Black Friday is around the corner and it’s time for me to upgrade my aged 970. I’m not particularly loyal to one brand and have been hearing good things about the latest AMD cards
My question is regarding their drivers. I know in the past their record is shaky at best. How are they these days in terms of new game support and stability? I was eyeing the 2070 super, but wouldnt be opposed to 5700 or something similar. Lastly, and somewhat unrelated, how much of a bottleneck would an i7 6700k be for either of those cards if running a 1440p dual monitor setup?
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Honestly, the last few generations Nvidia had much more driver issues than AMD. Right now it’s the other way around. AMD had some rough RX5700 driver launch, but they have fixed most of those issues.
At the moment, both are fine. I would say just go for whatever is cheaper and fits better in your budget. Thermals, power draw etc is pretty much the same for both, so there is no reason to go for one instead of the other based on anything else than price-performance.
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Yeah it’s not bottlenecking by any meaningful margin.
Like @psycho_666 said I’d just go with whatever you can get cheaper, both are decent cards.
If you use Linux go for Nvidia.
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Yeah, skylake is pretty much still what Intel is selling today. Just more of it per CPU and slightly faster. Eight threads of somewhat decent clocks won’t limit these GPUs at 1440.
I don’t like that suggestion but I can see why you are making it. That might do a 180° very soon though when another few kernel and mesa updates are out.
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The 5700 with an XT bios and a healthy power supply is a compelling value. If you want sheer performance then you’re probably going to want Nvidia. If you want bang for buck then you probably want AMD. Personally I stick with the animal I know and keep it simple on nvidia. If you’re more of a tinkering type then the 5700 makes sense.
none really at all unless you’re turning quality settings down to become CPU bound.
Long term, the 5700 will have better drivers than anything Nvidia can offer. Kernel 5.4 should fix most of the 5700 driver issues.
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I held off from AMD cards for years because of driver reputation from way back to the ATi days. I was Nvidia exclusive between 1998-2016.
In my experience, AMD drivers since 2016 ish are pretty solid.
I had a couple of issues with Vega 64 regarding video playback (or something, i forget exactly) in Windows in the first week or so of release (from memory) but i had more serious driver issues with my GTX760 when i was running that. That single problem i had lasted for a matter of days before a fix was out.
I’d disagree with that statement unless you have something more detailed to back it up?
Not having to worry about binary drivers and just running fully open source driver stack is a pleasant change from the crap i used to go through with Nvidia on Linux.
edit:
If it is current performance on navi related… well that will be a short term situation as mentioned above.
Better support and better performance.
All the reasoning you need.
AMD has open source drivers, so you’re not SOL when Nvidia is… like, not feeling it anymore. And the better performance only exists at 2080 levels and above.
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This is definitely not the case regarding Linux. AMD drivers are far more supported, due to the open source nature, and the Mesa stack. As far as performance, the 5700 XT is as good or better than the 2070, trading blows with the 2070 super, for less money. 2080 and above, true, Nvidia has the best performance.
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I don’t think this adds up.
I still have screen tearing on AMD in $CURRENT_YEAR despite everyone telling me how awesome the open source drivers are.
You guys are going deep into circle jerking Linux and AMD – This dude hasn’t even said he’s using Linux.
I’m not circle jerking. I own a couple of computers running Linux, one with AMD, one with Nvidia. The Nvidia one simply couldn’t update drivers past 280 without breaking X server completely, every time. The AMD drivers are far easier to maintain and update. I have run into screen tearing with them as well, but I also ran into that with Nvidia.
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Nvidia has a tool that fixes that. nvidia-settings and force full pipeline composition.
I’m running Nvidia 440 drivers on Fedora.
Good to hear. About a year ago it was a trash platform on Linux and couldn’t keep up on Windows.
It seems the consensus is that AMD still isn’t up to par but let’s hold out and hope they patch to make performance increase.
The OP hasn’t said anything about Linux. I think it was assumed because of this forum.
If you’re going bang for the buck and only looking at straight game numbers, the 5700 XT is usually the better card.
As for actual overall value, the one leg up on Nvidia in games that I’d give to the 5700 XT is Radeon Image Sharpening, it’s a good bit better than DLSS. But then the 2070 Super has CUDA, RT cores, and a vastly, vastly better NVENC encoder. If you don’t have a problem with making an account for GeForce Experience, in my opinion and experience, Shadowplay is just easier to use and overall works better than AMD’s ReLive.
I’d personally go for the 2070 Super (will hopefully yoink one eventually), I’m keen to see what they can do, and how RTX ray-tracing looks in titles that support it, and more importantly how that impacts screenshots (I like taking them, lol). A 2070 Super is usually within $60 of a higher AIB 5700 XT, and if you compare reference to FE they’re about $100 more, but the FE 2070 Super has a vastly superior cooler to the reference 5700 XT.
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I only had a problem with your statement that comparing Founder’s Edition cards. AMD’s decision to put blower type design on its reference/founders edition was a bad decision. Its hot, noisy and not cheap. PCB components on the otherhand is 
. Nvidia’s Founder Edition/Reference design seems to be usually better vs AMD.
2070 Super only seems to make sense if you game on 1440 with higher refresh rates of 120hz and above. If you game on 1440p60, 5700XT seems to be the more cost-effective choice (unless you want RTX).
I want a 5700XT too but mostly for philosophical reasons (AMD loves linux more and is overall cost-effective right now). If someone was to give me a 4k 144hz HDR display right now I can only trust on Nvidia to have the current capability to push that.
My statement? Or were you addressing someone else?
It’s also a good boost in features though, and again the NVENC encoder can’t really be glossed over, a lot of people like to record gameplay or sometimes stream for fun.
Cost-effectiveness though, like you said that’s 100% the 5700 XT for gaming. If you do other stuff, it depends on what that other stuff is.
Just this. Like I said, recently, AMD makes poor design choices for cooling their reference design. The underlying PCB is more than competent. The only reason to get a reference design is to do water cooling mods.
That’s what I said. The Founders Edition 2070 Super has a much better cooler than the Reference (blower) RX 5700 XT. Rephrasing: The blower cooler on the 5700 XT is pretty dang bad, the FE 2070 Super’s cooler can actually adequately cool the card.
Basically if it’s a choice between an AIB 5700 XT and an FE 2070 Super, I would personally choose the 2070 Super because more features and slightly better performance. I would never choose the reference 5700 XT, even if they do look pretty IMO (unless I was watercooling the card, then I’d get the cheapest compatible one, usually a reference card). But then I also have a Radeon VII for when I need my AMD fix, so my personal choice would be different from someone else’s. I still think it’s useful for people to provide their perspective though, and that’s mine.
I didn’t mention PCBs, I was just comparing the coolers.
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