First of all, AMD does release drivers and fix issues. It takes a couple weeks but it happens. And if you look at benchmarks the r9 290 still trades blows with the 970, there's no huge disparity like Nvidia wants you to believe and your 70% comment is just plain rediculous.
But second, seriously? No logical reason to stick with AMD? You have no moral dilemma here? So you want to continue buYing from the company that lies about their most popular card's specs then refuses to apologize and instead tells you how grateful you should be? A company that intentionally sabotages performance of their last generation of cards because it might make the new one look bad and it may make people buy a new card (then we'll do it again next generation!)? A company that attacks open standards and tries to create schisms in the community? Can you not see what they'd do if they didn't have a competitor? And don't forget - this is all in trade for a 5% performance improvement and some power draw reduction. That's just sad.
"Sad" can also be accepting inferior products because of emotional and moral reasons.
We're not talking about human rights violations or something here, so not everyone has an appetite for moral grandstanding and voting with your wallet.
"A company that attacks open standards and tries to create schisms in the community? "
Amusingly, many software darlings of Silicon Valley behave poorly. Uber, Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook all behave aggressively anti-competitively in their own immoral and unique ways. Every company I listed attacks open standards in some way or another and creates schisms in communities on a regular basis (or their entire market is based on such walled schisms of larger markets).
If you're the kind of person who assess all hardware and software from a moral perspective, then that's an interesting and rare way to approach your decisions in this space, but not everyone finds it "sad" to use "use the best available".
Considering they downgrade older cards with driver updates 'the best available' over the lifetime of the card is directly influenced by their poor behavior.
Sure, back when a card where more than doubling in speed every year this was less of an issue. However, now that things have slowed down your better off getting a high end AMD card than a mid-range nVidia with forced obsolescence.
PS: And I say this as someone that has been using nVidia cards for a while, but watching framerates drop when replaying older titles is simply unacceptable.
I'm not an evangelical snob, I can forgive transgressons obviously. But we aren't talking about a company that doesn't only attack open standards.
This isn't even really a moral argument anymore. If you buy Nvidia you can't have good faith they'll continue to develop and optimize your card the next year when new cards are out. You can't be sure that when games that push it are released you won't stutter uncontrollably, or your stay doing GPGPU work with specific hardware in mind and its not running right because they lied about specs, etc.
And again - 5% performance difference, $100 more expensive, and not the best available (that would be 980/295x2/titan x).
Morality is not logical, so my saying "no logical reasoning" does not preclude a moral reasoning. There are a lot of things that people should do morally but they choose the logical answer instead.
Like I said, I don't want to play politics. I don't care about which option is morally superior. I worry about moral choices all day, I take the moral high ground where I can, I recycle and I buy fair trade coffee and I make sure my clothes don't come from sweatshops, but at the end of the day... I just want to play my video games. I owe absolutely nothing to AMD, they've never saved my kitten from a tree, so logically why would I buy their products if there is something that works better?
I mean if you want to bring up morals, think about that power draw reduction... I'm getting that power from a coal plant down the road. Isn't the morally correct option to go with hardware that draws less power so I can save the environment?
This is BS. Morality is extensively covered in game theory and is all about getting the best possible outcome for every member of the group, including not fucking yourself over long-term.
We don't buy Nvidia when they do this shit, because doing otherwise will encourage them to do it and fuck us over in the long-term when they potentially put AMD out of business in the long term and then they have us by the balls. More importantly, if all of us will sacrifice a little in the short term, we will ALL be better off in the long term.
It's logical, it's just not purely selfish (but a four year old could tell you that).
No one said AMD is virtuous. However they work hard to produce and mantain open standards that benefit everyone. The only other GPU producer is anti-competitive and anti-customer, so obviously we'll say "buy from AMD, they're better. " You bet the moment AMD starts bad practices (again?), I'll be putting the same critisisms on them.
With your last sentence, I don't see how meeting the basic "not exclusive" keyword to avoid legal trouble makes this okay? Nvidia doesn't allow the code to be shared or even communication with AMD (correct me if I'm wrong of course). I'm not really sure how AMD is supposed to work with that.
