Nvidia. They have best drivers across all platforms. Also if you want to buy GTX 770 go for 4GB GDDR5 version, more VRAM is better for PA.
Which won't help much, since the 4GB VRAM is going to last way longer than the power of the 770, so he won't gain any advantage from that.
Yes, he don't need 4GB VRAM for most of current or next gen AAA games, but it's useful especially for Planetary Annihilation. This game using triple virtual texturing technique (you can know it as MegaTexture, it's was used in RAGE) which will always work much smoothly with large amount of VRAM. At this moment game can easily use 3GB VRAM. Also as long as we know PA will use "window in window" as replacement of traditional mini-maps. When you open new "sub window" it's one new viewpoint and game will keep textures for each viewpoint in VRAM.
The chip does not handle the 4GB well, therefore he would pay more for no advantage. He should just go with what is cheap but good on the market and then can look again once the new generation is out.
[citation needed] I checked PA on these videocards: HD 6950 1GB and 2GB GTX 580 1.5GB and 3GB Both times game perform much better (less textures loading too) with more VRAM, is there some specific exactly about GTX 770? It's important that you won't get any difference in games with traditional texturing techniques.
Hahaha, no. The Windows driver is barely ahead, the Linux driver is actually worse than the AMD Linux drivers, the AMD driver evolved a lot in the last few years while the Nvidia driver got stuck in development. It's still a completely closed source, monolithic and inflexible "thing" which made a lot of Linux devs curse it because it hinders the transition away from the old Xorg system. Nvidia drivers have slightly better anti-aliasing algorithms and a better OpenCL-compiler (experience with CUDA was a plus in developing the compiler, even though AMD hardware has the better design, it's just that the AMD compiler still has a few memory leaks during compilation), but thats it. Apart from that, all that counts is raw performance. Nvidia cards are usually more expensive than AMD cards, not because they are actually better, but because many people still believe that Nvidia has superior drivers, which hasn't been true for years now. Actually it's even the other way around nowadays, you will see when you try to run applications which are not conform with the DX or OpenGL-API. Both drivers crash in that case, thats inevitable. But the difference is how they crash, the AMD driver often detects the errors and terminates the application, while the Nvidia driver tries to execute anyway, causing the driver (and therefor the desktop) to crash instead. And almost no game out there is conform with the APIs. Well, neither are the drivers (only the Intel ones are quite stable, yet slower), but it's always funny to see new games always crashing on either Nvidia or AMD cards and rarely running on both at the same time.
I think i agree with you but i think nvidia have better drivers for specific games. That is why I nearly always buy ati cards.
I have an AMD card and it has never disappointed me in these 2 years. Nvidia is indeed better for specific games but I think AMD does a better job making everything compatible with almost all games. It comes much to personal preference as well since the cards aren't all that different. If you compare two cards that have similar specifications, you will see little difference across all games, the Nvidia specific games will run a little better, the others will not and so on but the difference is very minor. There are lots of tests all across the internets so its easy to check, you just gotta investigate a bit
Do you understand that you saying it to somebody who live with AMD cards for last 5 years? And I currently use open source driver because Catalyst got large vsync problems and texture corruption in PA. It's awesome that they develop open source video drivers, but there 10 times less people who working on it compared to Catalyst. So If I only care about playing games I'll go with Nvidia, because for me videocard it's consumable item, I just buy new one in 2-3 years. Yeah, I use AMD cards because I need fast OpenCL, but in mu experience games working much better on Nvidia and I don't really care why. Make simple experiment: setup Linux and Windows on one system and test Nvidia and AMD videocards here. Run Unigine Benchmarks on both and compare performance. When I did it last time in February AMD got 20-30% performance gap with Windows drivers. Let's be more realistic: both Nvidia and AMD proprietary drivers even ignore simple GLSL standard rules like usage of __ in constants names, and it's just simple example.
