GTX 970 vs R9 390?

[DonnieBrasco453]

So I am buying a new graphics card as a christmas gift for myself, and i am honestly at a loss at which card to buy. This: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487088 or this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127874&cm_re=390-_-14-127-874-_-Product

 

Apparently they are both fantastic cards, and everyone I ask seem to always tell me "either one is great." I've also read a bunch of reviews, and done a lot of research, and the basic consensus seems to be that both cards are indeed fantastic....however, I have heard some people say that the 390 is more "future proof" due to its 8 GB of VRAM, and it is also 20 bucks cheaper than the 970. So, people, of Nexus, I ask you...which one is better? Which one would you personally choose? All feed back would be greatly appreciated. That 970 is very tempting though especially due to its free game....

 

Also, I also need a Power supply to go along with it, since i'm running a prebuilt PC. If you could find me one that's good for either of those cards, that would be appreciated also.

I was looking at this PSU: http://www.ncixus.com/products/index.php?sku=97307&promoid=1027 However, I have heard that NCIX US is not a very good company to buy from....in addition, that savings code for 40 dollars off and 30 dollars mail in rebate seem almost too good to be true....What do you think of NCIX US, if you've purchased from them? And what do you think of the PSU?

 

Again, any feed back would be greatly appreciated! This will be my first time buying a high end graphics card like this one. Currently running a 750ti.

Edited December 26, 2015 by DonnieBrasco453

[Gazz43]

I don't know much about PCs for GeForce i would go for the GTX 980 better specs than the GTX 970 but the ADM R9 390 looks better

GeForce
GTX 980 GeForce GTX 970
(actual) GeForce GTX 970
(originally reported) GPU GM204 (Maxwell) GM204 (Maxwell) GM204 (Maxwell) Process 28nm 28nm 28nm Shader Units 2048 1664 1664 Texture Units 128 104 104 ROPs 64 56 64 L2 Cache 2 MB 1.75 MB 2 MB Core CLock 1126 MHz 1050 MHz 1050 MHz Memory Clock 1750 MHz GDDR5 1750 MHz GDDR5 1750 MHz GDDR5 Memory Bus 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 224 GB/s 196 GB/s (3.5 GB)
28 GB/s (512MB) 224 GB/s Memory Capacity 4GB 4GB 4GB Max. TDP 165 Watts 145 Watts 145 Watts Aux. Power
Connectors 2x Six-pin PCIe 2x Six-pin PCIe 2x Six-pin PCIe

Overview

Card Status

Released

Manufacturer

AMD

Release Date

16th June, 2015

Launch Price

$329 USD

Board Model

AMD C671

GPU

GPU Model

28nm Grenada PRO

Cores : TMUs : ROPs

2560 : 160 : 64

Clocks

Base Clock

1000 MHz

Memory Clock (Effective)

1500 (6000) MHz

Memory

Memory Size

8192 MB GDDR5

Memory Bus Width

512-bit

Memory Bandwidth

384 GB/s

Physical

Interface

PCI-Express 3.0 x16

Thermal Design Power

230

[HeyNeOx]

 

I don't know much about PCs for GeForce i would go for the GTX 980 better specs than the GTX 970 but the ADM R9 390 looks better

GeForce

GTX 980 GeForce GTX 970

(actual) GeForce GTX 970

(originally reported) GPU GM204 (Maxwell) GM204 (Maxwell) GM204 (Maxwell) Process 28nm 28nm 28nm Shader Units 2048 1664 1664 Texture Units 128 104 104 ROPs 64 56 64 L2 Cache 2 MB 1.75 MB 2 MB Core CLock 1126 MHz 1050 MHz 1050 MHz Memory Clock 1750 MHz GDDR5 1750 MHz GDDR5 1750 MHz GDDR5 Memory Bus 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 224 GB/s 196 GB/s (3.5 GB)

28 GB/s (512MB) 224 GB/s Memory Capacity 4GB 4GB 4GB Max. TDP 165 Watts 145 Watts 145 Watts Aux. Power

Connectors 2x Six-pin PCIe 2x Six-pin PCIe 2x Six-pin PCIe

Overview

Card Status

Released

Manufacturer

AMD

Release Date

16th June, 2015

Launch Price

$329 USD

Board Model

AMD C671

GPU

GPU Model

28nm Grenada PRO

Cores : TMUs : ROPs

2560 : 160 : 64

Clocks

Base Clock

1000 MHz

Memory Clock (Effective)

1500 (6000) MHz

Memory

Memory Size

8192 MB GDDR5

Memory Bus Width

512-bit

Memory Bandwidth

384 GB/s

Physical

Interface

PCI-Express 3.0 x16

Thermal Design Power

230

 

Well, you have to pay 150 more bucks to get the 980, though he was asking a choice between two gpu, not a third one.

