Hi, I am looking to upgrade my gpu. I currently have 2 gtx 760s, and would like something like a 970. However, amd cards get you a better performance per dollar. So i was wondering, How would something like a r9 390 perform in blender cycles, as well as in beamng.drive? Would i be better off buying a gtx 970?
The 970 would be slightly better for BeamNG, actually, since it's DX11. No idea about Cycles. The 390 is still the better card, much better DX12 performance. You should just wait for Pascal/Polaris. Both will have better performance/$ and power efficiency than current architectures.
The 390 is better for most games and will win massively in DX12. BeamNG being the exception to this rule where the 970 is a bit faster, but as we all know Torque3d sucks pretty hard for the time being no matter what GPU you have. As for cycles all round the 390 is a total beast in blender cycles, the 390x is able to beat a Titan X in render times by about 10 seconds so a 390 won't be very far off that mark at all. The reasoning for this is a mix of how Open CL works and the cards themselves just having better compute performance than Nvidia (which is also a part of why they are so much better in DX12.) You will also have much more headroom using 8GB of VRAM for rendering. This thread looks into it a little, turns into a bit of a flame with random back and forth but the first post render times say alot about it.
Wait until AMD releases 14nm GPUs later this year and nVidia releases 16nm. Might be some big performance gains and the previous gen cards will drop in price.
