AMD or NVIDIA for dual OS system?

[Kano]

@bridgman

I absolutely hate relabeled gfx chips - that applies to Nvidia as well. There is no reason to buy em new. Every old chip is overpriced if you could get cheaper used cards with the same chip. If AMD wants to make money they should create chips with HDMI 2.0, HEVC decode, better OpenGL support. AMD is so far behind that they do not even have got an own chipset with PCI-E 3.0. That company wants to lose customers, otherwise they would have produced better hardware.

[bridgman]

I absolutely hate relabeled gfx chips - that applies to Nvidia as well. There is no reason to buy em new. Every old chip is overpriced if you could get cheaper used cards with the same chip.

OK, I can't argue with that, but the majority of our first-level customers (OEMs, Channel etc..) do want updated product branding. I don't have a good answer for how to close that gap...

There is no reason to buy em new. Every old chip is overpriced if you could get cheaper used cards with the same chip.

That doesn't work if the person who bought the earlier product is still using it rather than offering it to the used market, which I think is the most common case here.

AMD is so far behind that they do not even have got an own chipset with PCI-E 3.0. That company wants to lose customers, otherwise they would have produced better hardware.

Doesn't Kaveri have PCIE 3.0 support ? Or are you saying we should design new chipsets for the older discrete CPUs ? At first glance that doesn't seem like the best place to spend R&D $$.

[Kano]

Well it sounds weird that AMD wants to sell highend cards only to Intel users. If you think there is an AMD chipset/cpu which supports pci-e 3.0 show me the amd.com link. I am sure you don't find one. And show me a card with HDMI 2.0...

[bridgman]

Well it sounds weird that AMD wants to sell highend cards only to Intel users. If you think there is an AMD chipset/cpu which supports pci-e 3.0 show me the amd.com link. I am sure you don't find one. And show me a card with HDMI 2.0...

We want to sell high end cards to anyone that wants them, whether they have Intel or AMD CPUs. The newest cards support PCIE 3.0, but I don't think anyone has been able to demonstrate higher real world performance between PCIE 3.0 and 2.0 -- AFAICS the current crop of CPUs and GPUs are not fast enough to max out PCIE 2.0 yet.

Are you asking for a link to Kaveri, or are you talking about the older discrete CPUs (per my previous post) ?

[Kano]

PCI-E 3.0 is mainly useful for multi gpu configurations which do not support 16 PCI-E lanes but also good for very fast SSDs with M.2 connection as those can use only 4 PCI-E lanes.

4k is getting the standard for this years TVs, you can get em for 500 $ already, using old hardware you can only use 30 Hz settings - those TVs don't support DP usually.

I am disappointed by Intel as well, Broadwell is missing HDMI 2.0 too and it was just introduced, but at least Skylake will fix that. If AMD does not catch up shortly there will be no reason to buy AMD hardware at all this year. Next month Nvidia will add slower/cheaper cards with Maxwell gen 2. Do you want to replace your gfx card as soon as you buy a new TV?

[scathlock]

[...] why should you pay full price for old relabeled chips? Because R9 280(X) sounds better than HD 7xxx?

In my country used HD 7970 costs about 80% of 280x, so I prefer to buy new product to get at least full warranty.

R9 285 and GTX 960 costs more-or-less the same and they are cheaper than 280x.

[Kano]

Well in case you want to buy a 4k tv within the lifetime of your gfx card forget AMD...

[A Laggy Grunt]

For open-source purists: Something with Tahiti. The support is there already. Hawaii and other modern GPUs will get proper support pretty quickly.
For this-must-work-fast-now: NVidia + binary blob. Very fast, very efficient.

If you want to run games in Wine, your CPU basically has to be Intel to deal with WineD3D overhead. AMD just doesn't have the single-threaded performance. Or you could play with a Radeon + GalliumNine, but that's very experimental.

[scathlock]

Maybe I should ask a fundamental question (or even two):

• What are pros and cons of using open source drivers?
• What are pros and cons of using proprietary drivers?

[duby229]

Maybe I should ask a fundamental question (or even two):

• What are pros and cons of using open source drivers?
• What are pros and cons of using proprietary drivers?

Well, it's hard to look at like that.

Basically does the OSS driver provide the capability you need? If yes use OSS driver, if no use proprietary driver. The majority of people can use the OSS driver on Tahiti and never know it. AMD's open source driver is intended to provide automatic support without the user having to deal with it. The proprietary driver is intended for people that need more advanced features.

Right now AMD's OSS driver is better than nVidia's, but nVidia's prorpietary driver is better than AMD's.

OSS DRIVER
Stable
almost as fast as catalyst
almost no configuration (out of box support)
no opengl 4.x support yet
incomplete opencl support

CATALYST DRIVER
Unstable buggy crap.
full opengl support
working opencl support

EDIT: If you need a proprietary driver, just choose nVidia, you'll be way happier with it. But I think you'll be happy with radeonsi OSS drivers too.