The R9 Fury is for me and anyone else who's main machine is a virtual one. nVidia has locked out its consumer graphics cards from being passed-through to a virtual machine unless you buy their multi-thousand-dollar workstation graphics cards, while AMD lets you pass your graphics cards through to your VMs, no problem.<p>Edit: For clarification, if you want to use a virtual machine directly (i.e. not in a window or a virtual terminal on another machine running a virtual machine browser), keyboard and mousing directly into the VM and having the VM direct its output directly to a video card/monitor, you must "pass through" the video card so the VM "owns" it exclusively and the host machine does not. Regardless of whether you want gaming-level graphics or just basic VGA output, you need to give it an actual, real graphics card (there are exceptions with new cards by nVidia that understand VMs and let you "create" a graphics card out of a subsection of a more powerful card, but at prohibitive prices). AMD's entire graphics card lineup, from their $20 to their $700 GPUs will let you do this. nVidia's cards detect they're being passed-through to a VM and won't install the drivers, unless you perform a (risky) hardware hack or use their professional graphics cards that a) aren't designed nor optimized for consumer graphics card use, and b) cost at least an order of magnitude more than their regular graphics cards.
It is very much application-dependent. For games they might be similar, but that's about it.<p>AMD cards tend to have much better integer performance, which is good for cryptography-related tasks.<p>NVidia has way more RAM + better float performance. Plus the fact that many libs only implement things with cuda as backend and not opencl, you are pretty much stuck with only one viable option.
The reason I tend to be more interested in AMD graphics cards is that I want basically workable open source drivers in Linux. AMD pays a couple of people to maintain the upstream linux driver for their cards, NVidia doesn't. So if you have an AMD card that isn't totally new in the last 2 months, you get a working proper resolution desktop with no hassle. (So for this strategy to work with the Fury, you'd probably have to wait another month or two.)<p>I still dual-boot windows just to play recent games, it pretty much always works better than the alternatives, like the closed source Catalyst driver, wine, even native ports. An NVidia card would probably work a bit better for this purpose, and their closed source drivers for linux are also better, but for me the open source drivers are the more significant factor.
I wish reviewers would include some measure (real, not paper) on GPGPU performance. WPA hashes per second is a widely known reference number for integer performance. Neural network training is a similar one for floats.
The performance difference are a few percent right? About 10-15 FPS? I guess nvidia are still considered the best but that means AMD have to reduce prices, which is better for me.<p>Reminds me that the nvidia graphics card in my MacBook is going wrong. Hmmm.