Recently, my colleague Kris Wallburg broke his long-lived relationship with Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs and bought an AMD Radeon 7000 graphics card. But like so many issues in life, the query of which graphics card is the “best” isn’t so easy to reply, as a result of the specifics are extremely particular person and depending on one’s personal computing necessities. As somebody who dared to make the leap from Radeon to Nvidia’s Green Team with the GeForce 40-series, I wished to clarify why.
Only Nvidia presents the best efficiency
This level is simply related for a small group so I’m solely going to briefly to the touch on it: If you might be in search of the utmost doable efficiency, in gaming and inventive functions alike, you can’t ignore. Nvidia.
The GeForce RTX 4090 is completely unrivalled and presents each players and inventive customers a efficiency leap over the earlier technology that we haven’t seen because the legendary GTX 1080 Ti. For the primary time ever, it’s doable to realize unbelievable ray tracing constancy and efficiency (like in Cyberpunk 2077) even with out DLSS’ AI upscaling in 4K at playable body charges.
The RTX 4090 is an absolute computing monster that makes all the competitors look outdated. In phrases of rasterization efficiency, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX — at the moment AMD’s quickest GPU — is already crushed by round 25 p.c in 4K decision. When ray tracing is activated, the lead will increase to over 60 p.c, and in some video games, the RTX 4090 is even twice as quick.
Don’t neglect the subject of effectivity, as a result of Nvidia’s GPU is clearly forward of the competitors right here as effectively. You additionally pay a premium worth for the RTX 4090, however in return you get the finest graphics card the market at the moment has to supply.
Power effectivity issues, particularly now
When evaluating two graphics playing cards with roughly the identical efficiency, worth is commonly the deciding issue. What is commonly not taken under consideration, nonetheless, is how the effectivity of the merchandise impacts the worth over time.
It’s a quite simple calculation: In addition to the acquisition worth, you pay for the electrical energy your graphics card consumes yearly. If a card is a bit more costly to purchase, however works rather more effectively, you possibly can compensate for the upper preliminary prices after a couple of years and find yourself saving cash.
Sebastian Schenzinger
An instance: AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT has roughly the identical rasterization efficiency as an RTX 4070 from Nvidia and at the moment prices round $100 much less, relying on pricing fluctuations. So in the event you don’t place a lot worth on ray tracing, the AMD card is the higher alternative, proper?
Not essentially, as a result of the RTX 4070 consumes nearly 100 watts much less when gaming. Depending in your electrical energy costs and the way a lot you play daily or use the cardboard to its full capability, you’ll make up the $100 surcharge in about two years. As you possibly can see, the acquisition worth is just one side of the price calculation, particularly in the event you dwell in Europe.
Nvidia is the innovation driver
DLSS, ray tracing, Nvidia Reflex, G-Sync: these are just some of the Nvidia-driven improvements that shook up the PC gaming world lately. Team Green units the tendencies and the competitors follows swimsuit, with out (no less than up to now) having the ability to obtain the identical high quality.
This is to not say that AMD’s FSR or Intel’s XeSS upscaling applied sciences, for instance, can’t additionally ship spectacular outcomes. AMD particularly is doing loads proper with its DLSS different and the information provided for FSR 3 so far sounds promising. But till that occurs, we’ve to match Nvidia’s DLSS 3, together with its performance-skyrocketing body technology, with AMD’s FSR 2 — and this duel is clearly determined in favor of Nvidia each when it comes to each the efficiency gained and the picture high quality.
Further studying: DLSS 3: How Nvidia’s RTX-infused AI technologies turbocharge PC gaming
And regardless that ray tracing continues to be in its infancy and can in all probability make nice leaps within the subsequent few years, there are already video games (such as Cyberpunk 2077) by which I not need to miss the graphical improve ray tracing gives. Since I play in 1440p and with excessive settings, this requires lots of ray tracing energy and high-performance AI upscaling — each factors by which Nvidia is at the moment forward.
This doesn’t have to stay so. AMD will proceed to work arduous to catch up. And AMD’s applied sciences even have some arguments of their favor, as my colleague very rightly explains in his article. But the lead that Nvidia at the moment nonetheless enjoys satisfied me to make the change to Team Green.
Creative customers are higher off with Nvidia
CG Director, a {hardware} web site with a particular deal with artistic functions, has compiled a list of twelve graphics cards which can be finest suited to artistic work, taking each small and enormous budgets under consideration. The record is not fully up-to-date, however the truth that solely Nvidia GPUs are on the record reveals Nvidia’s place within the artistic scene.
An necessary issue right here is CUDA, a software program interface developed by Nvidia by which the graphics card can assist the CPU as a co-processor. The extremely specialised chip can thus carry out every kind of calculations. Processes that may be run in parallel, i.e. do not need to be processed sequentially, may be processed a lot sooner than with a CPU. AMD, alternatively, depends on the open supply OpenCL, which regularly doesn’t ship the identical efficiency as CUDA and is tougher for builders to implement.
Sebastian Schenzinger
CUDA is a proprietary interface, developed by and solely suitable with Nvidia GPUs. Since many artistic functions use the CUDA interface, graphics playing cards from different producers typically undergo from poorer efficiency or are even not supported in any respect.
With the introduction of the RT cores on the RTX GPUs, Nvidia has one other ace up its sleeve: Optix. Optix can be a prorietary framework from Nvidia, which goals to speed up the calculation of ray tracing. And ray tracing just isn’t solely used to make video games look extra real looking, however may also considerably pace up artistic functions, a vivid instance of which is the open-source 3D renderer Blender.
Nvidia’s NVENC, a expertise for sooner encoding of movies, can be indispensable for a lot of artistic execs. Nvidia even gives completely different drivers for players and creatives: the Game Ready drivers and the Studio drivers.
When I purchased my final graphics card, artistic functions had been hardly a difficulty for me. However, that has modified previously few years and functions like Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects are a part of my each day instruments. And so my change to Nvidia was already determined.
Just a few last phrases
Having defined intimately why I in the end determined to purchase an Nvidia graphics card (a GeForce RTX 4070, to be exact), you may get the impression that the choice was simple for me. But a brand new graphics card is an costly funding that ought to ideally final a couple of years and may subsequently be effectively thought of.
You know finest what your {hardware} necessities are and what facets you worth. Still undecided? Read my colleague’s article, which explains precisely why he in the end opted for an AMD Radeon graphics card. After that, you’ll know the professionals and cons of each producers and might determine for your self.
This article was translated from German to English and initially appeared on pcwelt.de.