I Switched to AMD and Saved $300. Is it worth these tradeoffs?

I know trust me I know there are a ton of good reasons to go for NVIDIA or are there hang on stop the list go back yet not many of those commonly quoted reasons are valid for most people and Nvidia is by far the more expensive option so why is the average gamer five times more likely to have an Nvidia GPU in their system in fact even for me personally my last five cards are the RTX 4070 TI the 3080 the 2080 TI a shroud modded 10 60 and the RX 470 and you'll notice that only one of those cards wasn't an Nvidia GPU so what's changed recently that has me breaking this six-year long commitment to Nvidia and switching back to AMD well maybe the better question is why is everyone seemingly making the switch to AMD because everything seems to suggest that Nvidia is the better option they must be with that much market share rate tracing Nvidia upscaling Nvidia stability streaming content content creation all favor Nvidia these are things that you likely would have heard in the argument for NVIDIA versus AMD or Intel and when you look at it like that how can you not go for NVIDIA if everything is telling you they are the best and other GPU manufacturers are to be avoided well we are going to cover why Nvidia tends to be the default option legitimate reasons and misconceptions as to why they are better the frustrations I am currently facing with them and ultimately swap to AMD and investigate some of the primary differences in game with some really interesting results so we will either save hundreds of dollars or reveal that AMD really is as bad as some people say let's find out so I have a question are you an aid PC Enthusiast stuck with that ugly ass Windows Watermark ruining your gaming and streaming experience well I have great news for you hook Keys is a software licensing website dedicated to getting you affordable keys and the best part is you can get rid of that water mark in a matter of minutes all you need to do is head down to the video description click the sponsor link and enjoy an additional 25 % off using my coupon code T20 with PayPal checkout and quick key delivery all you need to do is hit the Windows key type activate and paste your key right here to become fully activated it really is that simple and that cheap so head down to the video description if that sounds right for you and thank you hook keys for sponsoring this video when you're spending so much money on a GPU most people only really have one chance to get it right you just can't go out and buy a 7800 XT for $500 realize it doesn't do what you want it to so it for 400 then make up the difference and ultimately buy a 4070 because at that point you're now $100 down not accounting for taxes and any sort of fees so buying the 4070 to begin with may actually be the cheaper option because yes that AMD GPU is more powerful but maybe giving up a little bit of raw performance for more features and peace of mind is the right option but in my experience only some of those reasons to go for NVIDIA are valid though definitely itely not all of them but that's also not really fair of me to say either I was already honest with you guys I haven't daily driven an AMD GPU in 6 years and testing a GPU isn't the same as an ownership experience is it so it's pretty hypocritical of me to keep recommending AMD based on hard data but not put my own money where my mouth is and legitimately embrace the AMD experience For Better or For Worse and document what I find for you guys as the counter arguments against Nvidia are really starting to bother me outrageous pricing that likely won't get better while AI demand is still high memory capacities that Mak envidia R tracing perform worse than their competitors even company ethics forcing their Partners to question the viability of their business I'm very conscious and really not happy with the current trajectory of these Trends and what they mean for us in a couple Generations time but even outside of that talking more personally I can't take my gaming system upstairs because apparently Nvidia doesn't play nicely with my Sony TV I use a mirrorless camera as a webcam which constantly freezes during activity spikes like opening an application which may be unrelated but seems to be linked to GPU usage the last time I tried to use the Nvidia overlay to record something it literally sh itself and OverWatch for a couple months and my monitor's backlight refuses to go to sleep which I suspect may be a Windows 11 thing but it has persisted through one windows reinstall and many driver updates so we'll have to see if AMD can fix that but I'm not here to gloss over any AMD issues either nor am I expecting this switch to go 100% smoothly but AMD drivers have come a long way since the vager days though AMD issues do seem more common than Nvidia ones with the most recent big one being CS2 accounts getting banned through using an AMD GPU feature and it doesn't even matter who is at fault here it's things like this that damage brand reputation and at a minimum suggest to people that AMD is the less refined option and if they aren't