Isn't AMD a no brainer choice because of Mantle?

(Noob here) I'm building a PC next week and I'm torn between the 770 and 280x. Can someone please explain why everyone hasn't suddenly switched sides to AMD due to mantle? People go to the extent of saying "mantle practically brings 2018-level performance to current generation graphics hardware." If that's true, or even half true, then why are there so many threads, articles and forums suggesting 770's and 780's? Is it simply poor timing for me to be looking into building a PC? If the miners weren't buying all the AMD cards would there still be a majority preference over nvidia? I'm not interested in Gsync (only because of financial reasons) or Shadow Play.


I'm actually hoping to be proved against mantle because I'm really excited about building a new PC next week but that won't happen if I need to buy a 280x, because all of the ones I'm willing to buy are out of stock everywhere and if I put in an order for one they can't tell me when It will be shipped to me, I could be waiting 3 weeks, and I'm not in a position where I can do that. o

AMD intends for Mantle to be an industry standard that Nvidia are welcome to use.

If Nvidia fails to adopt Mantle, they could produce their own solution. They already have their own API called NVAPI.

Mantle might be oversold/overestimated. We have rumours of a 40% performance gain. However, we know nothing of the hardware. This gain might be seen on an APU, but GPUs might see a minuscule gain.

Very few games use Mantle.

 

Just grab whatever is cheapest, they perform similarly. Unless there is a specific game or specific use that you have that could determine which GPU is best...?

Well I cant think of alot of nobrainers for switching to a 770 instead. You will ofcourse not have Geforce Experience and the drivers may be a bit better with nvidia. And honestly, there will likely not be a huge amount of games supporting mantle.

we've seen absolutely to proof of mantel, so anyone who's sane can't recommend anything based on something that we can't even say with 100% certainty is actually even real

even if it's the best thing ever we can't say that more than a handful of titles will support it

i haven't been recommending amd lately for the seer reason that they're unavailable everywhere and when they are they're selling for $100 too much

Mantle is over hyped to shit. We may see a 10% improvement but even then, Nvidia has at, any time, the option to adopt mantle. There is nothing stopping them from patching it on to every one of there video cards tomorrow if they had devs working on it today. But why would they? No game even has a demo of Mantle yet. Right now everyone is making huge claims off what AMD said it would do. Not what any real world user said so because no one outside of AMD or EA has seen it in action.

Also 280x vs Gtx 770. The 280x and 770 perform almost identically but the 280x now costs $400, while you can get a 770 for as low as $320. Even then you cannot find any 280x's in stock at $400 so your looking more at $430+ for the gaming performance of the Gtx 770. Note gaming performance. I say that because the AMD r9 cards are the best video cards to mine litecoins with. So people will pay that if they are miners because they know how to get that video card to make them money. Most people aren't mining because a lot of the time, the cost of power out ways the production of the litecoins.

R9 290 vs Gtx 780. These cards are now similarly priced, perform about the same but, the 290 runs hotter and is not available wide spread with custom coolers like ASUS's DC2 cooler or MSI's twin frozer cooler. These coolers help but it still runs much hotter than the Gtx 780 does. The 780 at load is sub 70c, while the 290 is 80c +. Same deal with litecoins on the 290. It's really good at it but not really cost effective for others. Also the 290's price is going up. Right now its about even with the 780 but the custom cooler versions are slightly more expensive. Also the 290 is incredibly hard to find in stock with a custom cooler where as the 780, is easy and can be found at any big or small name retailer no problem.  

I would need real numbers that I got to test before if I would say yes.

Nvidia already says that they wont use mantle and they make fun of it in press conferences. If mantle becomes a hit and nvidia stays stubborn, they will lose the gpu battle.

That's assuming Mantle is good, with noticeable performance improvements. And Nvidia can still make their own solution, they already have their own APIs.

I think you're too easily bought by the Mantle argument if you believe that.

both the people that are hyping mantel as well as those that are declaring it useless are jumping the gun and are most likely just fan-boys trying convince them selfs that they spend their money well.