I would go for the R9, because as you said, it is more "future proof" than the 970. If I had to choose, i'd go for 4 gigs of vram, not a game. The 20 bucks you save can be used for that game, and I bet you'll have it cheaper with steam sales.

[obobski]

I would go with the Radeon, and here's why:

 

- Its cheaper. Honestly the two of them offer competitive performance and present-day functionality so whatever is cheaper should win and that should be that.

- nVidia blatantly lied about DirectX 12 support (on all 900-series GeForce cards) and the memory capabilities (on the 970 specifically); the GTX 970 should be regarded as a 3.5GB card and it does not support async compute in DX12 (which the GCN-based Radeons do). Personally I'd say vote with your wallet and send a message that selling a product that does not, and can not, meet its claimed specifications is not okay, and that your dollar will pay for something that can deliver everything the box says it can (which AMD can currently do).

- nVidia has released a couple of rounds of absolutely wretched drivers recently (and has a long track record of breaking old/legacy games and applications if it suits contemporary benchmarks), and if you're running Windows 10 you will forced to use whatever is the latest, even if it makes your machine a brick. AMD/ATi has a far from perfect record for driver development, but I haven't heard many (any?) reports of "loaded Win10 and my machine is a brick" from AMD graphics (whereas this is actually likely to become a meme its so common with nVidia cards).

- AMD has done a lot better with respect to adding new features to GCN over the years, while nVidia has recently been playing a game of vendor lock-out and forced upgrades, so if some new whizbang feature comes out in their drivers that you want, guess what, have to buy a new nVidia card to enable it; AMD has just been adding the features in no problem.

 

 

The 8GB of VRAM will do absolutely nothing for you and isn't a benefit or liability - nothing today needs more than 4GB (and honestly very little even needs that, especially if you're running at more normal/typical resolutions like 1080p or SVGA), and by the time we get into games that can actually draw on 8GB+ of video memory, the GPUs of today will be likely woefully out of their league. So that's nothing I'd be overly worried about. The 390 is identical to the 290 series (and there are 8GB 290s), so if you can find a 290 or a 4GB variant for less money, save your money and go that route.

 

This isn't meant to be "AMD fanboy" or "nVidia fanboy" opinion either - I own, and have owned, many Radeon and GeForce cards (along with a lot of other brands of cards) - I preference whatever works, is a good value for money, and doesn't create headaches down the line. Currently that looks a lot like Radeon; in the future that may change, its impossible to say.

 

 

As far as the PSU, 750W would be fine for either card and a modern PC, as long as you aren't trying to run like 20 hard-drives or some other huge, taxing peripheral off of it, but for a contemporary CPU, either of those cards, normal peripherals, etc it should be no problem at all. I'd probably dump MSI for the Radeon though, as their customer service ranges from mediocre to awful IME; go with Sapphire or XFX (which are much more on-par with EVGA).

[Ranebow]

The R390 is not much different in real world scenarios than the 290. I previously had two R9 290s and then switched to two GTX 970s. Keep in mind I had the 290s for more than a year and knew them like the back of my hand.

Despite a well ventilated and cooled case, I was never happy with the heat or power that they used, especially in Crossfire. The one saving grace was that the model I had(and I suspect this was true of most R9 290 that were good quality chips), was able to under volt quite significantly - to the point that on stock clocks (and even with some overclock) I could undervolt the card enough to save up to ten or fifteen degrees per card.

 

They also had (not sure if 390 is affected by this) some issue supporting 1600p monitors with their VSR upscaling/downscaling technology.

 

 

The move to the GTX 970 has been a mostly positive one.

