I within the last three years or so pretty much made the transition completely over to pc gaming from consoles and was very impressed that a midrange laptop could easily beat my old ps4 in terms of performance. I got a pretty good desktop about a year and a half back with a 1080 and an i7. I choose the 1080 because I do various work in cad drawing and 3d modelling/rendering and my research lead me to believe that nvidia cards were more suitable as a result and also for games.

What do you guys think though? Is the conclusion that nvidia is better for cad, modelling, rendering and games true or was my research insufficient?

Nvidia cards will always have the better optimization.

That's a hard question, CPU is AMD. Intel is pretty fucked until 2021.
GPU probably Nvidia, but that depends on what you want in terms of performance.

so what benefits does AMD offer if any? I've seen comments about better multitasking but I've never had issues alt tabbing from games and playing youtube, browsing etc etc etc simultaneously

High End Nvidia, midrange AMD.

sounds like I should stick to nvidia then lol, won't upgrade till the next gen at least though, RTX doesn't seem to be a massive leap

As much i love console and AMD support for console, there is no doubt in terms of Graphic tech Nvidia is a head. If Nvidia is not dick about price and their bad behavior on competition i will fully support them. But still they're good, i will but nvidia RTX if i have money and if the RTX become more cheaper.

High end Nvidia for me

I'll go Red team when AMD notice that I exist and do better than Nvidia on the high end.

Depends on what's available when you are buying or building your pc. Generally Intel/Nvidia, currently if i was building one it would be AMD.

Nvidia. To think at one point AMD considered buying them instead of ATI... can you imagine if GlobalFoundries + AMD + Nvidia were a single company nowadays?