i know that it was towards the last 0.5 gb. can you show me any source with frametime measurements that show that this is not an issue? i can show you the opposite: grman hardware site(sorry its in german, but the graphs should be selfexplenatory)
well, good AMD custom designs are not more noisy. furthermore, AMD has better driver support for older cards and the GTX 970 ESPECIALLY needs good drivers because of its faulty design. therefore it may get a lot worse in future. "less frame rate variance"-> isnt that the reason for the r9 390 with 8 gigs? and they cost the same more or less
Well, lucky me i do read german.
PCGH shows quite heavy spikes with the 980, and even 290x/8G as well.
Fair enough, frametime issues past 3.5 GB may occur, that is correct, outside of this scenario and generally speaking nvidia is way ahead in this department. Which brings me to the mentioned part of drivers: i doubt nvidia will abandon "support" in this regard, at least not any time soon, nor will it actually be any serious problem without.
And again, i tried to explain my personal preference, and AMD doesn't offer too much in this department.
Why would i need a card with 8GB vram, if i can't properly drive any higher resolution with either card? But i get the better noise / cooling and lower power draw on the nvidia one - and no, a card with 64% more power draw won't have the same efficiency, that is literally impossible.
Marketing and swayed benchmarks won't change physics.
Anyways, i don't want to argue against the 380 / 390, just explaining why i would get one card over the other. Now if i had different scenario, then it would also look into different GPUs.
OP is on a budget, so some used 290(x) might be quite a bargain atm - if chassis airflow and PSU are decent that is.