AMD vs nVidia (vs Intel lol)

meanyhead

meanyhead
Greetings Commanders,

I'm starting a new desktop build finally after many years of abusing a laptop older than the game. Since I know how these things can sometimes go I'm gonna cut to the chase: I'm not looking for opinions. I would like to know any evidence towards buying one brand over the other, at a comparable price point, when it comes to Elite. It has been so long since I've done this that the only difference I remember is team blue had ray tracing. Is that still a thing? Does it matter? Does AMD do it yet? I used to lean towards AMD about my whole life until I starting editing videos for a friend and learned how important Intel and nVidia's hardware acceleration is! Feel free to link to benchmark testing or your own threads, maybe someone has tested different hardware in game. I have attached a photo of my puppy as a way of saying thank you in advance!

tl;dr rtx 4080 or rx 7900 xtx (or Arc..?) for hp reverb g2
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Crank Larson

Crank Larson
While I wish NVidia did have some competition, unfortunately they don't. Their GPUs are still far ahead of AMD in terms of both performance and stability (in my experience). I'm currently running a 3090 with AMD 5800X (having swapped out a Radeon 6800 after not very long). I'll likely go back to Intel motherboard too.
 

Morbad

Morbad
By and large, AMD is quite competitive with NVIDIA, except in price segments where AMD simply doesn't have a product (the 1600+ USD RTX 4090) and in NVIDIA sponsored titles that are heavy on hardware accelerated ray tracing. NVIDIA and Intel still have an edge in video encoding, but that is rapidly narrowing.

Having owned and extensively used both AMD an NVIDIA graphics cards since before the term GPU was coined, and most recently having had, or still having, in my possession two GTX 1080 Tis, three RTX 3080s, an RTX 4090, an RX 5700 XT, an RX 6800 XT, and an RX 6900 XT, I am firmly convinced that most statements regarding NVIDIA's overall driver superiority are mostly nonsense. There are, of course bugs, with all brands drivers.

meanyhead said:
I would like to know any evidence towards buying one brand over the other, at a comparable price point, when it comes to Elite.
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When it comes to Elite: Dangerous, both the RX 6000 and 7000 series still seem to have issues, mostly where VR is concerned. The 6000 series also has a strange problem with orbit line aliasing. Overall, in 2D, the difference is minor, and the performance is mostly a wash at similar price segments.

I will say that the presence of a DSR smoothing slider helps 4.0's aliasing issues quite a bit on NVIDIA and that AMD lacks a similar feature. VSR is largely equivalent, except for that smoothing functionality, and to get a similar effect via other means requires post-process shader injectors and a modest hit to performance.

Anyway, if Elite: Dangerous is a major use case, especially in VR, then NVIDIA is the obvious choice, even if I'd normally recommend AMD (especially RDNA2) at a given price point most of the time.

meanyhead said:
It has been so long since I've done this that the only difference I remember is team blue had ray tracing. Is that still a thing? Does it matter? Does AMD do it yet?
Click to expand...

Hardware accelerated ray tracing is still a thing. It matters in games that support it. AMD has had hardware accelerated ray tracing since the RX 6000 series. In general, they are behind both Intel and NVIDIA in this area, at any given price segment. The difference is a big deal in a few games, especially NVIDIA sponsored games where the effects are heavy (sometimes needlessly so), and more mild in others. If ray tracing heavy titles are a major use case, NVIDIA is the only compelling choice at the high-end, and even Intel's Arc parts are much more competitive than AMD in the mid-range. This is not to say you can't use RT in games that support hardware RT on AMD, just that when it's used heavily performance will generally be a full generation behind what NVIDIA offers.

meanyhead said:
tl;dr rtx 4080 or rx 7900 xtx (or Arc..?) for hp reverb g2
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VR rules out the 7900 XTX as being a good recommendation, at least until some outstanding issues are resolved. It also rules out Arc, because the fastest Arc is too slow.

So, if you don't have enough for a 4090 the 4080 is the rational choice.
 
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Fixitman

F
If Anti-Aliasing is important to you, choose Nvidia. Orbit lines and all other curved thin lines are broken badly on AMD 6000 series. I wouldn't be willing to purchase a 7000 series just to find the same issue.

