AMD cards don't suck, they're actually (in my opinion) better than NVIDIA for their money. It's the drivers that suck. They add an absolute shit ton of ridiculous latency-increasing options (some of which, such as auto GPU scaling, you can't turn off), and the newer drivers prevent you from forcing your own custom resolution and refresh rate. This essentially means that if your monitor doesn't have hardware scaling, you're forced to run every game and application you use at the monitor's default resolution and 60Hz. Essentially, AMD (and to some extent, newer NVIDIA cards such as the Titan) have outrageously bad driver settings. They optimise their drivers entirely for frame stutter reduction in title game benchmarks and when using Crossfire (or SLi), and as a result completely ignore the one thing that most of us care about: input latency.
The only solution is to use a custom .inf or registry file, or revert to an old driver before the scaling and resolution modules were rewritten. This causes problems with most new graphics cards since only the newest drivers are available for them.
AMD drivers also create frame stutter in games that run on DirectX 9 and below (it affects my one true love, Skyrim). The only fix for me was to turn off vsync, or alternatively keep vsync on but use MSI Afterburner or a similar tool to limit the framerate being displayed in Skyrim to 59.9 fps, so there's no 59-60-64-59-60-etc stutter.
Btw, on topic: windowed mode will utilise GPU scaling so it will _always_ add input lag, since graphical scaling is an extra computational process in itself. However, the exact amount depends mainly on your monitor, and to some extent the type of scaling used (Display Scaling is better than GPU scaling). This also goes for things such as driver-enabled FXAA (and if you have a NVIDIA card, "Maximum Prerendered Frames" will also add latency). GPU scaling is also present (for me) when I try to run the game at a resolution that doesn't match the native aspect ratio of my monitor (16:9), so 4:3 aspect ratios (such as 1024x768, 800x600, etc) end up looking stretched across my screen (this was the case on my old computer, which had an AMD XFX 7950, but it wasn't the case on my older computer, which had a GeForce 9100). Not only does it make my game look like arse, it also adds noticeable input delay.
Anyway, some settings you may want to tinker with:
/animationinterpolationtime
/smoothmove
/smoothdist
/sensitivityscale
And yes please use hitsound, helps a ton! You can edit the volume of the hitsound in your sounds.cfg or use a custom one, I have the quake live hitsound. Best of luck!
EDIT: I don't use AMD anymore, playing on a laptop with a GTX 870M. 8)
EDIT2: Fixed a major derp in my post.
The only solution is to use a custom .inf or registry file, or revert to an old driver before the scaling and resolution modules were rewritten. This causes problems with most new graphics cards since only the newest drivers are available for them.
AMD drivers also create frame stutter in games that run on DirectX 9 and below (it affects my one true love, Skyrim). The only fix for me was to turn off vsync, or alternatively keep vsync on but use MSI Afterburner or a similar tool to limit the framerate being displayed in Skyrim to 59.9 fps, so there's no 59-60-64-59-60-etc stutter.
Btw, on topic: windowed mode will utilise GPU scaling so it will _always_ add input lag, since graphical scaling is an extra computational process in itself. However, the exact amount depends mainly on your monitor, and to some extent the type of scaling used (Display Scaling is better than GPU scaling). This also goes for things such as driver-enabled FXAA (and if you have a NVIDIA card, "Maximum Prerendered Frames" will also add latency). GPU scaling is also present (for me) when I try to run the game at a resolution that doesn't match the native aspect ratio of my monitor (16:9), so 4:3 aspect ratios (such as 1024x768, 800x600, etc) end up looking stretched across my screen (this was the case on my old computer, which had an AMD XFX 7950, but it wasn't the case on my older computer, which had a GeForce 9100). Not only does it make my game look like arse, it also adds noticeable input delay.
Anyway, some settings you may want to tinker with:
/animationinterpolationtime
/smoothmove
/smoothdist
/sensitivityscale
And yes please use hitsound, helps a ton! You can edit the volume of the hitsound in your sounds.cfg or use a custom one, I have the quake live hitsound. Best of luck!
EDIT: I don't use AMD anymore, playing on a laptop with a GTX 870M. 8)
EDIT2: Fixed a major derp in my post.