 

• Despite most benchmarks having the R9 290/390 and GTX 970 neck and neck at 1440p/1600p, I have found the 970s to be often faster - particularly when using in-house Nvidia features such as TAA (which is a great Anti-aliasing method).
• They also have a smoother feel to them in terms of texture loading and VRAM management.
• They run cooler considerably, the fans are nowhere near as grating when they speed up.
• The power draw is shockingly lower.
• Support Physx
• SLI works in windowed mode (true of all Nvidia cards)
• DSR (Nvidia's version of upscale/downscale technology), supports your native resolution and is more flexible
• The 970 is an awesome card for handling chroma/luma upscaling for video viewing. There is a neat program named Potplayer, that can be complimented or supplemented with a video plugin named MadVR. Together you can set the PotPlayer to automatically upscale, filter and present videos in a higher native resolution than your desktop. Watching something in 4k (though it still has some grain - it's not real 4k) that was previously 480p or worse, is pretty awesome. I've been going over a 480p set of Star Trek Next Generation, using some serious upscallng at 3840x2160 resolution. It looks as good as most quality 720p/1080p copies. All powered by a single GTX 970.
• In the past few years, Nvidia drivers have been more nice to work with. Maybe that's changed now that AMD revamped their approach to driver software.

 

The concern over the GTX 970 having only 3.5gb of 'good' VRAM is not what people make it out to be. The performance loss when accessing that remaining .5gb is not noticeable - additionally, if you're pushing 3.5gb+ in a game, you've probably got some type of third party mods and third party mods aren't particularly efficient in their VRAM usage. Point being, you could have a 12gb Titan and still suffer VRAM related issues, simply because the mod or extra usage is inefficient. GTA 5 comes to mind when you over crank the special advanced features and the game becomes unstable.

 

 

 

Price wise, I'd say they're about the same whether new or used, though R9 390 may be less costly due to needing to make themselves competitive.

My recommendation is you get used Gigabyte G1 970 GTX.

 

Whatever you do, don't get a GTX 980 or a 980 Ti. The former has a poor price/performance ratio and the latter is slower than two GTX 970s in SLI, while also being more expensive.

Edited December 26, 2015 by Ranebow

[DonnieBrasco453]

Damn, so it looks like both the 390 and 970 have their ups and downs. In all honestly this had made me even more confused as to which one I should buy haha. But in any case thanks everyone for the advice, I'll have to think long and hard about it. However, the PSU i was looking at is completely sold out, with the special deal anyway. Do any of you have any good PSUs you could recommend?

[obobski]

 

 

The R390 is not much different in real world scenarios than the 290. I previously had two R9 290s and then switched to two GTX 970s. Keep in mind I had the 290s for more than a year and knew them like the back of my hand.

Despite a well ventilated and cooled case, I was never happy with the heat or power that they used, especially in Crossfire. The one saving grace was that the model I had(and I suspect this was true of most R9 290 that were good quality chips), was able to under volt quite significantly - to the point that on stock clocks (and even with some overclock) I could undervolt the card enough to save up to ten or fifteen degrees per card.

 

Which brand/model 290s did you have? Anything based on the OEM design will run hot and loud (I'm convinced OEMs just hate their own hardware, and design cooling solutions to take that hatred out in a passive aggressive way), and throttle considerably under load (especially if running the "Quiet" BIOS and in CrossFire), but there are third-party designs that use (significantly) improved coolers that largely fixed all of those problems, and produce cards that are just as competitive with anything else WRT noise, running temps, etc. Power consumption for Hawaii is still high, but only when under heavy load (the same is true for nVidia too - modern cards are pretty good when it comes to power management).

 

 

 

 

 

They also had (not sure if 390 is affected by this) some issue supporting 1600p monitors with their VSR upscaling/downscaling technology.

 

 

Honestly the whole VSR/DSR thing smacks of "hypetrain" to me - nVidia released it as a "new killer app feature" for Maxwell and AMD followed them down that rabbit hole. It was completely unnecessary/redundant for AMD cards, as they had already re-introduced SSAA with GCN. But I get that it's just a buzzword compliance competition - they have to have it because nVidia has it, and nVidia has it because AMD didn't have it...

 

As far as "issues" - can you be more specific? I've never noticed, or read about, any big problems with either implementation, but I'm admittedly more keen to just use conventional AA, especially if SSAA is an option.

 

 

Despite most benchmarks having the R9 290/390 and GTX 970 neck and neck at 1440p/1600p, I have found the 970s to be often faster - particularly when using in-house Nvidia features such as TAA (which is a great Anti-aliasing method).

 

 

Welcome to nVidia vendor-lock-in stuff. There are actually entire games that will run faster on nVidia cards with nVidia drivers due to artificial bottlenecks borne out of nVidia's recent anti-competitive practices. Consumers are the real losers.

 

 

They also have a smoother feel to them in terms of texture loading and VRAM management.