good these videos will still be a good example of reasons to avoid them and I'm excited to do some graphics and upscaling quality comparisons later in my initial test to really see the differences between AMD and Nvidia rendering but now we better understand what people commonly say are reasons to go for NVIDIA I told you before that I don't think all of them are valid so let me explain that and let's break down two things before we switch to AMD how many of these I feel are actually valid reasons and what are the negatives for NVIDIA or the positives for AMD because we don't want to be in a situation like the 4070 example I gave earlier potentially buying an AMD card for it to either be a crashy mess or just not work the way we need it to so let's start with one of my more controversial takes rate tracing performance and I'm going to say it it's overrated because of its massive performance hit most people consider consider it an unjustifiable disadvantage in any competitive game so only single player games then but one of the best examples is path tracing in cyberpunk which averages in the 20 FPS range at 1440p on the $800 RTX 470 TI even rate racing High only gets into the 40s so as rate racing gets more advanced with better effect implementation this $800 current generation GPU still won't be able to keep up so up feeling of frame generation then which is basically becoming a requirement for a playable rate tracing experience and again Nvidia does have the advantage but these videos will investigate how much and if it's worth the additional cost increase market share can be a good indication of experiences or it could just be marketing doing a good job and I consider neither of them to be a good reason to go for one brand over another without something more concrete to back it up stability sentiment seems to carry a lot of weight as it's one of the more common reasons I see for people to recommend Nvidia and given the issues I'm having let's not pretend it's perfect for Team Green additional software features like RTX voice are a really nice thing to have but AMD do have a competing feature for most and similarly to streaming if you're doing anything other than casual use of it you're really building out a proper solution like decent Sound Treatment or a dedicated PC but professional applications and content creation they do tend to favor Nvidia though amds seem to be making a big push here which is one thing I am eager to test but do you know what's funny I just realized that all of the reasons to go for NVIDIA need a decent amount of context but the counterarguments are actually quite simple by defaulting to Nvidia without at least considering another option you basically say that high prices poor value and a deprioritization of gaming over crypto and AI is absolutely fine and Nvidia will likely abuse that right up until the limit let's face it you then couple this with the fact that AMD will give you more performance for your money or similar performance for less money in what people play the most and adding the fact that AMD tends to equip their cards with more memory potentially increasing their useful lifespan and I would also argue a much more usable software experience these are simple things but simple things with a much bigger impact so it's starting to look like AMD is the better option provided they can deliver a good experience which means it is time to cut Nvidia loose say goodbye and EMB race team red but I can't do that for every system I own for legitimate work rated reasons which is why I've been using Nvidia for so long but that changes today so what system and what AMD card are we talking about well this is where I had to take some necessary precautions to make this as relevant as possible for you guys this is my main editing system that uses the 13900 K and an RTX 38 I went Nvidia specifically for this machine as it needs to be a stable as possible in Premier Pro but it would be rather interesting to see how far AMD has come making it a solid Contender for this series if it wouldn't interfere with my Editor to an unreasonable degree oh okay we we're doing this apparently the next option is this system that runs the main set using a 3600x and a 36 CTI there wasn't really a fundamental reason to go for NVIDIA which is unlike my editing system but I chose the 3060 TI KO Edition right there from from Asus because it's a duplicate card for me I already have the 36 TI Founders Edition which I prefer to test with but going AMD here is potentially an even better option for two reasons using AMD really shouldn't matter for what this system does and if I do the entire system would be all AMD but as you can imagine there's not a lot that I do with this system outside of a few very specific things that most people can't relate to which brings us on to the next system which many of you have probably seen before in a different form this used to be my enase M1 build that I have been using and upgrading for a few years now but moved the whole system into the o1 mini a couple months back and upgraded the GPU to the 407 TTI in preparation for this video to