AMD R9 290X high end card soon be released.

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I've never undestood the whole "AMD has bad drivers" statement. The problems that I've had with GPU drivers are not specific to AMD; NVidia has them also.

 

Anyhow, that Mantle API is getting an awful lot of flak despite it being what folks have been calling for (more or less); direct-to-metal programming.

 

The reduction in draw call overhead, just by itself, is a major reason to use it. Gives the CPU more room to breath. Hell, Bethesda's games would be much more effecient if Mantle was used to lessen the impact of draw calls. I've found that Skyrim's framerate plummets when there are around 2,500 draw calls or more.

 

OpenGL support, alone, has been poor since the initial release of the standard, as well as polygon rendering issues in DX11.  A quick Google search comes up with 633,000 results for homebrew fixes and problem reports for OpenGL, and a search for rendering issues comes up with over 8 million results.  I repeat, I don't trust a card that doesn't work with out of the box drivers and relies entirely on third party fixes as opposed to releasing their own.  ATI has had these same issues since I started building my own gaming rigs, and so long as they continue to happen, I won't buy their cards.

 

 

So you don't like AMD thats fine. This statment (A quick Google search comes up with 633,000 results for homebrew fixes and problem reports for OpenGL, and a search for rendering issues comes up with over 8 million results) is null as the reverse can be done for Nvidia or any other product when compared to another. A quick search for driver issues with nvidia pulled 4.3 million results. A useless number because there is no telling how many duplicates there are covering the same topic. A search for Nvidia rendering issues resulted in 17.4 million hits, again a useless number. You are arguing personal preference (which is perfectly fine, every individual is entitled to their own opinions and preferences) but you have yet to provide a credible unbiased source outside to back your claims. Besides any 3rd party developer is going to run into problems with 1st party products, its to be expected. The goal is to minimize these issues. As a consumer it is my responsibility to understand that bugs, issues, and incompatabilities will always exist in a world filled with tech. Developers do their best to minimize this but the human element will always exist and errors in code will always exist.

[Guest carywinton]

Well I just broke my Christmas fund and bought the R9 280X and for the first time in I cannot remember , when FO3 tries to do it's "Oh I am going to stutter and crash here because something is happening" garbage, this card actually compensated and went rocking on, that's enough proof for me.