do not takes advice from anyone saying this, in this and other computer matters.

The short, but right answer is: it depends. Both brands make excellent cards, both brands have small and serious issues. Do not let folk tales scare you into believing otherwise. I can assure you from both personal and professional experience that there is no significant difference between the brands (besides business practices, but we are not talking about those right now). Go for the brand/card that gives you the best performance for your money in the appropriate real life benchmarks, unless you have specific technologies, OSs or reasons to come to a different conclusion.

It really is one of the most stubborn fairy tales on computer related forums.

4 hours ago, Frybert said:

I've encountered nothing but problems with ATI. Your mileage may vary.

ATI does not exist any more. It has not for the past 9 years. I guess your experiences have been a while ago

 

 

Edited December 13, 2015 by Camacha

[Frybert]

Editing for fix.

Its been that long? Wow. Feeling kind of old now. But yeah, Its been quite some time since I've owned one.

Edited December 14, 2015 by Frybert
wut

[The Destroyer]

I love AMD cards (cheaper, cooler looking (tri-x!)) but for CPUs I perfer intel. For laptops though, I have no idea

[Randox]

My advice would be to be wary of anyone who swears by any one brand. In a nutshell, you're taking advice from people who haven't taken a serious look at all the options. Right now, neither company has a monopoly on the price to performance metric, and when you start looking at the comparable cards between the two makers, you'll usually find that one card will be the general winner, but the other card will be a better performer for certain games. So without a whole spiel about how the industry works, the best thing you can do is this:

1. Figure out your price point.

2. Find cards from both manufactures (all three for laptops/integrated desktops) in that price range

3. Figure out what games you want to play

4. Go to a site like anandtech and compare benchmarks for the games you want to play, and see what is going to work for you.

 

For example, if I were to buy a new GPU today, I would probably be looking at either a GTX 970, or an AMD R9 390 ($450 bracket). I think most people would declare the 970 to be the overall winner. For my purposes, the only games I play in those benchmarks are Shadow of Mordor, and GTA 5, and I play them at 1080p. Shadow of Mordor is interesting because the 390 achieves a not insignificantly higher average framerate, but also the lowest minimum frame rate. So it's not consistent, probably a few stutters, but also a better overall performance. If I was really into Shadow of Mordor, I'd want to find a way to play the game for myself on the two cards. For GTA 5, the cards are almost dead even. The 970 gets a few extra frames on average, with a tie for minimum performance. If I were actually going to buy one of these cards, I'd probably see if I could find some other benchmarks for other games I play (done by the same people. Comparing benchmarks for one game done by different methodologies or on different rigs is a complete waste of time, not to mention misleading). Based on this site, for the same price, I'm going to by the 970 for sure, because it looks like the overall winner, and not all the games I am going to play are out yet, so that's a safe choice. But I'd also be very willing to buy that 390 for a good deal.

It's actually a really weird year, where a lot of the benchmarks look like the one between the 390 and 970. AMD hasn't had to drop their prices, because their cards are stacking up very well this year, so Nvidia is also doing better on the performance per dollar than usual as well.

Now, you want a laptop, and I don't really do laptops, so all I can do is advise you that everyone who answered this kind of question has an agenda. We're all cheerleading for our preferred method of buying cards here. I just happen to think that my 4 steps here are a better way to go than brand loyalty

Edited December 15, 2015 by Randox

[Camacha]

8 hours ago, Randox said:

My advice would be to be wary of anyone who swears by any one brand. In a nutshell, you're taking advice from people who haven't taken a serious look at all the options. Right now, neither company has a monopoly on the price to performance metric, and when you start looking at the comparable cards between the two makers, you'll usually find that one card will be the general winner, but the other card will be a better performer for certain games. So without a whole spiel about how the industry works, the best thing you can do is this:

[...]

Finally someone knowing his stuff and talking sense