Morality is not logical, although sometimes the moral choice is the logical choice. Here's what I'm talking about: two video cards, the $200 GPU runs the game at 90+ FPS and the $300 GPU runs the game at 85FPS [1]. You're paying $100 more for less performance. How is that logical?
I don't care about hardware vendors. Like I said, AMD has never done a thing for me, so why do I owe them loyalty? Why is AMD suddenly the good guy? Just because they're the underdog doesn't mean they're inherently good.
There's no moral dilemma. None at all. Do I want to buy the fast video card or the slow video card? I want to play my video game. I want to buy the fastest card I can get for the money. I've bought AMD for years only because they had faster and cheaper cards in my price range. That's not true anymore. Maybe someday they'll be able to compete again, and then I will buy their hardware.
If morality was always the logical choice, Nintendo would have the highest selling hardware in video games and everyone would be playing Mario. Instead it's Sony, and everyone is playing EA games. Because people want to play games made by horrible companies on the PS4, not the games made by good companies on the Wii U.
But it doesn't really matter, because right now I have a brand new AMD R9.
> Morality is not logical, although sometimes the moral choice is the logical choice.
There is no logical choice outside of a decision rule which must rest on first principals that cannot be supported by logic. Morality is a source of such first principals (aesthetics is another, though the boundary between the two is not well-defined.)
> Morality is extensively covered in game theory and is all about getting the best possible outcome for every member of the group
You can derive some rules similar to those that some moral systems hold as first principals through game theory starting with simpler first principals, like some particular operationalization of utilitarianism, but that doesn't make morality logical, it makes it possible to use logic to derive a more complex moral framework from a small set of moral axioms. (And it may provide a tool for simplifying some pre-existing moral systems, to the extent that they have a large number of moral axioms but those can be derived from a smaller set of axioms through logic.)
It's more like you are trading short term gains (I just want my games to work) for long term losses (Putting Nvidia in a position to continue it's anti-competitive practice, potentially to the point of controlling the PC gaming industry to the detriment of everyone, but themselves, involved).
Or the long term losses of continuing to buy AMD cards even though they're slower and more expensive, which gives them no incentive to improve. How long, in your opinion, do I have to buy AMD hardware before it's morally correct to switch to another vendor?
Everyone talks about voting with your wallet, but suddenly that all goes out the window... remember when AMD was the dominant force when all Intel had was the Pentium 4 and AMD squandered their technical advantage with Bulldozer and other crappy cores?
Yes, $240 r9 290s all the time xs down to $260 at times. The former is very near the 970 and the latter overcomes in many games. Both are preferred at 1440+. A $320 970 is definitely worth it.
You may also want to consider that those AMD cards are years old while those are the newest Nvidia offerings (which aren't significantly better than Kepler - which now has poor driver support for because of this). AMDs 300 series coming out in 2 weeks (ish) is the competitor for maxwell. And instead of a minute cash grab update, it's a significant change.
Edit: There is no problem not buying inferior products. Sometimes there really isn't a choice because of the schism in features or performance. And sometimes the morality involved isn't worth fussing over.
In regards to that AMD comment: I honestly don't know what that has to do with this conversation. Amd isn't infallible amd their history had mistakes as well, but right now they're the best option for GPUs. I'll tell someone to buy Intel for performance everyday though. On the other hand, look at how little innovation Intel had brought up while Amd barely competes with them. Lack of competition produces high prices with little progress.
Intel has had massive progress in their chips, reducing TDP and pushing really good integrated graphics. The new quad core Atom chips can run Skyrim on a Windows tablet.
But second, seriously? No logical reason to stick with AMD? You have no moral dilemma here? So you want to continue buYing from the company that lies about their most popular card's specs then refuses to apologize and instead tells you how grateful you should be? A company that intentionally sabotages performance of their last generation of cards because it might make the new one look bad and it may make people buy a new card (then we'll do it again next generation!)? A company that attacks open standards and tries to create schisms in the community? Can you not see what they'd do if they didn't have a competitor? And don't forget - this is all in trade for a 5% performance improvement and some power draw reduction. That's just sad.