AMD GPUs vs. nVidia GPUs for Dolphin

[Silent Gunner]

I was about to go and sell my current video card for an upgrade, and I was wondering if Dolphin would be negatively affected by using, say, an R9 380 as opposed to a GTX 960. The reason I ask is that I have heard that PCSX2 does not work well with AMD video cards in OpenGL mode. (which is really bad since some games need a feature in said emulator's OpenGL mode to avoid graphical glitches) Considering the fact that I play regular PC games as well and not just emulators, I was wondering just how badly emulators may be affected by an AMD GPU as opposed to an nVidia one.

[admin89]

Are you willing to upgrade your CPU as well ? G3258 is an ideal CPU for Dolphin and PCSX2 but not for PC gaming and the new Wii U Emu - Cemu (Only 10-20 FPS atm even with overclocking while my i7 can do much better than that at lower clock ) . G3258 will bottleneck your new GPU for sure
And btw, now is not the time to upgrade GPU . Pascal and Polaris are about to be released soon (2nd Quarter 2016) . Along with new GDDR5X which has twice the memory bandwidth of GDDR5 and the new HBM2

[Helios]

If you're looking specifically at Dolphin, your 750 TI is more than okay. nvidia's drivers are much better than AMDs, and their OpenGL drivers actually works.

AMD's is a steaming pile of garbage unless you only care about Windows, and only care about Direct3D.

[kirbypuff]

If you're a Windows user:
- In Direct3D applications, AMD GPUs are the better option (better performance and image quality for the price, especially with Direct3D 12).
- If you need high performance in OpenGL applications, there's no other choice than NVIDIA.
NVIDIA's OpenGL drivers are super fast and feature-complete.

If you use Linux, then it's all about the OpenGL drivers:
- If you want stable, high quality Open Source drivers, but do not need maximum performance, there's no other choice than AMD (Intel's iGPUs are too weak and NVIDIA doesn't care about open standards or open source).
- If you don't care about openness and want maximum performance from the proprietary drivers, NVIDIA is the only option.

AMD's proprietary OpenGL drivers are still garbage, but they're improving. With the latest Vulkan Beta5 drivers, they finally have full OpenGL 4.5 support (LOL) and some of the ARB 2015 (a.k.a. NVIDIA's OpenGL 4.6) extensions.
OpenGL is low priority for AMD right now, since they really want to get the Vulkan and Direct3D12 drivers in perfect shape.