Any downsides to choosing AMD over Nvdia? (AMD 8970M)

So I'm customizing a laptop on xoticpc (Sager NP8265 aka Clevo P150SM to be exact), and a deal comes up to upgrade a GTX 770M to AMD 8790M for just $100 more. Just $100? For a card that is apparently close to a GTX 780M performance wise? Surely there must be catch...are there any downsides to choosing AMD over Nvidia? I've seen "Runs best on Nvidia" stamps on some game sites, but idk

 

Trust me there is a big difference. Last year owning a 7970m was the most FRUSTRATING time of my life as a PC gamer. AMD's drivers are very poorly optimized and you will suffer from all kinds of issues on new games.

Also do to issues with Enduro, your AMD card will perform SIGNIFICANTLY worse than the Nvidia counterpart.

To give you an example the latest release of Rome 2 Total War folks with AMD graphics cards are having all kinds of issues. Sure these will "eventually" get resolved, but when you spend all this money on a gaming machine is it really worth it to deal with these problems just to save a few extra bucks.

My advice would be to go with the Nvidia graphics card that you can afford.

 

Enduro issues were fixed several months ago.... And at any rate, you should be able to turn it off iirc.

True, some games will run better on GeForces, some will run better on Radeons. GeForce drivers are more stable than Radeons (so I hear), so it really comes down to if you think a bit more stability is worth the extra price-per-performance for a GeForce.

 

Name me one game that plays significantly better on an Nvidia card.... I can name several which play SIGNFICIANTLY better on Nvidia "Assassins Creed, Rome Total War, list goes on..."

Also my friend with a 7970m will be very interested to hear that apparently Enduro issues were resolved.... this will be news to him.

 

I only dropped by to chime in on the Enduro fix. I don't really play games and don't pay attention to that market, so I can't just name something off the top of my head.

Anyway, here's a much more recent blog post on it: AMD Catalyst Mobility PowerXpress and Enduro Fix Drivers(13.4/13.6b2/13.8b2/Rev13.12) - Guru3D.com Forums

An earlier version of the fix: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...7800-7900-8500-8600-8700-8800-8900m-gpus.html

 

This is correct. Despite what many are saying, Enduro has NOT been "fixed", despite it being out for 18 months now.
AMD has chosen to do a game by game "fix" of it, and not a global fix, and that just adds to the frustration we 7970m owners have with AMD. Games that have been out for two or more years have NOT been, nor will they be "fixed" of their Enduro problems, and as such, problems will always exist with any newer AMD GPU.
This is why I have said that it is unwise for anyone in the market for a gaming laptop to think of Clevo machine with AMD until ALL of Enduro is finally fixed once and for-all (if that is even possible after this length of time).

If AMD is still your choice, then go with an Alienware laptop, where you can shut Enduro OFF, whereas with Clevo laptops you CANNOT.
The safest, smartest, and best choice for anyone, is to stick to Nvidia, with a BETTER GPU, Physx, CUDA, and vastly superior drivers.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

please stop with "amd has crap drivers" "nvidia has good" because it is simply not true. as a service tech i've seen my share of driver caused issues and in both camps the number was pretty much the same. 7970 and clevo had serious problems that is the fact. but to say that there are problems on all levels. there arent.

Sent from my HUAWEI Y300-0100 using Tapatalk 2

 

There are ONLY three downsides to taking the nVidia GPU over the AMD one. The downsides are:
1 - More expensive
2 - Unless you've got a 230W/240W power brick, you'll be a bit starved for power. If the machine comes with this; IGNORE THIS DOWNSIDE ENTIRELY
3 - Worse OpenCL calculation times.

The upsides are:
1 - More stable drivers
2 - Optimus actually working for the most part
3 - PhysX
4 - CUDA support for programs you wish to use that support it (though somewhat impacted by the fact that OpenCL on AMD cards is faster than CUDA)
5 - Better SLI feature stability compared to CrossfireX
6 - Higher overclocked performance by far

I won't count the AMD games vs nVidia games as they're relatively equal-sided. Far Cry 3 loves AMD and all, but then Batman Arkham xxxxx games love nVidia etc and so on and so on. So it's neither a hit or miss.
Some people think the monetary differences and OpenCL performance etc outweigh nVidia's bonuses, and for them they might be right. But you have to decide for yourself. The number of bonuses isn't the main thing; it's what they mean to you.

