Who’s the best GPU company? AMD or NVIDIA

Time for a face off, the biggest players in the graphics card industry. Both company’s product offer different performance benefits — so what makes them unique to us? What’s the difference? Who’s the best GPU company?

AMD and NVIDIA have been trying to one up each other for over a decade now — both mimicking fabrication advancements, performance metrics and hardware developments in the GPU landscape. The competition is fierce, and the loyalists, well they are die-hard — what makes these two companies different? It depends on exactly what you’re using it for, and how much you can realistically spend.

NVIDIA

1. Historically, NVIDIA has delivered better driver support – *drivers* are a software package developed by the GPU manufacturer. This particular package dictates how your graphics hardware components work with the rest of your computer: your software, specific applications like PC games and PS (Photoshop), the monitor, and so forth. NVIDIA tends to update their drivers more frequently. They also seem to have a jump start on the competition by making BETA drivers for anticipated game titles like Battlefield: Hardline that have foreseen problems with NVIDIA drivers, working efficiently with graphic content specific to certain games.
2. NVIDIA has grown exponentially over the last decade, thanks to fantastic marketing and a wide network of hardware partners — in turn, a large pc modification community has rallied around them – primarily for heavy overclockers who demand a modified vBIOS for additional power target overhead.
3. A majority of PC game developers tend to optimize game titles with, and for, NVIDIA specific graphics cards. This saturates the PC gaming market toward NVIDIA, and expands the influence of NVIDIA’s technologies in entirely different markets.
4. Users tend to voice the price-to-performance ratio to be ‘just right’ with most of their cards.
5. NVIDIA has put a lot of effort into R&D of maximizing GPU power efficiency – With the release of the Maxwell architecture, their GeForce cards consume far less power than AMD’s GPU equivalent.

AMD

1. AMD provides more product cost efficiency for somewhat similar GPU solutions in comparison to NVIDIA. This is a huge attraction to full system builders that need to be budget-minded when optimizing every component in the PC including the motherboard, processor, memory, cooling, wiring… etc.
2. Mantle, AMD’s brand-named API, is limited to AMD’s GPUs, but can be tweaked for AMD’s architectures — this offers AMD the chance to exploit their GPUs in additional ways that a common, cross-manufacturer API like DirectX 12 cannot.
3. Samsung recently has been rumored to acquire AMD, so we could see some advancements coming to product development and support from the tech conglomerate. As the GPU space sees some healthy competition, we should expect AMD to grab some market share from NVIDIA.
4. Some will argue that this is the single most powerful graphics card for the money – one of the smartest GPU values for system integration. In reference to the R9 295X, which is still a relatively hard card to beat, for its price, was originally benched against the TITAN Z, forcing NVIDIA to significantly drop the price from $3000.00 to $1500.00.
5. Although AMD does not update drivers as frequently as their counterparts NVIDIA, AMD folks tend to get stuck waiting if their cards have problems with anticipated game titles. With that being said, AMD’s drivers tend to be much more stable and reliable, crashing less than NVIDIAs, according to reports via Tom’s Hardware.

The rest is up to the decision maker. How do you perceive these 2 GPU companies? How do you envision the marketplace shifting one way or the other in the next calendar year?

We want to hear the chatter — give us your play on these top GPU players