Last year’s GTX 980 featured 2048 CUDA cores, which now looks underwhelming put against the Titan X’s whopping 3072 CUDA cores, a nice 50% bump for the architecture. Nvidia also went the other way, releasing the $160 GTX 950 which sports just 768 CUDA cores. All told, Nvidia released four new GPUs in 2015, while AMD delivered eight cards if you’re willing to be loose with the definition of “new” and three if you’re not, namely the Radeon R9 Fury X, Fury and Nano.

Some of you are probably shouting that the 390X and 390 are new as well. Yes, the Radeon R9 390X and 390 received double the VRAM, but they are essentially the same GCN 1.1 GPUs – 290X and 290, respectively. Thus far, the larger 8GB memory buffer has proven to be of little benefit, so we prefer the cheaper 290s anyway. At this point, it looks like AMD and Nvidia have finally squeezed the most out of the 28nm design process. Before moving on, AMD will release a dual-GPU version of the Fury X which should become the Fury X2. Nvidia could also return fire with a dual-GPU monster of its own. Something we haven’t seen a lot of this year has been price cuts. AMD was forced into aggressive discounts last year to compete, but this year the company has been competitive at the upper end of the high-performance GPU market and has therefore felt less pressure to reduce prices.

As shown in the table above, the key battles are currently being played out between the GTX 750 Ti and R7 360 at ~$100, the GTX 950 and R7 370 at $150, the GTX 960 and R9 380 at $200, the R9 390 and GTX 970 at $300, the R9 390X and GTX 980 at $450 and finally the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X at $650. By the end of this article we should have figured out what are the best buys at every price point.

Test System Specs

Intel Core i7-5960X (3.00GHz) x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24) Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99) Silverstone Strider Series (700w) Crucial MX200 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s) GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048MB) GeForce GTX 760 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 950 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 960 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6144MB) GeForce Titan X (12288MB) Radeon R7 265 (2048MB) Radeon R7 360 (2048MB) Radeon R7 370 (2048MB) Radeon R9 270 (2048MB) Radeon R9 285 (2048MB) Radeon R9 380 (2048MB) Radeon R9 390 (8192MB) Radeon R9 390X (8192MB) Radeon R9 Fury (4096MB) Radeon R9 Fury X (4096MB) Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Nvidia GeForce 358.50 AMD Catalyst 15.7.1

title: “The Best Graphics Cards Nvidia Vs Amd At Every Price Point” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-07” author: “Jeffrey Bauer”

We received something fresh with the R9 295X2 in April, but with pricing around $1,000 it was cheaper to buy two R9 290Xs for the same or better performance. Rounding out the year, AMD delivered its next-gen Tonga architecture in the R9 285, but the card was crippled by a 256-bit memory bus and struggled to outpace the similarly priced R9 280 while being slower than the 280X.

Meanwhile, Nvidia had already shown off its next-gen tech in February with the unassuming GeForce GTX 750 series. Built using the new Maxwell architecture, the GTX 750 demonstrated amazing performance per watt but was out-priced by the R7 265. However, it wouldn’t be until seven months after the debut of the GTX 750 series that things would get truly interesting. Mid-way through September Nvidia unleashed its Maxwell-powered GTX 900 series with the GTX 970 and GTX 980. Despite featuring 27% less transistors in a 29% smaller die using the same 28nm design process as Kepler, Nvidia was able to make Maxwell faster. The advantage of making Maxwell less complex meant that it consumed less power and so it was more efficient. In the end, the GTX 980 was 20% faster than the R9 290X while costing slightly more and the GTX 970 was 3% faster than the R9 290X and 16% faster than the R9 290 while costing 12% less than the former. With Maxwell crushing Hawaii, AMD was forced to slash prices days after the GTX 980 and GTX 970 were revealed (a triple digit drop to $400 in the case of the the R9 290X). Since then, pricing has continued to plummet with cards selling for under $350 with rebates, though the average price is about $370. It seems that AMD can’t unveil its next-gen GPUs quickly enough, though we are told there won’t be any more releases from either camp in 2014, with both holding off for the first quarter of 2015. Therefore a price war will be waged in the meantime. While we’re always looking forward to testing the latest hardware from each outfit, it’s still great news for PC gamers if the companies plan to make the existing high-end graphics cards more affordable, especially for those of you who have a shiny new GPU at the top of their Christmas list. Let’s break down each price bracket to determine which company offers the best value product.

Methodology

Although we collected the frame time data we didn’t include it because it’s becoming less important for single-GPU reviews. Our results showed the GeForce GTX 970 to be in line with the R9 290X for example, which is about what we would expect, so there isn’t much to see here. Frame time data will still be included in our CrossFireX and SLI reviews.

For this review we’ve tested at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, though we will only be discussing the 1920x1200 results as the lower end cards performed better here. We are yet to include 4K results or higher because there isn’t a single-GPU solution available that can provide playable performance at this resolution.

Test System Specs

Intel Core i7-4770K (3.50GHz) x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28) Asrock Z97 Extreme6 (Intel Z97) OCZ ZX Series (1250W) Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290 (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 280X (3072MB) HISRadeon HD 285 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 280 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 270X (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 270 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 265 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 260X (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 770 (2048MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 760 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 (2048MB) Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit Nvidia GeForce 344.07 AMD Catalyst 14.7