experience Nvidia frame generation as more of a firsthand account for me personally instead of just testing it over at the test bench this will be especially useful with the AMD recently releasing FSR 3 frame generation to compete with Nvidia and we'll have to see how they compare the reason I wanted to do the AMD challenge with this system is that it's the one I use the most especially for gaming otherwise what I realistically do most of the days on that computer is script write research Photoshop and light usage of Premier Pro so AMD needs to be able to handle that for me for me to keep the card in my system otherwise I'm just going to have to revert back to Nvidia but I guess we'll find out it has a 58 800x CPU which is very popular and would make the entire system AMD to get the full experience so now we just need a GPU to put in there and I have shortlisted two options this was my original choice the 6950 XT I really wanted to go for this card as it's a prime example of the AMD Nvidia conundrum because it dropped from 1100 to around 5 to 600 I've been recommending it as the best value high-end card for months before theas release of the 7800 XT which at $500 was a solid recommendation in our best value GPU series both of these cards are a bit faster than the 3080 and a bit slower than the 470 TI I upgraded to but both are considerably cheaper than either of the Nvidia cards unless you were buying used so really is a tossup here but I like the 7800 XT as it's the latest generation while also likely to be an extremely popular card this time around making this entire experiment more relatable for you guys and given that it is a new card if amd's track record is anything to go by I'm expecting the performance to increase over time as it has done with the 6950 XT though driver stability is likely going to be worse on the 7800 XT given that it's a new architecture which could be a negative for my experience but would be a positive for this video and you guys getting a real understanding of the experience I'm having and whether you can put up with it whether we're getting massive driver issues that just really should be avoided so I'm leaning 7800 XT but a side note in my personal life is we recently rescued this little princess this is Luna and she loves cuddles but to my disappointment I recently found out that she's team blue for some reason maybe she knows something about Intel's next Generation I don't but I'm going to let Luna decide between these two cards in the most unbiased way possible good girl 7800 XT it is so let's drop this card into our system and check out some of the gameplay differences between Nvidia and AMD now that I have fully embraced team red one ddu later to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers and it is time to install the AMD card now I'm expecting this to go reasonably smoothly it's not that much bigger I think it's roughly the same size as the 4070 TI might actually be a little bit slimmer but what we're going to need is a chopstick this is a pro tool for PC Building and I'll show you why there there we go and now you can remove the GPU without scratching it because it's wood get one so if the internet is to be believed then once we install this what should happen is 3 2 1 so we are now installed with the AMD 7800 XT and there's a few things that I want to do number one is figure out out what broke in the process I'm imagining that there have been a few bug Replacements as in some of the issues that I was having with Nvidia I'm hoping that we can solve with this AMD card but I'm also assuming that there'll be some additional issues to deal with so we're going to figure those out as well as do some gameplay comparisons I ran probably something like 30 to 40 different runs of cyberp punk see if there's any visual differences any upscaling differences I don't think that we can do frame generation is FSR 3 isn't released on cyberpunk yet hopefully yet but let's find out what the differences are between this GPU and the 4070 I just replaced let's take a look so what I think is the fairest thing to do right here is to leave as much as possible on default or Auto to get the raw user experience from each manufacturer typically I am far more strict about this for benchmarks but as most people will just ddu drop in their card and play I want to have the same experience that you would to make this video as relevant as possible for you but before we game let's figure out what issues AMD fixed and see if they caused anything to get worse so the first thing that I wanted to look at is if I fixed the biggest issue I was facing while the Nvidia GPU was installed I will test everything before the follow-up video but the issue that's had the greatest potential for costing me a lot of money is the 247 backlight issue so having done nothing more than install the adrenaline application and setting the time out to 1 minute it is time to test now go to sleep that one's off that one's off perfect so it was to do with Invidia well at least something to do with Windows and Nvidia which is kind of the same thing so that alone might have just saved me