I'm thinking about upgrading my system with a new GPU. My Radeon HD 7770 is not enough for smooth XCOM 2 and Dark Souls 3.
So I've got stuck on the price range of about 200€, that seem doable for me as a carefull student. Now I'm thinking, should I get a GTX 960 or rather a R9 380? What exactly are the differences? I've looked them up and I'm not quite sure, which one is better.
I'll summarize the different specs:
GTX 960: GPU freq: 1241 MHz Streaming cores: 1024 RAM: 1752 MHz / 128 bit Power consumption: 120 W
R9 380: GPU freq: 1010 MHz Streaming cores: 1792 RAM: 1450 MHz / 256 bit Power consumption: 225 W
So my take away is, that GTX 960 is faster clocked, but has less streaming units and less bit on the RAM. What exactly does it mean, if the RAM has 128 bit or 256 bit? And is it better to have more streaming cores that are a bit slower, or less units that are faster? (I assume the first is better?)
I'm a bit rusty on GPUs, so I'm asking here the real experts :) Which one would you recommend me?
You shouldn't compare the amount of stream processors and frequencies between different uarchs, only with very similar cards like 390 and 390x and so on.
Basically AMD and Nvidia GPUs are like Porsche and Ferrari. They work on the same principal, doing the same job, but completely different implementations. There is no way you can compare them. Nvidia still somehow uses lower bandwidth and have similar results... Now, 380 outperforms 960 in DX11 and destroys 960 in DX12. That is something, you can compare. Also it consumes twice the power of 960. That is another thing you can compare. And is similarly priced. So price to performance it is better. However it is warmer, so tiny cases, not well ventilated cases, etc may be problematic.
You can't really compare them at all, and Nvidia calls them CUDA cores by the way. They're all called unified shaders, and it has been used in all DX10 cards and up.
Good example is 5870 vs gtx 580. 5870 : GTX 580 Shaders. 1600 vs 512 Clockrate. 700MHz vs 772 MHz
One would kinda expect the 5870 to be faster no? It in real life the 580 is considerably faster.
Comparing cores and frequencies between cards is a bad idea unless it uses the same basic chip.
I see :o Interesting, how very different nVidia vs. Radeon performs. I guess, I'll go for the R9 380 then. That was my favourite in the first place, but I wasn't so sure.
One thing to note about AMD cards, especially GCN ( their architecture name ) is that it tends to improve over time a lot more than Nvidia cards. AMD can't do as much optimization as Nvidia can, A: Because they have a smaller budget, B: because Nvidia has tons of code in games that only they can optimize for properly.
Over time you're going to see the perf gap between the 380 and 960 get wider and wider.
Those reasons given by @Castellorizon plus add in the fact that Nvidia will probably nerf the performance of the 9xx series like they did with the 7xx series and the 380 will last much longer. Furthermore, if you are looking at getting an adaptive sync panel someday it should be noted that a freesync panel will be a minimum of $100 less than an equivalent Gsync (I've seen the difference over $250 at times and others probably even higher than that). Yes AMD is much better than Nvidia in dx12 (thanks to dx12 taking a lot of elements from mantle).
For these reasons I'd go for AMD, but personally, I'd wait to see what the new chips are going to do to the market. There will be an influx of current gen cards on the used market as people upgrade to the newer stuff so you might be able to grab those up for cheap.
If you have to buy one now, get the 4gb 380 (or the 380x but the value on that one isn't too great but if you see one close to the price of a 4gb 380 just grab it). If you can wait, you might want to wait for the things polaris has to offer