 

Where did you get the information that the 780M needs a 230 or 240 watt power supply. I asked owners of the P157SM and NP8255-S if the 180 watt power supply was powerfull enough. They said it was fine, unless you were doing over clocking or other things, but stock was fine.

 

CUDA on the 6xx and newer is basically a joke, thanks to nVidia heavily optimizing their newer GeForce cards for gaming and nothing else (partly to push CUDA users to their more expensive, higher-margin Quadros for sure). Not that this matters to OP since I'm unaware of any games that use CUDA, but this pretty much nullifies point #4. Yeah, CUDA's "there", but it's a vast hollow shell of its former self as seen on the 5xx and older.

 

A lot of users said that 180W wasn't enough if it reached higher levels of usage. If you don't use all of the card it'd be fine, obviously. But I'm pretty sure I've seen all around NBR that people were saying the 180W wasn't really enough. Maybe they were OCing it and I did not see it stated? But as far as I saw, if you're playing things that are using up your GPU fully, you'll run out of some power with a 180W brick.

Yeah, that's why I said it. There are some rendering programs that DO use it in conjunction with the CPU and it reduces render time by a nice chunk (even on my 280M) but I haven't seen them very much lately. No games use it, as far as I know. Anyway, I did say it was pretty much nullified, but it's there if you ever want it so to speak. Same with the OpenCL benefit for AMD; games don't really use it, but there if you need it.

 

This is where I specifically asked if 180 watts was enough. http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/729999-p157sm-np8255-s-ac-adaptor-big-enough.html

From that thread it seemed to be enough. If it isn't I would like to know.

 

The answer for the title question, is no. Future games more and more optimized for AMD, by virtue of all the new generation consoles are AMD!

 

I tried to find problems on the 8970M, by doing various google searches, but couldn't find much. But the previous model did and continues to have many problems. Personally I will wait a generation before I trust them. So my next laptop will have the 780M.

 

What is interesting with 8970m is that it performs roughly in between GTX 770m and GTX 780m for about the same price as the 770m, this is definitely worth considering when you are looking to buy a high end gaming laptop but saving some bucks .
AMD drivers are not on par with Nvidia's but they have made huge strides since 7970m debacle .
Otherwise with the next gen consoles around the bend I think it is wise to pick up a 8970m over a 770m, the performance increase will help when playing those next gen titles .
This Notebookcheck review is pretty good, they cover quite a few generic benchmarks as well as the FPS to expect in multiple games, pitting it directly against 770m and 780m .

Review AMD Radeon HD 8970M - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

If money is the "question" - AMD is the best choice. Nvidia is not that cheap, but perform PhysiX and have good driver support.

 

AMDs driver support is most certainly inferior to Nvidia's. I'm actually shocked that anyone would dispute that point. I'm sure even AMD would agree behind closed doors.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 4

 

The post you have quoted doesn't seem to mention anything about nVidia vs AMD driver quality. I might be reading it wrong, but what I think he tried to say was that both nVidia and AMD drivers have issues (without mentioning the severity of these issues). Currently AMD drivers are somewhat inferior though, that is not really up for dispute, the more important question is if the lower price makes AMD a worthy choice.

 

The thing is, there is a huge performance gap between 770m and 780m. Sager dropped the ball with their implementation on Enduro and AMD is having its rought start fixing it.

I would not advise going for a 770m just because, as it is considerably slower sometimes. It's a tough question, which makes me angry because very few models of any brand actually have the HD8970m to be a viable option. Alienware being the most "successful" of the bunch.

And any driver issue between brands is almost a moot point compared to the actual issue of enduro. Generally nvidia has more stable drivers, but you can find stable ones on the competition, even if the releases are not as constant.

 

just remember that therre were driver/enduro issues with the 7970m and hardware issues with the 6990m before it. in fact i dont know of any sager 6990m user whose card hasnt failed totally or partially after a year.

i too believe in the bang for buck advocacy of amd. but after seeing these two issues pop up too many times in the sager forums i am very reluctant to try them.

 

choosing amd you will be dropping down to earth, core of the earth

 

are the pixelated shadows in my skyrim because of the AMD card? would they be smoother shadows on an Nvidia mobile card? all settings are on max.

 

I do, my friend is doing fine for 2 years now. Mine in the other hand... just over 1 year and then months wainting for replacement, WHICH died too afte ONE WEEK of use. My P170HM could have been part of the problem but still, rather pay the U$300 for the realiability with harware and drivers AND 20% more performance.

