Best video card bang for buck with this game?

Sry if i offended someone with my posts, dident mean it. It was my evil twin, ill kick him in The nutts.
Anyway amd brings the most bang for the Buick. From what iv read

AMD may be good, but for bang for your buck? I wouldnt throw my money at them yet. AMD might have great performance, but wont do much if it wears out early.

Nvidia from what I have personally experienced, lasts longer. While its not AS powerful, its cheaper, and more ... durable for long periods of use.

Can't exactly agree on either of these. With both vendors, it's usually not the GPU failing first but the board. And that is fault of the board manufacturer. Only exception is with extreme overclocking, but you really shouldn't do this with either vendor. From a technical point of view, it's also not logical since both AMD and Nvidia are using the same manufacturing facilities and processes, so - unless one of them has a severe design flaw or faulty power managment - both will age just at the same speed.

Just make sure to get a card with a proper cooling system because that has the biggest impact on durability.


There is only one significant difference between AMD and Nvidia, and that is the drivers.

On Windows, Nvidia drivers have slightly more settings, but Nvidia is also known for breaking stuff REALLY bad from time to time.
Developers tailoring their games towards one specific vendor don't really count. That's at most relevant for the first 1-2 months after release, because afterwards both the other vendor's driver is catching up and developers usually also tend to fix the previously created bottlenecks and incompatibilities as soon as deadlines are lifted.

And as for Linux:
AMD driver offers poor OpenGL performance (it's not THAT bad though, at most factor 2x slower than on Windows), Nvidias driver has slightly better performance, but BOTH are to be considered stable enough for everyday use.

And when comparing the open source drivers:
Open source drivers for Nvidia are a mess, it's not even capable of switching to 3D clock speed since Nvidia did contribute NOTHING of value to the open source driver for several years. Open source drive for recent Nvidia cards is in RUINS.
Open source driver for AMD is MUCH better, it's actually about 60-105% of the closed source drivers performance.

I have machines with both amd and nvidia cards. I haven't had much issue with failures either way.

My oldest running card is an ancient hd 2600 pro that I gave to my parents to make plants vs zombies run smoothly

My main rig is currently on a GeForce 560 which is fine after a coupe of years use. Both manufactures cards work fine and last when respected. The last dead card I had was a GeForce 2 ti (a beast in its day), but that had been abused by its previous owner and it was about 6 years old when it finally gave up.

I would personally recommend getting the fastest card your budget will allow, and as others have said ensure it comes with a good cooler.

For some reason there is an idea that has got about that nvidia is somehow better quality, which is pretty ludicrous when you consider the same companies manufacture the chips, and build the boards.

@elvisior, I would say a GTX 650 somewhere on their with release 2Gb+ of VRAM. PA is VRAM intensive it requires more of it. Specially if you want to have all the bells and whistles on. Look at reviews as well and it will you decide on a good card not just for PA. A good rule of thumb is do not pick a reference implementation choose one that is from a third-party and at least one generation old. That would help with any problems with the card. Also always stay within your budget.

Hopefully this helps.

Also developer relations as demonstrated in these two quotes:

This would explain why PA as better performance on NVIDIA instead of AMD.

Its hard to say, before its optimized.

My 780 ti superclocked 3gb struggles.

You call that old? I ran a Riva TNT 2 64 Pro for a few years in a Linux box and has used it fit almost a decade in our home pc.

One again, best baby for buck. AMD often has this, but not always.

Amd cards I recommend HIS as the manufacturer, or xfx.

I prefer EVGA or asus for nvidia.

To a student, reading threads like these is like watching leprechauns discuss who has the biggest pot of gold...

Everyone has a habit of recommending expensive stuff... In reality pa will run ok on most graphics cards if your prepared to notch graphics down a bit. A 50 quid Radeon r7 250 or gt 640 are probably the lowest cards I'd consider. Below that you may as well use integrated (which again on modern processors isn't bad).

I run pa well on my laptops gt 420 which is very old now.

I'm still playing on the computer I built with my brother... 3-4 years ago?
It wasn't exactly state of the art then but actually runs PA fine provided I just keep everything on low graphics, tbh I don't really see the need to upgrade just so you can play everything on uber. I suppose if you've got the money and that's what you want to spend it on then why not?

Considering the game is not very well optimised yet I'm very happy with the performance, since gamma I've had almost no problems with performance even in the very late game.

