Buying a Laptop: Should You Choose an AMD or NVIDIA Graphics Card for Gaming?

👁 0 views

🇻🇳 Đọc bằng tiếng Việt

[Every graphics card maker has its own pros and cons. The following article will help you analyze them and feel more “at ease” with your choice of graphics card.
For a long time, whenever we buy or build a computer, choosing a graphics card has remained a problem that causes users a lot of difficulty because of how diverse the graphics card market is. In fact, there have been many debates about this among computer users. Today, most graphics cards use processing chips from 2 giants: Nvidia and AMD. In this article, let’s analyze this problem in more detail: the strengths and weaknesses of each company, and how to choose the right graphics card for your needs.

The Cost–Performance Ratio Is Always Changing

Nvidia and AMD are big tech companies from the US, the cradle of the most advanced computer science and technology in the world. So both companies have their own technologies and superior product designs. On the market today there are many OEM manufacturers such as Asus, Gigabyte, Msi… which are all manufacturing partners of Nvidia and AMD. So for the same product model, for example: GTX 950 or R9 280X from ASUS and MSI, they usually deliver equivalent performance, while the prices differ slightly only because of the included extras and whether the design looks aggressive or not.

Frame rates in Tomb Raider – the higher the better

Keep in mind that the graphics processor market today is extremely competitive. A truly bad product will certainly be eliminated right away. However, it is not hard to see that although AMD is somewhat behind, it still stands firm and holds a sizable slice of market share. The most important factor is that AMD cards are quite reasonably priced.
One example: although they are constantly compared, the AMD R9 290 and Nvidia GTX 970 are actually not in the same price range. Even though they are said to be in the same segment, AMD recognized that the R9 290 performs lower than the GTX 970 and adjusted its price to be more reasonable. Currently, the vast majority of graphics cards using the AMD 290 chip have a market price about 1 million VND lower than the GTX 970. For example, the Gigabyte R9 290 I am using for this review costs about 9 million VND, while its sibling from the same brand, the Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming, costs over 10 million. The 2 top lines, the GTX 980 and R9 290X, also have average prices of 15 million and 13 million respectively. This accurately reflects the performance gap between these graphics card lines.

Power Consumption: AMD vs. Nvidia

People usually label AMD cards as power-hungry, but in reality that is not necessarily so. In the same segment, AMD cards consume 30 – 50W more power. If you average it out over a whole day of gaming 24/7, the difference comes to 1 kWh (about 2,500 VND). In actual use of cards from both lines, we found that the electricity bill for AMD was only slightly higher than for Nvidia, specifically about 60,000 VND more. For a whole month, that money only buys iced tea every day, not too expensive. But compared with the performance it brings, this really doesn’t matter much.

NVIDIA and AMD – In-Game Technologies

Nvidia and AMD each have their own technologies

The cost–performance ratio is usually the most important factor when buying a graphics card. But there are some other factors we should also consider.
Both Nvidia and AMD have features that set them apart from their rival. For example, Nvidia has some proprietary technologies such as PhysX, which creates many extra physics effects to make games more lively. AMD is not to be outdone, adding similar technologies, but mostly it comes after its rival. Nvidia launched G-Sync monitors, advertised to work well with its graphics cards without causing lag or stutter while gaming. Meanwhile, AMD also has Freesync with a similar feature, but it appeared some time after G-Sync.
We also can’t fail to mention Nvidia’s ShadowPlay feature. This feature lets us record video while playing games. As mentioned above, if Nvidia has a feature, AMD also has a similar feature for its graphics cards. AMD’s GVR serves the same purpose as Nvidia’s ShadowPlay. Nvidia also supports game streaming to Shield devices.
It is probably worth stressing that Nvidia is not always the first to introduce new features. One example is AMD’s TressFX, with extremely impressive hair simulation. And of course Nvidia was not to be outdone: a short time later it also introduced HairWorks, also for hair simulation. But in our own opinion, TressFX seems superior.

The Nvidia and AMD Scandals

Scandals involving NVIDIA and AMD

These two giants often clash with each other, and together with the heated arguments between each company’s fans, this creates endless debates that take up so many resources on gaming and computer technology forums.
Nvidia is always “rumored” to team up and collude closely with game developers. AMD gamers are no strangers to how badly their systems crawl when playing games branded with Nvidia. The most typical example is games that support PhysX: AMD systems playing them will lag and stutter terribly when this feature is turned on. And what do players get from PhysX ???
The answer is “splashy” effects that look somewhat fake, and over-the-top, very cartoonish fire and explosion effects in games. You can watch PhysX simulation clips in Borderlands 2 and Batman Arkham City.
On AMD’s side, there is the TressFX hair simulation technology, which creates hair that looks real. Notably, this feature does not drain the system the way Nvidia’s PhysX does, so green team gamers don’t see big frame rate swings either. However, Nvidia was not outdone and launched Hairworks technology, for example in The Witcher 3. Although the effect looks very beautiful, it makes AMD cards weep as frame rates crawl. There are also many conflicting opinions, such as AMD drivers being unstable and making the computer hot. Nvidia’s GTX 970, meanwhile, was accused of using RAM with different speeds on the same product …

DirectX 12 and Beyond

The scandals above have affected the user experience quite a bit, but they are still small compared with the recent scandal when many tech news sites reported: Nvidia did not have a single graphics card line that supports full Dx12 like AMD’s. The strange thing is that old graphics card lines such as the R9 290 and R9 290x, running on the GCN 1.1 architecture, can play DX 12 just fine. This wonder made the prices of, and the community’s hunt for, the 2 old but hot names R9 290 and R9 290X flood the for-sale topics.
Ironically, more than half a year after Windows 10 officially launched, there is still no game supporting Dx 12. People are asking whether game developers are not keen, or whether Nvidia wants them to “polish” their games more so the release dates get pushed back.

Which Side to Choose, Green or Red?

The key point of the article above is: every company’s cards are good and have their own fanboys. Each graphics card targets a different market, so once you put your full trust in a company, ignore the chatter outside. AMD succeeded with the Xbox One and PS4. Nvidia succeeded in building its brand and supporting PC games. We succeed when we choose a graphics card that is not only good, useful and cheap, but also matches the color scheme of our “rig”.

Source: GameK.vn

]]>