I'm trying to decide on whether to get a GTX970 or an R9 390 for a gaming rig that I plan on building. I'm interested in running Dolphin on this machine so I've been wondering which card would perform better on Dolphin.
Both are great, you cant go wrong either way
If you have an interest in recording, get the 970
If you play older games, get the 390. AMD drivers are notorious for being absolute shit in the newest releases, but over time, they outperform nvidia cards
If I was in your situation right now, I'd get the 390, but not for reasons of performance (they're extremely similar at 1080p, with the 390 winning slightly at higher resolutions). The reason would be that nVidia have been pretty anti-consumer (e.g. 3.5-gate) and anti-competitive (e.g. GameWorks) recently, so I'd feel my money would end up doing more good in AMD's hands than nVidia's.
Oh yeah forgot about GameDoesntWorks v3.5
I typically stick with Nvidia for no other reason than because I leave my computers on 24/7. The TDP for Nvidia cards tend to be lower...and over a course of a year, that could $100-$150 dollars difference in electric bill. Probably wouldn't matter which card you get for dolphin if you turn your PCs off when not being used.
If you're wanting to switch to Linux later on, you want to get a NVIDIA card.
But that's pretty much it.
(12-22-2015, 08:30 PM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]If you're wanting to switch to Linux later on, you want to get a NVIDIA card.
But that's pretty much it.
Exactly. I had a R7 260X and the AMD drivers caused a lot of issues (crashes, black screens when switching between users, lower performance than with Windows). The difference was most visible when I replaced it with a NVIDIA GPU.
For most Windows users, I think it doesn't matter.
For Dolphin it doesn't matter. Pick whichever is cheaper.
You should be worrying about your CPU choice instead.
I'm using Dolphin with a HD7770, and have 0 issues.
(12-22-2015, 06:49 PM)sulblazer Wrote: [ -> ]I typically stick with Nvidia for no other reason than because I leave my computers on 24/7. The TDP for Nvidia cards tend to be lower...and over a course of a year, that could $100-$150 dollars difference in electric bill. Probably wouldn't matter which card you get for dolphin if you turn your PCs off when not being used.
Ignoring the fact that a computer being on all the time doesn't imply that it's under full load all the time, I'm going to calculate exactly what the cost in power is for each card over a year, as that figure looks very, very high to me.
There are 24*365 = 8760 hours in a year. The R9 390 has a TDP (absolute maximum power under worst-case conditions) of 275 W, and the GTX 970 of 148 W, so the 390 can't use more than 2,409 kWh in a year, and the 970, 1,296.5 kWh. I found a figure saying electricity in the US costs on average 12¢ per kWh, so, based on this figure, the 390 would cost at most $289.08, and the 970, $155.58. This gives a difference of $133.50, which is pretty consistent with the original figure.
Remember that this is only applicable in the (extremely unlikely) case that the system is under full load at all times. An hour a day, which I'd say was still reasonably larger than what I'd expect, would be more like $6.