 

Always go Green.

 

You are sorely mistaken if you believe you are paying 300 dlrs extra for reliability of hardware It's better to figure things like stability in performance, or particular games, or cuda etc. Hardware malfunction will plague both vendors. I have several nvidia GPUs die on me but I am not vocal about it because it's not an inherent defect of nvidia, it happens due to manufacture.

The funny thin is, these particular are sager issues, not present in other brands. Yet people keep buying them.

 

The enduro issue was on all brands, just that some vendors had workarounds that disabled enduro.

But if you look at recent benchmarks, the problems seem to be fixed. I wouldn't say that there's a particular downside to getting the 8970m, it fills the performance gap between the 770m and 780m pretty well.

 

Not and wouldn't say that just cuz I had 1 bad experience. The 6990m is actually well known for dying afte like 1 year, which I found out around forums after mine died. That added to enduro and driver problems doesnt
inspire lots of confiance. The 8970m may have better price for its performance, but after 2 or 3 generations with issues... hard to tell before having more time in the market and more reviews.

 

When thinking of getting a gaming machine you - ALWAYS - must chose top high end GPU and sacrifice all other components, which means 4GB ram, mechanical HDD with basic i7 CPU (or maybe a good i5) and GTX 780M, it'll be easy job to upgrade all those specs in case you want to but will not be easy to upgrade the GPU in terms of the cost.. (Note: any of those upgrades will not improve the gaming performance except the GPU itself and maybe 3% the CPU)..

So my answer is definitely GTX 780M for gaming laptop.

 

No problems here with the 7970M here in fact it does a great job. Although I run it in an old IGP/enduro less machine. The 7970M is the one and only GPU in the system, kinda simplifies things!

I have played both Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 that are 2 of the most demanding titles to date and still play them and can run them comfortably at highest settings. The 8970M if you can find it will only be better not worse. Then again I would recommend the 680M GTX. Best 100W card hands down so far. I don't include the 120W+ behemoth 780M. May as well call it the 780MX and stick it in a desktop.

 

Wait what? Are you implying you play Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 at max settings? I assume with lower lvl's of AA, right?

 

i have not tried FC3 in sp.
but in mp playing it this whole afternoon on very high/ultra in mp with 4xMsAA gives me between 40-74 fps with the 8970m.

but.... and there is a big one.
support for the 8970m on the game on a whole is severely broken.

frames are extremely erratic.
one moment the game is like butter with 40 fps then it stutters like crazy with 60 fps.
and the game sometimes render blocks of shadows on the screen.

sad but true.

but the graphic fidelity available is impressive.

 

I knew I was forgetting something. AMD cards have worse frametimes. That's the other downside to them. nVidia cards (according to almost every benchmark I've seen of the two top-classers, ESPECIALLY with SLI/Crossfire machines) state that while AMD does get the high FPS too, the game looks smoother on the nVidia configurations.
ONCE AGAIN this may not be an issue for you, and should not affect actual gaming in terms of accuracy in frame-based games such as CoD etc, but it is a point to consider. Of course, if you don't care about it, and still find the price difference sufficient, then the AMD is still a very strong card and nobody can really fault you for it.

In my opinion though, the benefits to nVidia outweigh the downsides I listed earlier in the thread. You are *NOT* required to share my opinion, but that won't stop me from sharing the information that can help you arrive at your own judgement =3

 

The erratic frametimes and stuttering in Far Cry 3 affects most if not all GPU configurations.

Single-GPU Nvidia or AMD there is no difference. The frame pacing problem is only an issue with CrossFire and it is slowly but surely being addressed with driver updates. Still, for any multi-GPU solution Nvidia is no doubt the way to go.

 

He clearly was saying that he doesn't believe that AMD has worse drivers than Nvidia.

 

Nah.. Apart from the entire "a 13 year old went amok with photoshop" interface, amd isn't really behind on the drivers technically speaking. What they are struggling with is posting consistent fixes to issues with older cards in crossfire, where the cards aren't the same, etc. And their profile application is horrible and useless compared to the nvidia one.