 

 

Let's not go down this rabbit hole of how the card "feels" or makes you feel. Numbers, benchmarks, facts, etc please. That said, SLI has been much better optimized over the years for micro-stutter than CrossFire has, and while AMD has made significant strides in the last few years, nVidia is still "better" at this. None of that matters for single-card though (and based on somewhat dated data (from Tom's Hardware), it doesn't matter for 3-way SLI/CrossFire either).

 

 

They run cooler considerably, the fans are nowhere near as grating when they speed up.

 

 

Depends heavily on specific model, case configuration, etc. The stock 290 is a very loud and very hot card, but there are OEM boards that don't exhibit that behavior.

 

 

The power draw is shockingly lower.

 

 

If by "shockingly" you mean around 200W under max load (DC side, for the entire system), then yes, it is "shockingly" lower. Honestly my feeling on this is that A) if you're really that worried about power consumption and efficiency, an ultra high performance gaming computer shouldn't be on your radar and B) with modern graphics cards (from either side), power management features have gotten to the point where non-gaming usage is quite light and unless you're running the absolute bleeding edge of games (at the absolute highest of settings) even gaming usage is usually well managed in terms of balancing performance, heat, and power consumption (e.g. my 290X running Fallout 3 on Ultra with 4x SSAA only reports around 52W DC draw, and the entire system's AC side draw is under 200W; with newer DX11 games I've seen it go a bit higher, but nothing outlandish - it's *LOTS* better than DX10-gen hardware (cook your bacon while you game), and not too far removed from high-end DX9-era stuff; FurMark/Uniengine/etc of course will see big numbers on the board but those aren't games). This isn't meant to be a flip dismissal - I'm not saying we should go out and burn Styrofoam and heat our houses with whale oil, but at the same time I don't think there's a huge argument to be made on the power consumption line unless you're dealing with a cramped case (where heat may be a problem for any high-power part), or have a limited PSU. With something like the 750W EVGA mentioned earlier, I can't imagine there being any problems with 970 *or* 390.

 

 

 

 

• Support Physx

 

 

More nVidia vendor-lock-in stuff. There's not *tons* of games that use this, and GPU PhysX doesn't actually carry the entire SDK (it only accelerates part of the PhysX SDK). Of course, if you need PhysX, you have no choice: you're buying an nVidia card. You can either run a hacked Hybrid solution with a Radeon providing 3D and an nVidia card doing PhysX, or get an nVidia card to do both (any of the newer nVidia cards are more than capable of doing both with ease). In this case, the 970 is an easy suggestion, but honestly I can't even think of the last game I played that even offered me PhysX (I used to run a GeForce in my main gaming PC and don't even think I ever used PhysX outside of a demo - I know there are games that use it, but apart from Batman and some Ageia-era stuff I can't name any).

 

 

SLI works in windowed mode (true of all Nvidia cards)

 

 

afaik windowed-mode did not/does not work on either platform, so if they have it working for SLI thats a relatively new development (and news to me). Either way, that's a "win" if it's something you need and shouldn't be discounted.

 

 

DSR (Nvidia's version of upscale/downscale technology), supports your native resolution and is more flexible

 

More flexible how?

 

 

The 970 is an awesome card for handling chroma/luma upscaling for video viewing. There is a neat program named Potplayer, that can be complimented or supplemented with a video plugin named MadVR. Together you can set the PotPlayer to automatically upscale, filter and present videos in a higher native resolution than your desktop. Watching something in 4k (though it still has some grain - it's not real 4k) that was previously 480p or worse, is pretty awesome. I've been going over a 480p set of Star Trek Next Generation, using some serious upscallng at 3840x2160 resolution. It looks as good as most quality 720p/1080p copies. All powered by a single GTX 970

 

 

You can do all sorts of insane (and imho needless) stuff with madVR, but it isn't unique to nVidia cards (thankfully). Out of the box, modern nVidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs are basically equivalent for video functionality, excepting AMD's cross-compatibility with their TV tuners, and nVidia's plug-in functionality for gameplay streaming.

 

 

 

In the past few years, Nvidia drivers have been more nice to work with.

