Switching from Nvidia to AMD - Better, worse or equal performance?

[santiainen]

So I've been considering buying a new GPU for a long time now, and the new R9 290X that's coming out fairly soon really, REALLY got me hooked to it. So shortly I'll be switching from my Nvidia GTX 590 to an AMD R9 290X, should I be expecting worse, better or maybe equal performance with it?

I'd really like to know this before buying it, as I still absolutely love using emulators and wouldn't want to sacrifice being able to use this emulator good due to switching to AMD.

Thanks in advance.

[cosmoruski]

The AMD R9 290X is somewhat like a nvidia GTX Titan, so should be faster than your GTX 590.
As the R9 290X is a single GPU it should be also more compatible and deliver better framerates (no multi-gpu microstutter)
But one thing I don't get: why upgrade from a still very good GPU like yours? Are there Games which are not working? I mean even Battlefield 4 schould be no problem

[Garteal]

For Dolphin specifically?
It'll be (marginally) better, but if you're solely going to upgrade for Dolphin then you should wait for the next generation or so. Your GPU is pretty good as is and already let's you play your games at a high IR with AA.

If you're going to upgrade for PC gaming too, then go ahead.

For Dolphin you can't go wrong with either. The OpenGL drivers of NVIDIA are better than AMD at this point, but AMD stated they're working on providing better OpenGL support.
With Mantle things will get very interesting for Dolphin emulation too. Check out the OpenGL drivers article on the Dolphin website.

[neobrain]

I should add to what Garteal said that no bugs in the AMD driver specifically have had any impact on Dolphin to date. On the other hand, there were two bugs with Nvidia GPUs which possibly might have been driver bugs (OSX lighting being completely broken and one of my branches being unusable, none of these are actually verified driver bugs).

Mantle is fairly uninteresting for me personally. I don't want to waste months of time writing a video backend from scratch just to support a limited number of GPUs. IIRC AMD did announce that Mantle features would be exposed as OpenGL extensions though, which might become useful indeed.

Also: I'm mainly an AMD user, so I'll bitch at anyone breaking Dolphin on AMD GPUs and revert their changes immediately. Not that this ever happened in this context, but I'd do that if it ever were to happen :p

[santiainen]

Well this sounds good. I'm not only upgrading for dolphin, as pretty much everything runs stable 60fps for me, I'm upgrading for PC gaming in general. I was just afraid that maybe Nvidia cards would've been generally faster than AMD on Dolphin or something, as I really prefer running Dolphin good over PC games in that case. Anyways, thanks. Now I'll surely buy the R9 290X, as it seems like a dream card, especially for that price.

And about the Mantle thing, if Dolphin ever happened to get Mantle support, do you have any idea what kind of performance improvements it could possibly bring with it? That sounds pretty interesting, I must say.

[neobrain]

No one is able to tell until we've seen the API. Currently all we know is AMD's marketing buzz around the whole thing.

[santiainen]

No one is able to tell until we've seen the API. Currently all we know is AMD's marketing buzz around the whole thing.

Alright then, that makes sense. Didn't really know if there's been any info about it or not.

EDIT: Actually I have one more question. Does buying a better GPU help with the performance of EFB Copies to Ram, by any chance? I seem to have absolutely horrible performance in every game I touch if I turn on EFB Copies to Ram.

[DJBarry004]

Not just the GPU, you also need a strong enough CPU to keep the frames up and also a high frequency RAM memory module (correct this if it´s wrong).

[santiainen]

Not just the GPU, you also need a strong enough CPU to keep the frames up and also a high frequency RAM memory module (correct this if it´s wrong).

I have an intel i7-2600K clocked @ 4,6Ghz, so I'm quite sure my CPU won't be a problem. That's why I'm asking only about the GPU. And my ram frequency is 1333Mhz, which I believe to be enough too... Keyword being "believe", of course.

[DJBarry004]

With that second generation i7 (correct me if false), EFB-2-RAM will give you speed problems. Anyway, you shouldn´t be getting massive slowdowns when using it.

And yes, the other parts are enough for the function.