Buying a new PC -- is a GTX 690 worth it?

[mashakos]

The point is Nvidia cards have poor performance and shortcomings in an entire category of applications. Does that sound familiar?

Fair enough. Then again, nvidia cards perform exceptionally well on a gpgpu platform that is widely adopted by software developers, one that amd cards do not even support - CUDA. I'd rather have a card that supports all the available platforms rather than one where people have to pester software companies to adopt in a limited form.

There's a context for everything. A single card not performing as well as a crossfire setup in OpenCL? For most users that is not a huge problem unless you are into generating rainbow tables or complex simulations built on that platform.

A single (or crossfired) card not able to accelerate H.264 video, cannot upscale on high resolution monitors and cannot handle applications where "driver optimisations" (read: artificial performance) are not applicable? That is major for a huge audience of users.

[Sakkura]

Fair enough. Then again, nvidia cards perform exceptionally well on a gpgpu platform that is widely adopted by software developers, one that amd cards do not even support - CUDA. I'd rather have a card that supports all the available platforms rather than one where people have to pester software companies to adopt in a limited form.

There's a context for everything. A single card not performing as well as a crossfire setup in OpenCL? For most users that is not a huge problem unless you are into generating rainbow tables or complex simulations built on that platform.

A single (or crossfired) card not able to accelerate H.264 video, cannot upscale on high resolution monitors and cannot handle applications where "driver optimisations" (read: artificial performance) are not applicable? That is major for a huge audience of users.

"Yay, we can invent our own standard and be the best/only vendor with it! We're so awesome!"

Also, why are you babbling about comparing a single card to a crossfire setup? That comparison matches single Nvidia cards against single AMD cards.

[mashakos]

"Yay, we can invent our own standard and be the best/only vendor with it! We're so awesome!"

Whether it's exclusive or not, it's the current industry standard. Here's an argument on the merits of both platforms in regrads to gpgpu. Bottom line: even if amd cards are cheaper (raw gpgpu performance goes up with dual chip cards like the 5970/6990) and have higher performance results in benchmarks, without proper support from the vendor professionals will steer well clear of a potential feature-creep mess in their projects. Even when amd wins the benchmark wars, it still loses out on overall support/reliability.

Also, why are you babbling about comparing a single card to a crossfire setup? That comparison matches single Nvidia cards against single AMD cards.

AMD's latest naming scheme got me confused since the x9xx model number signified a dual chip card when the 5 series were released. You got me on OpenCL: amd has clearly better numbers in sample applications. In the real world however? I'll just go with what people who use gpgpu in their work tell me: a mature platform trumps impressive numbers.