So, if you are in the market looking for a GPU, you will have two major companies to choose from at least until Intel comes up with their Arc Alchemist GPUs. These two companies dominating the GPU market today are American semiconductor giants, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Both of these companies competitively manufacture GPUs and are in a performance arms race. So, which company is the best for you? Let’s find out.
GPU Manufacturers – How did Nvidia and AMD Rise to the Top?
In 1981, IBM built the first video cards. To date, graphics processing was done by the CPU itself, thus severely limiting its processing power. IBM built two video cards, a Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) with 4KB of internal video memory, and a Color Display Adapter (CDA) with 16KB of internal video memory. In the early days, Hercules Computer Technology was the chief competitor of IBM graphics cards. They launched their Hercules Graphics Card (HGC) to fight against the MDA and CDA.
In the 1990s, a Californian company named 3dfx interactive joined the race. Their extremely popular Voodoo series of cards quickly became a market dominator, until they stopped making them in 2001 and went bankrupt in 2002.
Nvidia launched their first product, the NV1, back in 1994. This was also the time when Candian fabless semiconductor company, Array Technology Inc. (ATI), started manufacturing independent graphics solutions for PCs. By the time 3dfx, a major player went bankrupt, ATI and Nvidia emerged as the largest graphics card manufacturers.
AMD acquired ATI back in 2006, and the branding was phased out by 2010. The company was renamed to Radeon Technologies Group after it became a division of AMD.
AMD vs Nvidia – What is the Difference?
There is not a lot of difference between AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. The major difference lies in the architecture, but functionally, you can do the same things on a card from either company.
Each card from Nvidia or AMD is a part of a certain generation and microarchitecture. These cards have different designs, and mostly the difference lies in the arrangement and quantity of different components. So, equivalent cards from these companies will have a different arrangement if you are into taking them apart.
Some examples of these differences are different numbers of power stages, VRAM chips from different companies, and variable PCB lengths. But, they will still get the job done.
The second difference is in system software. Now, AMD and Nvidia excise proprietary control over the software that can be used to control the settings. This software has emerged to include a bunch more features than just being a hub for downloading graphics driver downloaders. These include support for video recording, taking screenshots, displaying your system hardware configuration, as well as showing all of your installed games for easier access.
Will I Lose Something By Going With Either Nvidia or AMD?
The simple answer is: no. While it is true that Nvidia has always been in a more favorable position in the market and also has had a significantly higher market share as compared to AMD, none of the offerings from either company are bad. Let’s talk about the current GeForce RTX 30 series and the Radeon RX 6000 series a bit.
The GeForce RTX 30 series is the second generation of Nvidia Ray Tracing cores while the Radeon RX 6000 series is AMD’s first shot at incorporating hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Thus, it is common sense that ray tracing performance on Nvidia’s cards will be slightly better. And, it is true, but most of the time, only theoretically. Equivalent cards from either company perform competitively and you will be good by going with either of them.
Now let’s talk about two other points where AMD is preferred. Most of the RX 6000 series cards pack more VRAM as compared to the offerings from Nvidia. The RX 6800, which is slightly more powerful than the RTX 3070 Ti, packs 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is both cooler and significantly larger albeit slower the faster than the 8GB GDDR6X memory of the latter.
The significantly larger memory capacity of the RX 6800 gives it an upper hand in the latest intensive AAA titles like Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
Due to significantly lesser sales and demand, the RX 6000 series cards are much cheaper than the RTX 30 series cards. This obliterates the little performance gap the RTX 30 series cards have because they pack second-generation RT cores.
The only reason the RX 6000 series are available at such cheap rates is that their mining performance isn’t as good as the RTX 30 series cards.
Nvidia vs AMD – Which One Should You Choose?
The answer varies depending on exact SKUs, pricing, and availability. Do your research and find out the performance deltas between all the products you are considering before purchasing a graphics card. Then, tally them and find out the performance-per-dollar metrics. AMD cards might have a slight upper hand most of the time. But, if you manage an RTX 30 series card at a dope price, go for it.
There is no set formula that Nvidia or AMD is particularly good. You need to find that out for every equivalent card they manufacture.