Unless you're planning on only using Linux, AMD just isn't worth it. If you do plan on using Linux, AMD is barely worth it. Although the drivers are open-source, they are just too buggy.

Looking back, I wish I had stayed with Nvidia/Intel. At least the headaches would have been familiar.
 

Northpin

Northpin
Morbad said:
I am firmly convinced that most statements regarding NVIDIA's overall driver superiority are mostly nonsense
Click to expand...

In this particular framework - Elite Dangerous and/or VR, it's far from nonsense
And is this particular framework where the questions are asked and the answers are most relevant.

In a more generic setup - driver issues for versions between 22.5.1 and 22.11.whatever - more than 7 months worth of drivers, AMD series 6000 cards had issues in other games too, not only in ED.

 

Morbad

Morbad
Northpin said:
In this particular framework - Elite Dangerous and/or VR, it's far from nonsense
And is this particular framework where the questions are asked and the answers are most relevant.

In a more generic setup - driver issues for versions between 22.5.1 and 22.11.whatever - more than 7 months worth of drivers, AMD series 6000 cards had issues in other games too, not only in ED.
Click to expand...

I think I adequately addressed the issues with regard to this game. In more general terms, which were referenced, by yourself and others, the claims of AMD driver inferiority are baseless.

And yes, the post-22.5.1 drivers caused new issues with several games. Several. And several games is a tiny drop in the bucket for games that have issues with the drivers of any GPU brand, highly unlikely to have skewed any general trend, even if the last seven months of updates didn't fix more problems than they created, which they almost certainly did.
 

avow555

avow555
Northpin said:
In this particular framework - Elite Dangerous and/or VR, it's far from nonsense
And is this particular framework where the questions are asked and the answers are most relevant.

In a more generic setup - driver issues for versions between 22.5.1 and 22.11.whatever - more than 7 months worth of drivers, AMD series 6000 cards had issues in other games too, not only in ED.
Click to expand...
Do you an AMD card and what is it?
Do you have an HP reverb2?
 

Northpin

Northpin
I dont see people with rtx3000 or 4000 series complaining about VR issues in Odyssey
I do see people with AMD 7000 series cards complaining about VR issues in Odyssey (there is a dedicated thread about it here on the forums)

which is unfortunate 🤷‍♂️

avow555 said:
Do you an AMD card and what is it?
Click to expand...

nope.
i run an rtx3080 laptop and i have a very stable experience in Odyssey (or any other game i run using the nvidia card)

I cannot say the same about the few games that i run on the embedded ryzen 9 5900hx gfx (ryzen vega8 iirc).
I mean seriously, getting an amd driver error while playing Catan or Space Haven, it's embarrassing (it's not happening often enough to really annoy me and switch them to run on 3080, but often enough to be noticeable)

but i'm digressing since the OP question was about Odyssey and VR - last 2 (#187, #188) posts in the linked thread and others.
 
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oblivionmanman 2476

O
perfection is in the mind of the beholder,its good for one not the other,my game runs ok np,nvidia graphics gtx 550 ti runs me fine,find one that works for you then stick with it,good luck looking for perfection,07 .
 

Morbad

Morbad
Northpin said:
I cannot say the same about the few games that i run on the embedded ryzen 9 5900hx gfx (ryzen vega8 iirc).
I mean seriously, getting an amd driver error while playing Catan or Space Haven, it's embarrassing (it's not happening often enough to really annoy me and switch them to run on 3080, but often enough to be noticeable)
Click to expand...

Most GPU driver errors are problems with unstable system memory (or, occasionally, an unstable GPU), have nothing to do with bugs present in the GPU driver itself, and can be resolved by addressing the underlying issue. This is even more the case with integrated video as video memory is a subset of system memory.

My first reaction to a video driver crash would not be to blame the driver, it would be to run a long TestMem5 loop.
 

meanyhead

meanyhead
Thank you everybody for the excellent in depth info but he had me at
Morbad said:
4090
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Hopefully the local micro center will have one in stock before I get too impatient. And hopefully I won't need another gpu for another ten years :)
I have also been reading other places about how difficult amd works with vr. I literally haven't built a pc in ten years so why cheap out and regret it for that long lol
I also saw a video of ED on the reverg g2 and 4090 and it kinda struggled to maintain 90fps so yeah that did it for me.... yes smooth lines are mandatory...
 
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