NVidia has been pretty crappy for a while now, they've made some exceptional products but they've also been complete dicks to gamers at the same time (see: GameWorks, along with their general history of implementing driver hacks to improve performance in games while reducing correctness).

I was really hoping AMD could be more competitive this generation too, I had only used AMD GPU's since 2011 when I built my first gaming system from scratch (as opposed to the cobbled up upgrades I had when I was still in middle/high-school). My R9 290 was looking long in the tooth, Vega failed to impress and the RX 580 was barely an upgrade (more VRAM, lower power, and due to cryptomining horrendously overpriced) - I ended up getting an ASUS Strix 1080Ti.

All of us should hope that AMD at least catches up with Navi, the current dominance of NVidia in the GPU market (both for gaming and the datacenter) is bad for everyone - even if you're loyal to them for some reason no real competition doesn't give them much reason to keep innovating.

Please stop propagating FUD: "proprietary RTX tech when there's no way they weren't involved or informed in the development of DirectX Raytracing"

Just looking here and searching for NVIDIA: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announci...

yields: "And, our friends at EPIC, with collaboration from ILMxLAB and NVIDIA, have also put together a stunning technology demo with some characters you may recognize."

Which was rendered with DirectX Raytracing using RTX hardware. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ue35ago3Y&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for the correction, I’ve edited my comment.

I grab a RX580 with a nice offert on black Friday. The best GPU that I brought on a long time. And works flawless on Linux.

I did too, then sold it 2 months later on eBay. Horrible windows drivers. A 1060 works flawlessly. Never buy an AMD product after that experience.

Nvidia being dicks to gamers because of Gameworks is like saying Apple are dicks to business people because of iOS. Both Nvidia and Apple create software products and only want their products to be run on their walled garden. The fallout of Gameworks wasn't even that bad as Nvidia released the source code under a restricted license and allowed AMD to optimize their drivers for the API. So like... what...?

Given the stated goal of Gameworks was to get usage out of high end GPUs using the latest effects in games that were otherwise ported poorly from console I think it has really been delivering. Now we have the opposite problem where these special effects can genuinely be hard to run on anything but the latest and greatest. It is a better situation than the alternative where you could 4x SSAA a console ported game and max out the FPS.

As long as AMD can make a card that is ballpark competative with nVidia on price/performance, I'll buy AMD. nVidia drivers, at least in my experience, have been pretty awful for awhile now. I hot-swap displays daily on a 7970 rig with no issues. I am terrified to swap the hdmi or dvi cables on my GTX 980 because it will completely screw up the display config and I'll spend an hour fixing it. Both rigs are due for upgrades, and we'll be going with AMD for both. nVidia just isn't good enough on any level for me to support this kind of tactic.