 

 

Unless you:

 

A) Play old games

B) Work with old software

C) Run older versions of Windows

D) Run "mixed" systems (e.g. graphics cards from multiple vendors)

E) Have Windows 10 (this is sadly a thing)

 

 

nVidia's latest-and-greatest drivers usually work great until you start looking backwards, and then you may or may not get to play the "which nVidia driver version supports X game properly" game. It gets annoying, especially if you're intending the machine to be a do-everything system. This isn't to say AMD/ATi drivers are flawless - they've been a slow march to improvement for years, and I'd say finally started to attain that sometime around 2009, and more recently (in the last year or so) have gotten quite good (and I would say that from casual observation, I've had less backwards compatibility complaints with 290X than with GTX 660).

 

All in all none of these are significant deal-breakers - if you aren't worried about older games or software, aren't touching multi-GPU, aren't using the latest-and-greatest buzzword compliance features, etc we end up where we started: they're basically equivalent and I'd go with whatever is cheaper because its cheaper. If we're to get more nitpicky about specific features (e.g. do you need PhysX, do you play a lot of games that are held hostage by Gameworks, are you considering multi-GPU, is legacy support an issue, do you care about full DX12 support, etc) then you should get more nitpicky about which card you pick, but even with that in mind we've come A LONG way from "the old days" where you had huge variations in performance and capabilities between manufacturers, across generations, etc; it's hard to make a genuinely "bad" choice with modern graphics cards, and consumers do benefit from that at the end of the day.

 

 

The concern over the GTX 970 having only 3.5gb of 'good' VRAM is not what people make it out to be. The performance loss when accessing that remaining .5gb is not noticeable - additionally, if you're pushing 3.5gb+ in a game, you've probably got some type of third party mods and third party mods aren't particularly efficient in their VRAM usage. Point being, you could have a 12gb Titan and still suffer VRAM related issues, simply because the mod or extra usage is inefficient. GTA 5 comes to mind when you over crank the special advanced features and the game becomes unstable.

 

 

Most modern games at typical/normal settings don't use enough memory to actually be a problem for a 3-4GB card, and nVidia released numbers to support that claim after they were caught in the debacle over the 970. Also remember, the fastest graphics card in the world still "only" has 4GB of VRAM (the R9 295X2). This is from nVidia's original response to the 970 thing:

https://techreport.com/news/27721/nvidia-admits-explains-geforce-gtx-970-memory-allocation-issue (look at how insanely high the settings have to be to even push it over 3.5GB)

 

As far as "the game managing VRAM" - the game isn't actually aware of any hardware resources directly, and does no low-level management of hardware resources. It only makes calls into the APIs it works with (e.g. DirectX), which in turn sit on top of the HAL and work with drivers - multiple layers exist between the game and the hardware (and there is no delineation on the application/API side between video memory "on card" and "off card"). Because everything (at the hardware level) is handled by the drivers, VRAM usage in the same application at the same settings can vary between different configurations (e.g. nVidia vs AMD; different driver versions; different GPU generations; etc) depending on how well (or not well) everything works. This provides a nice overview and has some numbers/charts (I literally found this with a quick web-search looking for some graphs; I only read the first page of posts):

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18663534 (you would be forgiven for logically thinking memory usage in the same game at the same settings should be equal, or at least equal between different GPUs from the same manufacturer, but it isn't - I've observed similar things with my HD 4890, GTX 660, and R9 290X, but I didn't make any pretty charts, and only used two games (Fallout 3 and Skyrim))

 

Also remember that most games, even today, are still 32-bit applications, so they're only capable of mapping up to 2GB of memory (with LAA up to 3GB on 32-bit, or 4GB on 64-bit, but I'm not aware of any games that come with LAA flagged out of the box; there are mods that enable it for New Vegas and Skyrim using MSDN devkit code, and that generally work well enough for their intended purpose). So having a system with 48GB of memory and 12GB of VRAM isn't doing anything (for better or worse) with such a game. For 64-bit games that could change, but just because 64-bit applications *can* map a mountain of memory, doesn't mean you're also given all manner of computational resources to handle all that new data. Still, it will be interesting to see how Fallout 4 changes over time with modding, and what it will look like in 4-5 years.

 

 

 

Soap-boxy part of my post:

My personal axe to grind with the 970 is just how poorly nVidia handled the entire situation with the memory bug, and the original lying, and the further things that have come out about the 900-series (like the lack of full DX12 support). And more largely their anti-competitive stuff like GameWorks, and the locking-out of PhysX, and on and on. nVidia has made some absolutely awesome hardware over the years, and will hopefully continue to do so, but all of the drama they've created recently just seems to do nothing but hurt consumers.