But the performance results and the picture/instruction set consistency for single cards and dual card setups with apus and so on is and has been very good, at least in my experience. In games or with video, and so on, I've just not seen any of the problems that used to plague the amd setups a while ago. Instead, what's happened is that performance and consistency was better for some games that used to croak on newer graphics cards. And that's because of well-written drivers that don't make use of ugly hacks that "typically work" and so on. So no complains about that. I've played far cry 3 on a slightly different amd setup than the one someone mentioned as well, never seen solid blocks, or streaming fails, or incredibly low drops, etc. I'm pretty sure you would have to enable fxaa (which nvidia has a specific implementation to make use of) and physx (nvidia again) to see any of that.

So they're kind of in contrast to nvidia, who have eventually come out with a very stable and reliable driver base now. They didn't have that a few years ago, but the one they have now posts consistently good results. But they still struggle with making some cards able to run older games properly. And don't achieve the best results from the beginning.

Basically they end up submitting specific hacks that sometimes increase performance eventually by anything from 5-20%. So essentially simple changes to specific routines end up increasing performance that otherwise wouldn't be able to get, purely from software tweaks. And while that's good, it means that they rely on some low-level hacks to achieve the improvements. I.e., when or if their support dries up, you're stuck with the baseline, unoptimized performance targets, and potentially some critical performance drops, etc.

...not that any of this will matter once we get laptops with arrays of 100s of instruction level programmable processing units on an integrated bus.

But until then, it's kind of a toss-up, it seems to me. On amd/radeon setups you generally have to tweak more yourself to achieve a consistent result - because the profile application for the radeon drivers don't give you anything for free, and is difficult to set up. On the nvidia cards, you instantly download a set of default driver profiles, and get perfectly good results, tailored to your hardware setup.

I mean, we can probably discuss driver quirks up and down for a month. But I think the profile application thing is really what makes any sort of difference between the two "experiences". That's something everyone sees, after all.

The entire "frame skip and consistency is better on nvidia setups" as well is patently untrue. Seen several blind-tests where people prefer radeon setups because of a smoother picture. I personally prefer nvidia because of a complete lack of pixel smoothing. But other people dislike that, and run lower resolutions with higher framerate, etc. And then that isn't an issue for them. So there are differences. And some of the stutter issues might turn up on laptops more often because you need to tweak more to get consistent results on lower performance hardware, etc.

But I don't think it's a definitive one way or the other here. Not sure most people really will get past the driver profile application problems anyway... So we'd really know if the performance drop problems are as critical as certain people say.

For example, I mean if you set full physics and density on the ferns and bushes and so on in Far Cry 3, you can easily croak an intel/nvidia setup as well. But with a good relationship between nvidia and the developers, they detect the settings properly, and the profile application sets anti-aliasing and filtering settings properly -- and the game just works. That's going to change the outlook for a very large amount of people very quickly. And that impression will be real, obviously.

But it's not truly based on actual differences in the actual driver or instruction set optimisation routines. Just.. making that point.

 

I don't know what you're talking about. There is empirical evidence of the serious frame pacing issues affecting CrossFire setups from testing done by several reviews sites.

Frame Rating: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Frame Pacing to AMD Radeon | PC Perspective

Frame-pacing driver aims to revive the Radeon HD 7990 - The Tech Report - Page 1

Word-of-mouth and blind tests aren't as reliable as hard data. The fact of the matter is Nvidia GPU's have had hardware frame metering for several generations now while ATI/AMD has had no frame metering until the issue was brought into the spotlight this year. Thankfully, they've been rolling out driver fixes and it has made a huge difference for people who own 2-way CrossFire setups.

Heck, if you don't believe me, spend a few grand on a proper test setup and go download FCAT from Nvidia's website to see for yourself.

Nice wall of text BTW.

 

Didn't know this part. I was of the apparently wrong opinion that AMD cards on the whole had worse frametimes. Thanks for pointing this out!

 

I've had laptops (and desktops) with both (3) AMD and (4) Nvidia. AMD always has awful drivers that are not updated often and give no performance boosts. Nvidias drivers are updated 3x as much and give huge performance boosts to games. Always go with Nvidia when you can.

 

My 6990m is still working and functioning and I put it through hell with every game up until a few months ago giving it a workout. I still have it and it still works beautifully on a HM series clevo.
And this was from Sept'11 so I guess my 6990m is a keeper

I can't say on the 8970m series but I have both a 7970m and 680m and there is very little difference between the two. I like the amd as recent games get better support with AMD but this is not always the case as some have said. For bang for buck the AMD no question about it. The Nvidia is $$ tho and the fps advantage is negligible in some games whilst slightly advantageous in others.

AMD FTW!

 

Anyone of you newcomers to this thread have any thoughts on this?

