04-03-2015, 08:47 PM
lol, double-ninja
I know ATI/AMD cards have been a bit weak in terms of OpenGL drivers, so if you play anything that relies on those (X-Plane is one I know) then you might be better off with Nvidia. It's not that they don't work, you might just get some strange looking artifiacts here and there, although I believe they've made a lot of progress improving them recently.
There is some extra power consumption but it looks to be only around 30W, so it's probably not significant enough to influence the decision.
They don't work as well in some games, certainly DCS fares much better with Nvidia cards. I think this is because it's still using DX9 and they've rather neglected those drivers to concentrate on DX10 and newer but hopefully when DCS 2 is released, using DX11, it will be much better. I'm waiting for that myself to decide which card I should get next, if it doesn't improve things enough that I can stick with my 6950 for now.
I find it hard to choose a card as even with the cards one down from the most expensive, it seems they can't maintain 60fps on Ultra settings, so you'd either have to run at 30fps or lower the settings to maintain 60fps and if I have to run at 30fps, I wonder if I'm getting any advantage over my current card. Generally the reviews only test with everything maxed out to benchmark, so it's hard to find out how well a particular game would run at less than max settings on a particular card but I'm sure the information's out there somewhere. There should be a site that shows for x card and x game what settings you can use and still maintain 60fps all the time. Then you could decide whether you're happy playing at those settings or if you want to spend more on a better card to use better settings.
I guess the main things to look for if you want a card that will last you a while are DX12 compatibility and 4GB (for 1080p - 1440p)but if you think you might be looking for another card in a year or less, you could probably manage with a cheaper DX11 2GB card. I wish they'd put memory slots on graphics cards, so we could just upgrade the memory if we need to
I know ATI/AMD cards have been a bit weak in terms of OpenGL drivers, so if you play anything that relies on those (X-Plane is one I know) then you might be better off with Nvidia. It's not that they don't work, you might just get some strange looking artifiacts here and there, although I believe they've made a lot of progress improving them recently.
There is some extra power consumption but it looks to be only around 30W, so it's probably not significant enough to influence the decision.
They don't work as well in some games, certainly DCS fares much better with Nvidia cards. I think this is because it's still using DX9 and they've rather neglected those drivers to concentrate on DX10 and newer but hopefully when DCS 2 is released, using DX11, it will be much better. I'm waiting for that myself to decide which card I should get next, if it doesn't improve things enough that I can stick with my 6950 for now.
I find it hard to choose a card as even with the cards one down from the most expensive, it seems they can't maintain 60fps on Ultra settings, so you'd either have to run at 30fps or lower the settings to maintain 60fps and if I have to run at 30fps, I wonder if I'm getting any advantage over my current card. Generally the reviews only test with everything maxed out to benchmark, so it's hard to find out how well a particular game would run at less than max settings on a particular card but I'm sure the information's out there somewhere. There should be a site that shows for x card and x game what settings you can use and still maintain 60fps all the time. Then you could decide whether you're happy playing at those settings or if you want to spend more on a better card to use better settings.
I guess the main things to look for if you want a card that will last you a while are DX12 compatibility and 4GB (for 1080p - 1440p)but if you think you might be looking for another card in a year or less, you could probably manage with a cheaper DX11 2GB card. I wish they'd put memory slots on graphics cards, so we could just upgrade the memory if we need to