 

 

 

Whatever you do, don't get a GTX 980 or a 980 Ti. The former has a poor price/performance ratio and the latter is slower than two GTX 970s in SLI, while also being more expensive.

 

 

SLI, or CrossFire, isn't guaranteed performance. You're much more dependent on driver optimization and application compatibility, and even then there is no guarantee of "good scaling" at all times. I'd much rather have a single GPU (or more broadly, processor) that can accomplish my performance goals than trying to fight with the ghost of Gene Amdahl in the attempt to save a couple bucks; multi-card is more of a "my performance goals exceed what exists currently, so I'm going tractor-pull style and just strapping more engines to my tractor" thing imho. IOW, SLI with something like the 970 or 390 doesn't make a lot of sense (IMO) - I'd rather have the Fury X/980/etc (or a pair of them if going "for the moon") than a pair of mid-range/upper-mid-range cards.

 

I'd agree with the 980 Ti being silly expensive; same goes for a lot of other "flagship" graphics cards that've come out recently. The 980 isn't so bad price/performance if you can get it under $500 (which is possible) but at the $600~ mark I'd get Fury X instead.

 

Damn, so it looks like both the 390 and 970 have their ups and downs. In all honestly this had made me even more confused as to which one I should buy haha. But in any case thanks everyone for the advice, I'll have to think long and hard about it. However, the PSU i was looking at is completely sold out, with the special deal anyway. Do any of you have any good PSUs you could recommend?

 

I would just go onto jonnyguru and see what's reviewed well - recently EVGA has been good, Corsair has been good but their cheaper stuff has been sliding into mediocrity recently, PC Power & Cooling may have some closeout stuff on ebay, Seasonic is usually good, etc. There's lots of good options.

[Thaneize]

I had the same question in mind and haven't decided yet to rather go for a 4 GB or 8 GB version, 8GB surely sounds cool but thats only barely usable if you play games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim with ENB and modded 4k textures everywhere.

If you are a Student like me, you should go with the cheaper one, but if you have a good job, save the money and wait for the next paycheck and buy a 980 GTX TI, the 970 is simply not worth its price, also I consider that VCard a scam because nVidia lied about the specs and DX12 support.

[obobski]

I had the same question in mind and haven't decided yet to rather go for a 4 GB or 8 GB version, 8GB surely sounds cool but thats only barely usable if you play games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim with ENB and modded 4k textures everywhere.

If you are a Student like me, you should go with the cheaper one, but if you have a good job, save the money and wait for the next paycheck and buy a 980 GTX TI, the 970 is simply not worth its price, also I consider that VCard a scam because nVidia lied about the specs and DX12 support.

 

All of the 900 series don't support DX12 async compute; it's a limitation of Maxwell. I agree with it being a big problem that nVidia lied about it, but what kind of impact it will have real-world remains to be seen (there are no DX12 games on the market yet, and DX12 requires Windows 10, which only represents about 9% of the entire segment (and how many of those are actually gaming computers?)).

 

Skyrim won't use 8GB of memory of any kind - Fallout 4 *may* as its a 64-bit application, but presently that isn't a requirement (but again, after a few years of modders getting into it, it may).

 

If you're looking at the 980 Ti, I'd also look at the Radeon Fury series - they're much more comparable to the 980's performance than the 290/390. That said, all of these cards are very powerful, and for modern games shouldn't be an issue, performance wise.

Edited December 28, 2015 by obobski

[Beriallord]

One thing you need to understand about Nvidia cards is the "boost" clocks are a gimmick and won't net you real world gains in demanding games. You only get a core clock boost when the load is under 100%. Demanding games will push that load to 100%. If your load is under 100%, then you don't need the boost clock anyway. A straight up OC is all that matters.

 

MSI R9 390 gaming 8G is a good model for the price. I got one in one of my PCs, and I'm happy with its performance. The GPUs are neck and neck in most games, which one pulling slightly ahead over the other in some titles. But at the end of the day, Nvidia lied about the 970 having 4GBs of GDDR5 Vram, and they lied about DX12 support. R9 390 owners don't have to worry about Vram or DX12 support. As soon as DX12 games start getting released the 390 is gonna smoke the 970 like nobodies business. If you're playing somewhere between 1080p - 1440p, the 390 will last you a decent while into the future. I can run 1440p on Fallout 4 ultra everything except for shadow draw distance, and I'm pegged at 60 most of the time.

Edited December 31, 2015 by Beriallord