Play the latest pte! Massive (circa 4x) performance boost for me on relatively old hardware... Also ui lag is gone.

AMD RULES. They have allways been best...duh. Pref aswell as price. Allways
The urge to say: suck it Nvidia fanboys. Maybe its the otherway

Nvidia RULES. They have allways been best...duh. Pref aswell as price. Allways
The urge to say: suck it AMD fags, hmm, maybe its the otherway.

LOL

I never understand the tribalism about graphics cards?! I guess 'which hardware maker is better' is the same to gaming fans as 'which football team is better' to sports fanatics :S

Yeah it is just down to preference really.. personally only reason i don't use AMD cards is because of the driver issues i get every time i borrow a AMD card from a friend when i attempt to play very old games on it (Just personal experience).. Nvida drivers just seem to be a lot better in that department i found but when it comes to the latest games and performance.. well both of them are as good as each other.

NVidia and AMD hardware are both fantastic.

AMD's drivers are a pile of sh... er, slower than NVidia's when it comes to how we're using (abusing?) OpenGL. We do have a handful of AMD GPUs in the office that run the game without issue, but we generally err on the side of NVidia because we've had better luck with getting good performance on their GPUs and support from their engineers.

I do know the R9 270 runs the game quite well, as do high end HD 7000 series cards. Mid range HD 7000s and most HD 6000s and lower seem to run into odd issues though. I don't think we've tested on any R7s, and I would assume the game runs fine on them since I'm not aware of any reported issues specific to them, but we've had odd issues with AMD cards in the same range as cards we know work well.

edit: This might shock you but we have machines with NVidia GeForce 9800 GTs running the game better than modern AMD APUs.

I played PA since the Alpha with an ATI 5770, never ever had a problem. Now I have a GTX 770, no problems either. Funny thing though, a friend of mine bought a R9 280X, DOA, 2nd card lasted 5 minutes... installed the latest video drivers for his CPU from Intel, PA runs super smooth with his HD4600... this games runs really well on all cards I tested so far... I really think it comes down to your own preferences...
I initially wanted a R9 280X myself, but the cards were suddenly super expensive, in the end the Nvidia card won... and I do not regret it. I think either way, both companies make great cards... I would really check what you want to spend and compare pricing today and make a choice.

Reading Ben's comment about OpenGL drivers, am really happy I got the Nvidia in the end.

AMD R9 cards got super expensive all of a sudden because of BitCoin mining. A few places posted benchmarks claiming it had the highest return on investment (factoring in cost of energy and cost of the card) so BitCoin miners started buying them in bulk, even after they skyrocketed in price to sometimes as much as 10x their MSRP (meaning they no longer were the best option). Then BitCoin's value crashed and the market was flooded with used R9s for a while.

Ben's post reminds me of a recent blog post on OpenGL driver quality from various hardware manufacturers (link) by a former developer from Valve that caused a small stir when it came out. He politely doesn't name names but it's fairly self evident who's who. (If it's not, one of the commenters churlishly spells it out directly as well.)

I'm not remotely qualified to comment on its accuracy but it does correlate with what I've seen from other sources and Ben's comment above.

A month or two ago I upgraded from an nvidia gtx 560Ti to a Saphire/AMD r9 270x Toxic so im glad to hear that the game runs quite well for other people using that AMD card.

Back when I had a pentium 4 laptop I was running an AMD/ATI gpu and absolutely despised it due to the driver support from AMD and how hard it was to actually find the drivers for it in the first place. From then onwards I stuck with nvidia for a while and had quite a good experience. Only upgraded to an AMD card recently for two reasons, 1: The card was cheaper than the nvidia equivalent for me, 2: I thought that AMD had after all these years sorted out that crap with their drivers.
Not very happy to hear from a dev that their drivers are still crap. (Their latest drivers have also been giving me issues with some other games like a few versions of springrts).

I wouldn't put much onus on spring rts. Don't get me wrong I've played spring since the beginning, but the devs are amateurs who in fight allot and add features they know won't work on one manufactures card or another from time to time. The fiasco where they fell out with zerver, then stripped his vastly superior Mt version out of the game completely sums up the professionalism of the spring team for me (real reason behind that relates to them wanting to push features for evolution rts to get it on steam at the expense of other mods).