I was joking, but kinda serious. The power of a card is only as good as the software it runs, and nvidia likes to make their software particularly demanding. So even if you have a card twice as powerful they can still artificially bring it to its knees with black-box software nobody but them has access to the source code for. an example would be assassins creed that runs under 60fps at 1080p with max settings on a 980ti. Granted its a ubisoft game and they seem to be on the “good stuff”, but its also a game with nvidia software in it.

That is a power they can more easily exploit once all the people gifting them cash beat their competition into the ground.

AMD software isn’t junky. In comparison to nvidia’s it might actually be better at this point. Their drivers are solid as well but varies per person. Some people can’t get their nvidia cards to run for any decent length of time before crashing. Some have bugs with certain games with AMD cards, such is the nature of the PC platform. Both have even had drivers that killed GPUs for some people.

I’m on a 290x. I had a 970 but it turned out that card was a lie. I can deal with bugs, but a company that lies about specs and is clearly working against the health of PC gaming is intolerable. It may not be as bad as 30fps on expensive hardware but once they can control everything they will do what they can to force people to upgrade frequently. For eg. right now a 780 gets performance similar to a 280x. The 280x was $300 at launch, the 780 was $649. But within nvidia’s ecosystem, with people who refuse to switch, a weaker neglected 780 is reason to buy the brand new 980 — which will probably end up performing like a 290 or worse later on. A similar thing with the 780ti which launched at $700. Its now slower typically than a 290x and often 290 which launched at $549 (or $399 for 290). Who knows where the 980ti will end up next year and we do not know what pascal will bring either.

So when I see people giving nvidia even more money I kind of cringe. I don’t mind ditching PC for consoles when things get bad though. I think.

regarding pascal, nvidia is not in a great position there. Because they are going to be putting in things that AMD has had forever and has experience with. My expectation is the power consumption standings will switch next year because nvidia gained a lot of power savings taking out certain hardware parts of the GPU and moving it to software. AMD never did that and still managed to stay close in power consumption. But maybe they manage it well. Their last attempt was fermi and that was hot as hell.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gtx-480-gtx-470-gf100-fermi-hotness,10061.html

similar to when AMD said the 290x was meant to run at 95 degrees, though I do not think those hawaii cards had heatpipes on the cooler.

It’s ultimately a good card so w.e.