Bitcoin Forum

As far as I know, Nvidia cards are not preferred in GPU mining. ATI cards are being used more often than Nvidia cards. Is there a particular reason for this?
Why do you prefer ATI cards?

yes. AMD cards are better at it. ROI faster then Nvidia cards

The main reason is price. Nvidia cards are much more expensive than AMD so for same performance you pay extra. That is the reason why everyone got them and why guys developing mining software are focusing on AMD first. But this may not always be the case, look at Zcash for example. Nvidia is more profitable than AMD there (just one coin but anyway...)

yes, but nvidia uses less electricity than amd on some algos, and gives equal or more speed.
But in general amd cards are more used for mining than nvidia.

Any card can be tweaked further when you get it. But look at let's say 200$ price range Nvidia and AMD cards. Performance difference is just way to large for same invested money and goal of every miner is to hit that ROI as soon as possible

Has to do with the way stream processors with AMD and CUDA cores on Nvidia are developed. Otherwise they're almost the same with few exceptions, this one major difference impacts hashrate in a big way.

not true at all

you have a 1060 3gb which cost almost the same of a 470 and hash more on zec with far less consumption

It is true only for Zec however. No one see Zec being here in long term so what is the point in buying Nvidia cards if they are better at only one coin that is actually dying ?

As a general rule on MOST coins, AMD cards are quite a bit less expensive for a given hashrate than NVidia cards, while usually being fairly close on power efficiency.

 THAT is why most miners run ATI cards on most rigs.

 ZEC is a rare exception, but even there NVidia is at best a tossup on hash/$ - and the other coins where NVidia wins are small market coins that can't soak a ton of hashrate before they become UNprofitable.

false it's true for lbry also and spreadcoin, and guess what lbry is profitable... and you can add sib too, and for amd you also have only to option xmr and eth on which they are better, and on xmr nvidia is just not optimized

Also i think that before pascal card, you didn't had any nvidia card that was worth mining with because they were doing quite poorly against AMD's in term of price & performance,especially because of their architectures, AMD went for memory optimisation where nvidia got more power to their core and thus not needed as much memory optimisation & bandwith, it made very good result for gaming, but for mining especially ethereum that was/is still the king of AMD the AMD architecture is just much better than nvidia when mining come into play. And you can see today, the algo that does very well on nvidia card are pretty much all core dependant (zcash, lbry)

So alot of optimisation, bios, & stuff went to AMD's. If you look today, 1060/1070 are doing pretty good on some algos, and even older 970/980 are getting some results because of all the optimisation that are coming for nvidia cards. Nvidia made their gpu's efficient @ gaming, but they're not doing as well in mining. Good point is that an nvidia GPU resell better because they're preferred by gamers and they often benefit of extended warranty time, it make it worth building nvidia rigs, and sell if something goes not as good as expected.

Somedays, maybe we will be able to tweak nvidia BIOS on pascal cards, and with more & more cards coming everyday, more miners & optimisation will get out, and nvidia will be more recognized as a mining solution, for now it is still a niche market versus AMD gpu's.

This said, i'm very happy of my 10x6 1070 gpus rigs, they do very well, were easy to setup, and the ROI isn't that bad either. Still i really want someday to do AMD based rig, but it'll wait until VEGA  ;)

That was true until ZEC has born. Right now Nvidia can mine very good on this algo and since a lot of miners are going for nvidia cards we will see more optimised miner for those cards in the future.

Reasons are amd gpus cheaper(if you gonna create full amd rig its also cheaper),software support is much more.
so those reasons means short ROI and reliable mining

actually i'm waiting for the big boy as well, it' not much about amd or nvidia, it's that i hate cheap cards that you need many of them to do the same, you lose quite a bit on those additional rig, not to mention higher consumption/cooling etc...

i want always the big boy in play(not old gen though...), density is very important and people seems to forget it completely

Now yes. But for the first 3 months when Zcash was most profitable amd destroyed any other platform.

Well kinda normal when you have 99,99% of miners on amd cards... you're not getting any love for nvidia from developers of miners. that's a simple equation. especially the ones that make you pay a fee.

I'm extremely curious about how things will turn in a one year, in last months we have seen many developers joining the nvidia community.

I have been thinking about getting some 1060s instead of RX470s, same price point.

Can you mod nVidias as "easily" as the AMD nowadays? Like can you drastically reduce wattage on a 1060? I know my 470s (4Gb) draw about 70-75W while mining ZEC/XMR.

Bios modding is "relatively" easy on AMD: since most AMD cards have dual bios, and some bios editors exists (but most complicated tweaks like timings on memory requires hex editing).
On the other hand, very few people try to hack nvidia bios (fewer tools, only some cards have dual bios...).

AMD card are better on some algos, nvidia on others.
For now, amd lacks high end video card on the new fab process size.
 

Well yeah, modding AMD cards is a breeze really. Hence when I hear people say "nVidia performs same as AMD with less wattage", I always wonder if they are saying this at default stock settings. But once you optimize an AMD card, my guess is it performs about as well as an nvidia in terms of wattage no?

Depends on the hash algo. There is no definite answer. It depends also on you electricity cost and the card price in you country/provider.

On zcash nvidia is now better. Nvidia is better on spreadcoin, nexus, lbry, neoscrypt... On xmr, amd is better ...
On pascalcoin amd is far better...

ATI was acquired by AMD in 2006 and the branding of ATI has not been used since 2010.

I remember my default system datasheet back in the day with a Trident 512k ISA video card and the possibility to upgrade to an ATI MACH series card with some super exotic name. It had DRAM standard, VRAM as an option, and a price point just as exotic as its name.

I went with the Cirrus Logic card instead.

Shaking off the memberberries, the main reason you see AMD as the prevalent GPU brand here is cheaper entry into the mining market.

more of the mining software devs tend to focus on AMD as well.

IMO the most applicable generalization here is:

     AMD is better for those with very cheap power; and Nvidia is better for those with very expensive power.

This is a generalization; it is not always true.

Well, it seems it's still popular question. As it was said and as I know, AMD’s better performance is due to having far more shader cores than the equivalent Nvidia cards. If we would say it in more easier way, Nvidia GPUs are more like CPUs, in that they have only a few processors that do work, but faster. ATI GPUs have slower processors, but a lot more of them. So that's why amd is better for mining but not in gaming.

on pascal is yet to be seen i saw a 1070 with 850MH easily, current miner is not optimized at all

Are you sure about that?
IMHO the main difference is not about hardware, but about software!
Historically mining software have been developed for AMD cards, things are now slowly changing.

As far as I understand, amd cards are preferred in bitcoin mining due to reasons such as optimization, price and mining performances.
At present, however, mining is not done with video cards anymore. But the opposite is the case in sub-mining. I heard that nvidia cards are preferred to amd cards in Altcoin mining.

Is this true?

The arcitecture of the two type of cards is absolutely different. Nvidia is mostly better in aspect of driver and software, I want to say that better side of nvidia is more optimized software for gaming. ATI is more better in hardware side and when we are mining, we need better hardware specifications. At last, Nvidia is mostly for gaming and ATI for othet job and in this situation, ATI is better for mining, plus it's more cheap than nvidia and that's why most mining softs were for ati at the begining but now simply many nvidia user wants to start mining and that's why nowdays we have some mining software for nvidia.

Bitcoin mining with graphics card stopped when ASIC miners appeared. Now you can still min altcoins(sub-coins lol) with them and it's not true that nvidia cards are preferred. They are better only in Zcash mining, for everything else AMD cards are better

Because ATI are the best.