PC enthusiasts have faced a question every time they want to buy a new card. NVIDIA or AMD? Team Green or Team Red? This is a tough question to answer. Both companies have pros and cons. Through this post, I will try to answer that question. Before we conclude about which card is better for you, we must know what are the cards capable of and how budget-friendly they are to consumers.
NVIDIA
Team Green or otherwise known as NVIDIA. They are one of the two players in the GPU market. They are well known for their powerful cards and for making ray-tracing popular. They defined the term GPU with ‘the world’s first GPU’, the GeForce 256. Their cards are the most powerful, especially the TITAN RTX (as of June 2020), they provide driver support that optimizes a new game for their cards. They have a lot of proprietary technology such as hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), Hairworks, G-Sync, etc. They provide cards that aren’t taxing on the Power Supply of your Desktop.
The problem with NVIDIA is that the cards they sell are very expensive (their top-tier card TITAN RTX sells for USD 2499, RTX 2080ti sells for USD 1000). Most of the proprietary technology they have is not being used in many games such as Ray Tracing (only 14 games support it as of June 2020). For G-Sync, specialized monitors, which are required to use the feature, are not very cheap (the cheapest one goes for above USD400).
AMD
Team Red or AMD. They compete in both the GPU and CPU market, fighting with both Intel and NVIDIA. They entered the GPU market after the acquisition of ATI in 2006–2007. They are well-known for budget graphics cards such as the RX 580, RX 590, and RX 5000 series of cards. They have cards that perform better than NVIDIA’s mid-tier cards, such as the GTX 1060 vs RX 580. They provide driver support that squeezes more performance out of the card and age more gracefully compared to NVIDIA Cards. They have Freesync which is a similar concept of G-Sync but better as the monitors available for free sync are cheaper. The cards they sell are very power-hungry, the power consumed by these cards are very high. They don’t have hardware-accelerated ray-tracing (as of June 2020). They don’t have any high-end cards that can compete with NVIDIA’s offerings. Like NVIDIA, AMD Freesync requires specialized monitors.
Conclusion
If you are a person looking to build a PC under a budget and want your PC to last for a while, get an AMD card. If you are someone who wants the best of the best and doesn’t care about the budget, get an NVIDIA card.
