The never-ending debate of AMD vs Nvidia has never been closer than it is right now. With both manufacturers offering some of the best graphics cards on the market, it’s hard to decide right now whether Team Red or Team Green is better. It’s all about choosing what’s important to you and weighing that against everything else on the table.
Regardless of personal preference, there are some things that Nvidia still does better, and this is despite the fact that AMD has achieved a lot in recent years. Here are some reasons why Nvidia still holds a commanding lead over AMD in many ways.
Display
Nvidia and AMD match up well when you look at comparable cards. This mostly applies if you’re focused on raw performance without any extra fuss, but we’ll discuss this in more depth later. However, there is one place where Nvidia is the undisputed leader of the pack – high-end.
Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is the graphics card to beat this generation, and AMD isn’t even trying. Its flagship RX 7900
It’s true that most gamers don’t really need the RTX 4090, so dropping the RX 7900 XTX is an acceptable option and a good compromise for many. However, this doesn’t change the fact that AMD has completely locked itself out of the most high-end segment of the GPU market. Anyone who needs more power than an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XTX will automatically default to Nvidia, as there is no AMD equivalent. And the difference between RTX 4090 and RX 7900 Huge,
A chart pictured above of AMD’s RX 7900 points to bridging that gap. Well, not unless it has a high-end chip hidden somewhere up its sleeve, waiting to be released. However, this is unlikely, as AMD itself has stated that it does not want to compete at a higher level.
Right now, anyone who wants the best of the best will go to Nvidia, and this will only continue into the next generation. Rumor has it that AMD is also out of the high-end race with its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics cards. However, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Cards like the RX 7800 XT show that AMD really shines in the midrange sector where Nvidia’s generational improvements are weak despite the price increase.
Even though it might be good for AMD to go down and really target the mainstream segment, the fact is that if you’re evaluating cards based on performance alone it gives Nvidia the upper hand. The bar has been set higher than AMD hopes to reach right now, and we don’t know when or if that will change.
dlss
It’s not possible to compare Nvidia to AMD without discussing Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology – especially now, when DLSS 3 (and DLSS 3.5) is available in full force. While DLSS was a nice feature in the previous generation, the third version of this technology took it to new heights, and those heights are still unattainable for AMD.
DLSS2 was still often considered superior to AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), but it had flaws. The visual artifacts and overall low quality made it easy to skip. DLSS 3, on the other hand, generates entire frames instead of just pixels and provides a huge increase in frames per second (FPS) in some of the most demanding games, taking them from playable to just fine.
This is a game changer over more budget-friendly graphics cards like the RTX 4070. As you can see from the chart above, enabling DLSS 3 on the $600 RTX 4070 allowed it to reach 73 fps. cyberpunk 2077, And that’s at 4K with ray tracing enabled. Meanwhile, AMD’s second-best GPU, the RX 7900 XT, lags behind the rest of Nvidia’s product stack with 18 fps.
However, DLSS 3 is not a magical thing. This is not available in every game and you can sometimes choose to skip it. This can make some titles feel a little sluggish and it adds latency – something that Nvidia Reflex can help with, but not completely fix.
While imperfect, DLSS 3 is a big selling point for Nvidia this generation. It may also be selling access to DLSS3 instead of the actual graphics card, as this technology is very powerful, but the GPUs themselves are not that much of an improvement over the previous generation – except for the RTX 4090.
AMD hasn’t had an answer to DLSS for a long time. FSR 1.0 was a disappointment; FSR 2.0 was a big improvement, but still not that much. Now, with FSR 3 finally out, almost a year after it was initially announced, we may see AMD and Nvidia on a more level playing field in the future. However, as AMD is catching up, Nvidia is moving forward with DLSS 3.5 with the new Ray Reconstruction feature.
ray tracing
Ray tracing is another easy task when comparing AMD to Nvidia. AMD has made great strides over the past few generations to catch up to Nvidia, but despite those efforts, Nvidia is still the king of ray tracing – especially at higher resolutions.
If you look at the graph above, you can see how current generation GPUs can’t handle cyberpunk 2077 At its highest ray tracing preset without any upscaling assistance. Still, it’s clear how far ahead Nvidia is here. AMD’s current-gen best is competing with the last-gen RTX 3090, while the RTX 4090 is offering almost double the frame rates.
