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AMD Continues To Pressure NVIDIA With Lower Cost Radeon R9 270 and BF4 Bundle
MojoKid writes "The seemingly never-ending onslaught of new graphics cards as of late continues today with the official release of the AMD Radeon R9 270. This mainstream graphics card actually leverages the same GPU that powered last-year's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. AMD, however, has tweaked the clocks and through software and board level revisions updated the card to allow for more flexible use of its display outputs (using Eyefinity no longer requires the use of a DisplayPort). Versus the 1GHz (GPU) and 4.8Gbps (memory) of the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, the Radeon R9 270 offers slightly lower compute performance (2.37 TFLOPS vs. 2.56 TFLOPS), but much more memory bandwidth--179.2GB/s vs. 153.6GB/s to be exact. AMD and its add in board partners are launching the Radeon R9 270 today, with prices starting at $179. The Radeon R9 270's starting price is somewhat aggressive and once again puts pressure on NVIDIA. GeForce GTX 660 cards, which typically performed lower than the Radeon R9 270 are priced right around the $190 mark. Along with this card, AMD is also announcing an update to its game bundle, and beginning November 13 Radeon R9 270 – R9 290X cards will include a free copy of Battlefield 4. NVIDIA, on the other hand, is offering Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassins Creed – Black Flag, plus $50 off a SHIELD portable gaming device with GTX 660 and 760 cards."
Nvidia drivers are shittier than AMD. End of story. AMD drivers implement the graphics API's to the letter. Nvidia lets any old crap through. The result, is that apps developed on Nvidia GPUs, rarely conform to the target graphics API, and as a result end up failing on AMD/Intel hardware (although admittedly Intel can also fail due to either a lack of resources, or the occasional bug). If an app fails on AMD, blame the shitty software you're running, not the drivers. AMD releasing mantle would appear to me to be nothing more than a way of forcing Nvidia to adhere to an API spec for a change, rather than routinely ignoring it (as they do now)
That's complete bullshit. Nvidia does indeed make their drivers very flexible, but it's trivial to force AMD's products into software mode (or black screen, blue screen of death/kernel panic, system freeze, trippy display noise, etc.) with totally valid state configuration.
Google it you fuck up.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!