hundreds of dollars from monitors dying prematurely which I'm extremely happy about but there was another issue that I was trying to fix that didn't go as smoothly for AMD remember the webcam freezing yeah it don't freeze no more as I did a fresh Windows install trying to fix issues when I was using the Nvidia card I think it's only fair that we allow AMD the same and I'll have to update you on this as well as any other bugs I find in the follow-up video but there was one more issue that almost stopped this entire video right here before we could even look at the gaming differences between these two cards okay here's something interesting what I've been doing for screen capture is an external capture right here now we do an external capture because this produces an extremely high quality video file while also taking none of the computer's resources but the issue that we're facing at the moment with the AMD card is that I typically mirror the main display here to that um and it's not picking it up there is one thing that I want to double check so we're going to change this to 60 and hopefully it will work oh there we go okay great once we got past that mini road block it is time to see some some of the differences which presented a bit of an issue for a couple things I wanted to test one odd thing in cyberpunk was that the frame rate would not go above 60 there was no frame rate limiter and vsync was off in both the game and the adrenaline application in fact it was happy going over 60 if it wasn't the active window and my cursor was hovering over the game creating the heartbeat of a GPU apparently the way to get around this was to change to exclusive full screen in cyber Punk yuck revera statistics worked with no issue other than losing the GPU power metric which was also the case for Hardware info and might just be because the card is new as the adrenaline software was reporting it and shows that between the two cards the 4070 TI is currently the better option for idle power draw even though it's a more powerful GPU at 1/3 the power consumption of the AMD card and the differences don't stop there we won't really be looking at average FPS much because that that's kind of a bit too card specific but I am interested to see stuff like frame consistency upscaling and even differences in visual quality because you'd expect the monitor to just output the same visuals regardless of the GPU but there can be visual differences between AMD and Aid and you'll have to let me know which one you prefer what we are looking at here is a cyberpunk benchmark at 1440p on ultra settings no upscaling no frame generation just pure raster rendering and you'll notice the color output is slightly different they were both recorded in the same way on my external recorder neither have HDR enabled but they definitely do look different to me the Nvidia one looks moodier and more saturated which I kind of like but really does lose visual Clarity in very light or very dark environments compared to the AMD card which retains much more visual detail at the extremes and Carries into upscaling though Nidia typically has the advantage here as they can use both both FSR and dlss the Nvidia proprietary upscaler in theory FSR really should work the same on both AMD and Nvidia but when we take a look at this sign on the steps the Nvidia card really struggled to render it at a distance this was by far the most noticeable mistake in all of the runs whereas the AMD card did a much better job here in terms of rendering accuracy however many other elements within the scam were sharper for NVIDIA while using FSR though you are far more likely to notice an impaired sign than you are a marginally sharper graphic through a railing and there were several other examples of Nvidia being sharper but less clear but going back to the color differences this building is by far the most noticeable which was just way too bright for NVIDIA kicking the Nvidia card into dlss mode the sign that rendered much better for AMD now renders better for NVIDIA and this was the same for other examples that I saw dlss generally did a better job at least in our cyberpunk test so far so in this example FSR is better on an AMD card but dlss still comes out on top in terms of visual Fidelity but it's worth mentioning the only thing that I really noticed without pixel peeping was the color differences and the sign on the steps everything else you just won't notice in normal gameplay and the conclusion is the same when it comes to rate tracing FSR better on AMD and dlss slightly better overall but the quality of the frames is only really half the story isn't it because a good gaming experience very rarely relies on visuals alone and arguably far more important is consistency and this is where AMD surprisingly pulled ahead even in R tracing with upscaling which is where Nvidia is supposed to be fundamentally Superior especially in an Nvidia sponsored game this is a side by side of R tracing medium 47 TTR using dlss and 7800 XT using FSR although the Nvidia card is averaging over 20% more frames you can see the consistency is not as good compared