I also have the problem of graphics loading in realtime as soon as they fall in my field of vision in-game. Totally kills the immersion. But the fps is smooth!

i have the AMD 6770m.

 

I assume you mean blocky shadows? Things loading in real time is called popup. Like when a tree or building just suddenly pops up. This is part of the games graphics settings.

These may help

RCRN Community | Five quick Skyrim tweaks you may not know!

Skyrim Tweak Guide - Graphics and Performance

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/35760/how-can-i-extend-the-view-distances-further

 

What I REALLY want to know is how you managed to max out skyrim on a 6770M.

 

Thanks. I am aware of these tweaks; they had almost no observable effect.

What I meant by the graphics loading in realtime is the texture only, not the whole object popping up. The houses, trees, rocks...are all there but only when i look at them does the high resolution texture and details load...

That and the blocky shadows thing. A straight line shadow for example is an integration of tiny blocks, or pixels, aligned next to each other. Not smooth at all. AA is off. But even turning it on doesnt fix this. Shadow quality being low or max has no effect either.

I am beginning to think Skyrim is not optimized for AMD mobile cards. It is not an eye candy for me on max settings. Wonder if the case is different on a mobile Nvidia card.

 

Thank you

No, I know "frame-pacing" is an issue. And sli-setups have struggled with this for a long time as well, even after nvidia started to employ the dynamic clocking schemes and the scheduled drops (because these are mechanical algorithms and are not going to be perfect.. and will be inferior to a software based solution).

And the thing is that you won't see those "lock-up" issues with very irregular or very noticeable framedrops (from one card locking the resources for preparation of the next frame on the second card, etc.) until you end up with 90 and towards 120 frames per second anyway. Or try to run a 60hz target with heavy anti-aliasing on a setup that will produce 30-40 on average.

And none of that actually is an issue with mobile cards, because of the level of performance. And it's not an issue with the single card setups. Meanwhile, it's not exactly news that nvidia's sli setups still have massive issues, not just with "frame-pacing", but with certain effects and routines causing lock-ups and often generally lower performance than with just one card. Mismatched cards is a real pain. It's also very easy, if you set the settings that way on purpose, to provoke very bad sli performance on even the latest nvidia cards.

And this is well-known, but you don't see test-sites going on about that. Which of course is because normal users will never see much of those problems. You also need to be fascinated by a performance drop from 160 fps to 140 fps. And most of the issues are shaved off thanks to the profile application being set up really well.

But, I'm just making the point that the actual technical issues with the amd drivers, in terms of performance (and consistent performance), those aren't really as severe as people would like it to be understood. ..Even if you typically need to tweak a little bit more to get where you want on amd setups. But the drivers are not badly written on the technical side - that's not really amd's problem here..

 

Late to the thread, but personally I didn't really have major driver problems with AMD or nVidia. I find nVidia's driver support to be overall better and AMD has the occasional driver release that isn't all that good, but in my experience those are the odd ones. Personally, I would go nVidia if you don't mind spending the extra cash, but I won't go out of my way to avoid AMD if the price/performance ratio is there.

For the record, I've had more games that I play that had issues caused by a new nVidia driver release than an AMD driver release in recent years, issues that were fixed by reverting to an older driver or the newer one when it was release. Not that AMD's record has been spotless either, but all issues on both sides were eventually fixed. My desktop is nVidia and my last two notebooks were AMD, overall, I haven't had any issues lately except one concerning ambient occlusion and nVidia in GW2 a few months ago.

 

Ronferri, are you sure those tweaks don't help. They even show a picture of before and after with the shadows and you can see blocky, then smooth shadows. Also they talk about texture pop-up, or loading as you approach, LOD, and why it happens and give two different solutions. I don't have the game, so I can't say.

 

Thanks I will try and download the RCRN mod which is in the links; looks like it fixes a lot of graphic related issues.

 

Per the thanks message I got, it seems this worked. I am glad it did. I will have to keep this in mind, since in about a month I plan to start playing Skyrim. I can't wait.

 

Thanks for all the input peeps, well, it wast mostly arguing lmao, but some of the replies were actually helpful so once again, thanks

 

Umm, I had to deal with game crashing bugs and artifacting in BF3 for months with AMD drivers, plus the issue of dynamic switching just straight up not working on OpenGL games. AMD definitely has weaker driver support. I don't see how the fact that there are also issues with Nvidia setups contradicts that point...