Hi there,
I am going to build my first gaming pc at the start of this summer and I (like many other noobs) am wondering whether to buy and AMD card or an NVIDIA one. I heard that AMD cards, especially in crossfire, have driver problems. Is this true? Also when are the next gen cards coming out (for both AMD and Nvidia)? I am hoping to have a nice gaming pc for most of the summer and idk if the new cards are coming out in time.
Thanks for any help
AMD has good drivers but don't crossfire unless you have to. The new Nvidia cards may come out in the coming months.
The new 7990 just came out. The nvidia 700's are set to come out this summer.
For pure gaming I think AMD is generally the best bang for the buck. For productivity it is a toss up...
From what I've read is that AMD puts out pretty lame drivers day of but as time goes on their product just gets better. So if you're looking into buying a 7990 then you'll need to keep updating your drivers for better and better performance but if you're going 7970 or 7950 or something along those lines (Great GPU's for gaming) then you should be fine just make sure you install the most recent drivers possible and don't stick with the out of the box crap they give you.
Also SLI and Crossfire are interesting but from what I've heard they can be a pain... so I wouldn't want to touch them. When it comes down to it, it is more cost effective to just buy a GPU better then the one you want to Crossfire and then to throw the old one on Craigslist or into a mining rig. And certainly don't plan to Crossfire or SLI out of the box.
Right now the AMD cards are suffering from high frame latency in crossfire while the Nvidia cards are doing very well in SLI because of very low latency. However, AMD is finally working on this problem and new drivers are being released every month or two so check the news on those.
The new Nvidia cards are supposedly coming out at the end of May, but so far this is only a rumor.
http://www.techoftomorrow.com/2013/pc/nvidia-gtx-780-5gb-gtx-770-4gb-video-cards-coming/
As for the AMD 8000 series, all we know is that they likely won't release until Q4 of 2013 or Q1 of 2014.
i have not touched crossfire or sli,but i currently have a 7970 for a little over a year,and before that over about 4-5 years i had many different nvidia card(7300gt,7600gs,7900gs, 8400gs,8500gt,9600gt,gt240,and a gtx 460 se,not in that order lol)and i had about 2-3 dozen times where my driver crashed,and the cards were at stock speeds,and with my 7970 i have had one driver crash,and that was cause i think i was pushing the card a little hard when trying to OC it.
I will also add that out of all those nvidia card the only ones still working today are the GT240,the 460SE,and the 7900GS.
I have a 3 way 7970 crossfire setup, and yes, its a pain in the ass. Not every game scales well, but AMD is finally releasing decent drivers for multi-card systems. It is getting better though with the newly released 13.4 drivers, but sometimes my system will still bug out because of the drivers.
thanks for the advice i think ill avoid sli/crossfire as i probably would have no idea how to fix any bugs. Once again thanks.
with AMD, you should use the beta drivers, they usually have some driver magic going on, at least from what I hear
Let me preface this by saying this. Frame time issue have been going on for years! it's just now that one guy (quoting logan lol) pointed it out and said lookie here!
always generally avoid sli/crossfire because drivers on either amd or nvidia will not ALWAYS work while a single GPU will. [depends on the game/application]
amd typically (right now) has higher frame times than Nvidia but does that actually make a difference? no, unless you're OCD, this has been going on for years like i said and if it really was an issue it would've been adressed seriously then like it is now.
EDIT: in terms of getting/making the best GPU core/drivers, both companys do need to address this so we can refocus on framterates
when the 7970 and the 680 came out everyone (and myslef) would recomend the 680 because with current drivers it was the better card. As time progressed we can see that is no longer the case, and the theorectically more power/advanced card (litterlly bigger and more stuff on the PCB) is coming out on top where it should be. Point being amd knew their 7xxx drivers were shit and they worked hard on it and are now on top. I think that they will do the same with frametime driver issues, Oh Wait they are! (and we have alpha drivers) I'd say stick with amd because as drivers advance more and more,... you get the idea
In some cases yes depends on your luck with drivers these days. I remember when I had trouble getting my very very old Radeon X1600 Pro agp card to work propally cause the driver installation was a pain in the butt compared to Nvidia's current installation.
Comparing a very old driver install to current nvidia installation? Not fair.
Old card i have ( Radeon 5650M ) is pretty much screwed in terms of driver support. Games that crashed on driver error 1 year ago still crash after recent update.