$230 GTX 970 or R9 390 or GTX 1070?

Microcenter has a sale on the EVGA GTX 970 It's $230 after a rebate. I live near a Microcenter so the plan would be to pick one up in store to avoid shipping costs. Up until now I was planning on getting an R9 390 because I prefer them to the 970s. $230 for a 970 seems like very good price to performance for me. Should I pick this one up, spend more on a 390, or wait for the 1070 to come out?

Well can you swing the extra 150 bucks for a 1070? If not then get the 970 while it's on sale. Or the 390 if you really want it

Just wait a few weeks for the AMD stuff and the nVidia stuff to come out and independent benchmarks to verify. Especially on the 1070 which I think is going to not perform as well as people think...

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I agree. Everyone's on their hype shit because of benchmarks provided by Nvidia. The benchmarks are always so unrealistic with the information given before the cards come out.

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what would you do?

That's one of the things that really pisses me off too... When Nvidia doesn't live up to the hype its perfectly understandable, but god forbid AMD doesn't live up to the hype.

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How much is the 390? Every time I got a reduced vram card I always ran into vram limits a few years later.
I don't think ive hit the 3.5GB limit at 1440p in anything besides dying light, but look up the games you play to see what they actually use.
If you are running 1080p and don't plan to go higher the 970 would be a great card for that price, but I would probably spend the extra money to get a 390 instead.

Either way wait another week or 2 for the 1080/1070 NDA to be lifted and see actual performance numbers.

I'd wait until at least polaris launches. The 970 was beat by the 390 so I wouldn't doubt that the 490 could beat the 1070 (of course this is all speculation at this point which, if anything, should be more of an incentive to wait until we have hard evidence).

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1070 still have 8gb ram
cant go wrong with that

970 for 200 is cheap as hell thats a great deal

I already have one 970 so for me getting a second one would be the way to go.

You could also wait for 490 to come out for 300 as the rumors go...
Also, nobody yet knows how 1070 performs, nor how 490 will, so we don't know is it worth the extra money over what 970 and 390 are currently costing...

@kewldude007

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Currently I'm planning on grabbing a 1070 when the board partners start doing their thing. I am also planning on sticking with 1080p for a while. My thought and hope is that a 1070 should handle all the new stuff coming for a few years at 1080p and maybe even 1440 pretty handily without needing to add more power.

Not much to say about the GTX1070 right now.
It will be out 10th of June or so.
i would personaly wait.

If you intend to never use Linux, then AMD is a decent choice, the 1070 is meant to be priced about the 390x, and the 1070 is claimed (and showed) to be like %5 faster then Titan X at stock! (yes there are actually benchmarks out, but we all don't trust them for whatever reason).

I have already had one 390x DIE on me, just so you know. Before that my 290x cards died on me, I'm sure AMD's new cards won't do this DYING thing right?! Anyway don't expect AMD Polaris 10/11 cards in June, would be surprised if they started showing them off then!

Don't go for the R9 390. It consumes a lot of power. I made an excel document calculating the power cost running a card for 3 years every day for 2 hours and it comes down to 160$.

In other words a 390 will cost you an extra 160$ over 3 years compared to 75$ extra on the 970 on electricity.

I'm confident that the amdgpu and amdgpu-pro drivers will do a pretty good job on Linux with the new cards.
The open source part of it makes things way less complicated for the distro managers and you. Especially if you use a rolling release distro.

Yes the AMDGPU driver will only get better, but how long until it becomes 4k@60fps+ usable? So far the only games I've be able to get that with is Shadow Warrior and stuff like Stellaris. Warthunder/ARMA3/ARK all chug to death on AMD hardware under Linux unfortunately, I'm just not willing to wait for 2 years for AMDGPU to get good enough for that content to work thats all, I'm sure it will get there one day.

In saying that I won't be getting a 1080 until end of next month, and AMD's new amdgpu-pro driver will have a updated release by then I'm told, so if it suddenly works ALLOT better then I will hold off buying the NVIDIA card. But another thing to consider is that apparently AMD are dropping high end cards for the time being, meaning we will only see low-mid end cards with Polaris, no 1070 or 1080 killers in other words! Told we may need to wait until sometime next year for that, if at all (nvidia will have a whole new batch out by then also).

That's actually AMD's goal along with freesync on linux.
The reason for your bad fps is that you don't have the proprietary part yet. You're running on half of the driver.