I got my hands on both an MSI R9 390X and a EVGA SC GTX 970. the R9 390X is typically regarded as performing about
~10% better on average than the GTX 970 at 1080p, but I was wondering how well it would perform in blockland, an "indie" game (or whatever the hell you want to call it)
My test consisted of starting up a singleplayer "freebuild" server and loading up the bedroom brick build. I then climbed on top of the table/drawer with the lamp, and did a timed walk/look motion. I used FRAPS to do a frametime graph and used FRAFS to decipher and save it as a picture.
I thought Nvidia would generally perform better due to me thinking that it had superior OpenGL performance - apparently I was wrong!
(note! they are not to scale! the most relevant information is in the top left corner, with the avg/1%/0.1% times/framerates. right click -> open in new tab to see full size picture)
GTX 970 TestsAVG - 183 FPS
1% LOW - 130 FPS
0.1% LOW - 115 FPS
AVG - 182 FPS
1% LOW - 130 FPS
0.1% LOW - 114 FPS
R9 390X TestsAVG - 265 FPS
1% LOW - 202 FPS
0.1% LOW - 91 FPS
AVG - 264 FPS
1% LOW - 201 FPS
0.1% LOW - 99 FPS
ResultsAVG - R9 390X performed
~45% better than the GTX 970
1% LOW - R9 390X performed
~55% better than the GTX 970
0.1% LOW - GTX 970 performed
~20% better than the R9 390X
VerdictThis is based off two single cards and could not be completely representative of overall GPU manufacturer performance and my testing methodology could be completely off or I might have some sort of driver issues/etc, but it seems that from my testing,
AMD has better average performance in Blockland compared to comparable Nvidia cards. If you want to play Blockland with the highest average framerates,
get a comparable AMD card over an Nvidia model. Something interesting to note is that the R9 390X had fairly bad 0.1% LOW results, however they are still high enough that I do not consider it to be a large problem, although it could be a problem for some. In short, AMD wins in this game.
specs of build in case any of you want to know:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zY64FTpicture 1picture 2