The biggest issue here is that AMD hasn’t improved that much from one generation to the next. After all, the RX 6950 XT performs just as well as the RX 7900 XT, and they’re both not far behind the RX 7900 XTX.
When you go down the ladder to the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 the two GPU manufacturers are a little closer. Neither of these were designed to handle ray tracing at ultra settings, but they both do a similar job; However, Nvidia still shows a leading edge in every benchmark.
For those who don’t care about ray tracing, this isn’t a deal breaker, but it’s hard to deny that Nvidia still does it better.
AI and Productivity
It’s not all about gaming – consumer graphics cards are also used for productivity, including things like AI or machine learning (ML) workloads, content creation, streaming, and 3D modeling. This is another segment where Nvidia has the edge, and with the current AI boom, cards like the RTX 4090 could be worth their weight in gold if you need something powerful to handle such workloads.
Nvidia’s lead over AMD in AI depends on several factors. For one, Nvidia is just a few years ahead – it moved into AI sooner than AMD, and that gives it a unique kind of edge where a lot of platforms are better off dealing with Nvidia cards instead. AMD. Nvidia has invested heavily in software development and support for AI tasks in its product stack, bringing software like TensorRT, NCCL, and others.
Due to how long Nvidia has been in the AI game, many tools and libraries are still primarily designed for Nvidia’s CUDA platform. The CUDA Deep Neural Network (cuDNN) library, which benefits from GPU acceleration, is widely used in deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. CUDA acceleration is also built into other applications, such as Blender, where even older Nvidia cards leave the competition in the dust.
AMD has its own platform for GPU-accelerated computing, called Radeon Open Compute (ROCm). However, given how widespread CUDA support is compared to ROCm, it’s an uphill climb for both AMD and anyone using its cards for AI/ML workloads.
In addition to software, Nvidia also has a lot of hardware support for AI. Both dedicated Tensor cores and RT cores are working well with their software stack, Nvidia is – well, stacked. AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards also come with AI accelerators, but with limited access to ROCM, it is still far from becoming the preferred solution for AI.
Even if you’re not interested in AI or machine learning, Nvidia still has AI-powered software that may come in handy, like Nvidia Broadcast, which offers AI-enhanced videoconferencing. It is often said that it is better than any third party software in improving voice and video quality and auto frame and providing virtual backgrounds. AMD’s optional noise suppression isn’t on the same level, and it doesn’t have a video solution like Nvidia’s.
we are
Historically, Nvidia has been the favorite for PC virtual reality (VR), and drivers and overall support have a lot to do with it. It doesn’t help that AMD generally gets poor feedback for its drivers, and unfortunately, in the case of VR, those who complain are sometimes right.
Even the AMD subreddit includes posts from people who are dissatisfied with the performance of AMD’s RX 7000-series GPUs in VR. What’s important to note here is that these issues are not universal; This depends on your operating system, game, video codec, and associated graphics card. However, the general consensus is that Nvidia is leading the way for a seamless VR experience.
This may be because the last generation drivers are more mature and AMD has had more time to iron out any issues, but the expectation is always that the GPU will perform well out of the box. . That’s not always the case here, and Nvidia performs better across the board anyway.
If VR problems on AMD graphics cards on Windows are actually related to driver issues, that’s even more of a shame. AMD’s GPUs seem to be well suited for VR on the hardware side, with abundant VRAM, so you’d think they’d be the better choice here.
Nvidia’s graphics cards in this generation are often starved for video memory, with GPUs like the RTX 4060 Ti only having 8GB, while the AMD RX 7800 XT comes with 16GB. At the high end, AMD and Nvidia both offer 24GB of VRAM, but as we’ve already established, the RTX 4090 has a more powerful GPU. Still, if you’re spending $1,000 on an RX 7900
there’s a lot to consider
Although it’s clear that Nvidia is the leader in some areas, that doesn’t mean you should discount AMD GPUs wholesale. There are areas where AMD is ahead of Nvidia, such as overall price, VRAM capacity, and a feature-rich software suite. In fact, we’ve only rounded up four GPUs you should consider this generation, and two AMD options appear in there. As is always the case, the right GPU for you depends on what features you need, and how much price you are willing to pay for the performance you want.
