GTX 780 or 290x?....because of drivers?

[mas5acre]

My specs in sig are correct but only kinda as I'm building a new high end machine.

This is my first post ever but I'm a long time lurker.

The new machine will have a i7 4770k with 16gb of ram with the cpu cooled by a H80i. I hate that new consoles do not support backwards compatibility. I've messed with many emulators before and I even own a dreamcast BBA if you know what that is, as well as done a top loading mod to my ps2.

Anyway I've read about the radeon 7970 having driver issues with opengl and wondering if anyone knows anything about the R9 290x? I am usually not a fanboy of either nvidia or amd. I currently run a 5870 @ stock without issue, past stock it has issues. I play at 1080p. I am also considering a gtx 780 with the holiday game bundle. I think the radeon 290x is a better card, but not for me if it hurts my overall emulation performance. Plus Mantle sounds pretty cool in the long run. DirectX should die so people can have their choce of OS if they play games. Not even a linux or windows fanboy, just hate how you are forced into windows if you want Directx gaming.

[JMC47]

NVIDIA will pretty much outperform AMD cards in almost any scenario with Dolphin. But if you're running an i7 4770K, it may not be enough to matter to you. There are some games that work better on D3D, and those games will run slightly better on AMD cards, where as the majority of games run faster than that on OpenGL with a NVIDIA card. You basically can't get the perfect situation due to differences in drivers and what the games use.

With that processor it likely won't matter much at all.

[Garteal]

There are no driver issues with the HD7970 in Dolphin if that's what you meant. We've had a topic on this yesterday, so check if out if you haven't already.
I have a R9 280x (rebranded HD7970GHz) and everything works flawlessly.

If you're going to pick between the GTX780 and R9 290x, the 290x is undoubtedly the better card. It shouldn't hurt your performance any bit.
I'd pick the 290x myself given the choice.

You can play Direct3D games in Linux too using Wine. But if you're going to be using Linux, then get the GTX780(Ti). The NVIDIA drivers on Linux are still much better than AMD at this point.

[NaturalViolence]

Kind of off-topic:

I think the radeon 290x is a better card, but not for me if it hurts my overall emulation performance. Plus Mantle sounds pretty cool in the long run. DirectX should die so people can have their choce of OS if they play games. Not even a linux or windows fanboy, just hate how you are forced into windows if you want Directx gaming.

Getting rid of directx won't automatically make every game cross platform. The differences between platforms extend well beyond whether directx is supported or not. Plenty of openGL games don't run on linux or mac osx. Making every game crossplatform would be a massive waste of labor considering most users would continue using windows anyways.