help me choose cuz last time i made a bad mistake

[Quinn Lysette]

last time cuz i was on a budget i ended up getting a R7 260X well i regretted that so bad now i will have a huge load of cash so should i give amd a second chance to redemn themselfs an get a R9 285 ? or just go for a Nvidia GTX 970 4GB i hear with that il be able to set secondlife to full ultra high so the nvidias winning but have a problem would the nvvidia be ok in a system with a amd cpu and mobo no wierd sideeffcts or problems down the line also any wierd black screens with nvidias something amd recently fixed finaly were the black screens but not secondlife :(

[Jean Horten]

I have been running Nvidia GPUs ( 580, 680, 780ti)  in AMD cpu (FX 8xxx and FX 9xxx) machines for quite some time, no problems so far.

J.

[Vulpinus]

It's a long time since I've had an AMD graphics or system board, but I can say this about the nVidia MSI GTX970:

It's grrrreat!

For the last few days I've been running two instances of Firestorm, one on each of my two monitors attached to the one GTX970 card. Windows maximised but not 'full screen'. The monitors are a 1920x1200 (yes, 16:10 not 16:9) and a 1600x1200. Graphics still set to maximum everything, RenderVolumeLOD (I think) at 6, and 256m view distance.

No problems at all with both running at once, unless I go somewhere really busy like Frank's Jazz at rush hour (just a bandwidth issue there really with so many avatars) or some of the stupid huge Gatcha resale markets (millions of ridiculously complex objects make it lag). Even then it still runs. In quieter places, it's a perfectly smooth and high frame rate experience.

Of course, if I just run one viewer, it's twice as perfect. I like my new graphics card!

[Jenni Darkwatch]

SL uses OpenGL, which AMD never really cared about. Use an nVidia GPU, otherwise you'll just keep banging your head against the wall.

[Crim Mip]

Go with Nvidia for SL. The Nvidia OpenGL performance is defintely better. I presume you have other games you play because a 970 is kinda overkill for SL. Currently the viewer won't actually use more than 512 meg of texture ram and the 970 has 4gig if I'm not mistaken. One possibly alternative would be to go for a slightly less cutting edge graphic card and an SSD if your system isn't currently using one.