to the AMD run watch this a few times over go back replay it and pay attention to those stutters stutters you feel when you play and that's really quite an important difference that really helps the fluidity of the game so we have covered a lot here but we've only really scratched the surface of comparing AMD to Nvidia so let's recap the pros and cons I've experienced which one has been better for me so far and what we will cover in our long-term testing let's take a look let's start with the subjective I have faced a couple issues with AMD so far but would say that my issues are far more acceptable and that's primarily because of my monitors but if I did have a lot of important video calls coming up that might change how much of an advantage AMD has been for me but would still absolutely be a net benefit a webcam is significantly cheaper than those monitors but I will do further testing with a fresh Windows reinstall for the next video speaking of cost both cards have similar max power specs but the 7800 XT currently uses a decent amount more power when idling in my setup at about 16 cents per kilowatt hour that works out to be just over $70 a year more for the AMD card if it was always idling and never turned off so probably more like under 50 I also lost the ability to use dlss upscaling and DSS frame generation we will compare frame generation in the next video but for upscaling so far I am 100% okay with this dlss may produce a more accurate image but slightly less accuracy is a compelling trade-off for a more fluid experience which is exactly what I got with AMD so far and I'll test more games for the follow-up video but AMD being more fluid wasn't enough for some of the r tracing tests I did in cyber punk in normal gameplay these cards should perform quite quite similarly about 10% in favor for the Nvidia card however in rate tracing nvidia's Advantage pulls ahead but I did say earlier that the advantage from Nvidia rate racing is overrated and I'll show you that now even though the envidia card outperformed the amd1 by about 25% in this test much higher than the 10% raster render difference neither card could average 60 frames per second running cyberpunk rate tracing medium natively at 1440p yeah but on paper that is still a big Improvement so is it worth the 60% cost increase well if you only play rate race games 20% of the time that Nvidia rate racing performance uplift should only be worth 5% more cost to you so no but what about future games is it worth spending that extra money to get better rate tracing in the future well if cyberpunk path tracing is anything to go by you're probably getting a new GPU at that point and that's why I have never advocated for focusing so much money on rate tracing performance it fundamentally just doesn't make sense for most Gamers but what does make sense is the fact that I've gained a lot more value between the two gpus I lost a little raw performance saved $300 and got 1/3 more memory I also could have used the 7900 XT instead but the conclusion would be the same at Price parity as in I spent the same amount but got more performance from AMD in either example I get more value for my money and with that extra money I have planned some great upgrades for my system which is suffering from small form factor big case syndrome but all of the components will be linked below for you if you want to check them out the only question is will the AMD card remain well provided that I don't run into some major issues in my long-term testing I will be happy to keep it and this isn't even AMD fanboyism I am mostly happy with Nvidia at least atast their performance with several other computers that I own and that likely won't be changing for any of them not anytime soon but I'm excited to give AMD a solid chance here so I'm going to try and cover everything else in the next video everything there hopefully there'll be a list right there but if there is something that you would have wanted to see here or something that you want to see next time let me know in the comments section below I want to make these videos as relevant as possible for you and make sure that I am answering the right questions otherwise to get my current unfiltered thoughts about each GPU manufacturer check out this video where we investigate the pros and cons of going for an Nvidia AMD or Intel GPU and where you should be using one over another for a variety of use cases and you can check that out by clicking here otherwise guys share like subscribe they are always appreciated and I hope you have an amazing day

Channel: TechLens

Views: 114,032

Keywords: swapping to amd, swapping nvidia to amd gpu, switching to amd, switching to amd gpu, switching from nvidia to amd gpu, performance difference, visual differnece, should i switch to amd, is nvidia better than amd, nvidia amd differences, 4070 ti, 7800 XT, nvidia gpu, amd gpu, graphics card, PC Gaming, ray tracing, dlss, fsr, frame generation, upscaling, bugs, amd vs nvidia, switching to radeon, Switched to AMD, i switched to amd, amd, nvidia

Id: 6l4NTfH5kUk

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023