I can't imagine that mantel will cause a sudden change devaluing all nvidia gear, but i can imagine that some games might run considerably faster on amd gear. I would expect it to be gradual change because programmers would have to get the hang of it.

In any case I would always buy gear that works well now, because chances are that by the time the big Announcements of today are deployed in a practical sens, the gear you buy now will be outdated.

So my advice is to not get caught up in premium-stuff or future-proofing, because computers are temporary compute machines that you will discard in a few years. Pay attention to price performance that is relevant to the present.

The reason AMD isn't a no brainer. A gtx 770  is $350, and a 280x which is a comparable card is $450. Simple as that.

Mantle isn't a factor either way. If AMD gets a 50% performance boost tomorrow, then Nvidia picks it up the day after and all is balanced again.

That's like saying "Isnt Nvidia a no brainer because PhysX?" No. No.

No. Nope. Stop it.

ministryofstopit.

To be fair PhysX isn't as big of a factor considering its something added graphically compared to being able to run all your graphics smoother. PhysX is more comparable to true audio in my mind.

 looks like the tables have turned on amd as being the more "affordable card" at least for higher end cards

damn crypto currency

oh well

i bought my 7950 for <200 brand new from a small store in town

it might help if you say the country you are in...

 

in my country, europe based i have :

eVGA nVidia GeForce GTX 770 = 717$

Asus AMD Radeon R9 280X Matrix = 514$

AMD is a no-brainer, not because of Mantle, but because of HSA and open source driver development. AMD leads in terms of HSA on x86... 'nuff said...

AMD R9-290 will be my next gpu to buy, unless AMD comes with something new soon, but i dont think that. reason, because in the Netherlands a GTX780 is still more expensive then an 290.But the 290 is the better card, in most games.

the GTX780 ti is not worth the price point in my opinnion.

A lot of good points in this thread, your last paragraph and the fact that nvidia can adopt Mantle at anytime in the future if they choose to has convinced me to go for the 770. Thanks for the advice everyone : )

Mantle is, for now, slightly irrelevant.

Mantle's performance gains in today's FPS games are irrelevant.

What is relevant in regards to Mantle is that it makes it a lot more convenient to develop games for developers, as it removes some of the significant restrictions that D3D has by design. Because of this, games might run a lot better with Mantle in the future (1-2 years depending on adoption rates).

If you aren't going to upgrade soon, go for the 280X, because it has also got a dedicated sound chip that might help a lot in the future if games start to use this sort of thing. As well as Mantle becoming a significant factor two years down the line (because NVidia cards can't support the same kind of low-level API with the same kind of improvements due to the architecture they use).

If you are going to upgrade within 3 years and aren't planning on playing SC or moving to Linux, go for the GTX 770. That gives you some nice PhysX effects and about the same performance (some games it's higher, some games it's lower) for the time being.

 

Mantle might just allow for pairing non-equal GCN cards and APUs without CrossFireX. This could give significant performance gains in games, as you can continue using your old card (maybe for OpenCL calculations on the game engine's side to take some load off the CPU?) together with your new card.

well bf4 has proven mantle to work well with the 45% improvement stated when they showcased Kaveri on BF4.  So it seems that the next gen EA games will support mantle and games like Thief are certified for mantle.  Cloud Emporium, Eidos, and Oxide for studios, Star Citizen, AVP, Sniper Elite and a few others i don't remember are going are certified as well.

It is a thing and it's going to get big, the next Dice game which is Battlefront will feature mantle right off the bat which my guess will be quite a big game.

I'm pretty sure that if mantle is a success that Nvidia will adopt, they'll be really stupid if they didn't, CUDA is starting to lose it's touch over the Stream Processors and many dev software now is focusing OpenCL like all the Adobe CC programs perform better now with Radeon cards than Nvidia because OpenCL dominates.  The only reason i went Nvidia was because Game engines and modelling/texturing software prefer CUDA.  Otherwise i woulda went straight for a 290x and went liquid cooling with it.