Maxwell really got me into Nvidia and made me forget about AMD for a while... but now that I'm poking around with AMD again and learning a lot more in the process, I've gotten a huge AMD-boner. Why?
Well, first, raw power is cool. Second, AMD and Nvidia have switched places in mining. What I mean is, people used to think Nvidia sucked hard at mining because there was no one who knew their asshole from their elbow when it came to CUDA performance tuning. Now, we have some pretty skilled people in here, doing great work... and there's almost nobody who can even properly port an algorithm to GCN - and optimize? I'd sooner get my pet cat doing calculus.
Hate to break it to you, but Nvidia is so much more power efficient now not solely because of the hardware, but because of the quality of the code running on it. That, of course, is not to say that Nvidia is NOT more power efficient than AMD - they are - but looking at this huge chasm in hash per watt between AMD and Nvidia, it is not truly what it seems to be.
The AMD are much more powerful than nvidia for calculation.
For example on skein which is just a bunch of rotation (so not much to optimize), the nvdia loose badly against the amd...
(there would be something to optimize on whirlpool for the amd at that level, but I won't tell
)
But programming with sgminer is a mess... (I thought I some point making an amd xcn miner...) but thinking to everything I would have to modify I gave up...
Also the new cards with there water cooling included on stock design is pretty nice