Now then, about a year ago, I built a machine with the follow specifications:
AMD FX-6100 CPU, 6 cores, 3.3 GHz
Corsair Vengeance RAM, 4x4GB
MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III GPU
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard
Acer S231HL Monitors x 2
1.5 TB of total storage available.
Now the only important thing here is that MSI card, the rest is jut me showing off. The MSI R6950 is an ATI 6000-series GPU. Reason I bring it up is that I would like to know if getting an NVidia card would have done me any better? I’m not asking for any mainstream benchmarks, I want to know how differently things would be as a Unity developer. Unity runs Physx, of course, and my main question is do ATI card fully take advantage of that? What do NVidia cards do that the ATI cards do not, if anything?
I tend to go AMD because I’ve only ever had bad experience with nVidia cards. Though I’m open to try stuff. But nVidia only outweigh AMD cards because of the CUDA cores. Not that you’ll use them much.
In general, nVidia has historically had better drivers, while AMD has had better hardware. I’m not sure how that holds up right now, though. AMD got around to unifying their drivers finally, and nVidia seems to have caught up in the hardware department.
In the end, I don’t think the choice really matters. Still, I’ve had really good luck with nVidia, so I stick with that. (And 10+ years ago, when I was doing computer repair work, I had a lot of trouble with AMD, and almost none with nVidia. That kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth.)
I like Nvidia better, I also liked ATI but I always think that AMD is just trying to trick its consumers to think they are the best, regardless of if it is or not… IDK it just seems like a less legit company to me.
Also, most places use NVidia for there stuff, like IIRC the butterfly effect demo is running on a single GTX 680 and the Samaritan demo was on a kepler NVidia card, so I guess it is fair to assume that that is what they run best on.
You’ll find your choice comes down to budget, with nvidia and intel leading performance if you’ve the budget, and amd/ati leading in cost effectiveness. As it’s been for the last, well, forever. It’s something all parties seem ridiculously content with.
The answer is YES, ATI takes the same full advantage of it as NVIDIA cards, namely 0
Unity does not support any form of gpu hardware acceleration for the Physics it all runs purely on the cpu so your cpu is quite a lot more of a problem with its subpar number crunching capabilities compared to any Core i (1st through 3rd gen) processor.
Also CrossFire and SLI are indeed overrated. To be more precise: when used with Unity your performance has a very good chance to degrade if the CF / SLI mode is the default alternating frame one
So that’s why my fan went nuts on some unity games the processor was not as powerful compared to my graphics card so if unity uses cpu for physics no wonder my cpu went hot lol
I have an AMD card and I like it alot, but the drivers are not as good as Nvidia’s, particularly when it comes to OpenCL. AMD’s OpenCL drivers are so bad that while Blender had plans to support it, they’re indefinitely on hold because the drivers don’t work nearly as well as the CUDA ones do. I bought the card with the hopes of using it for various OpenCL applications, but so far I haven’t actually done that because not many support it. If you care about GPU compute, you should definitely go with Nvidia. Hardware wise though, AMD has been great.