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ATI vs Nvidia drivers...Windows 7

yannis76

yannis76

yannis76

Associate
Joined
16 Aug 2004
Posts
804
Hi,

I am thinking of upgrading from a GTX 260 to ATI 5850. However I have to admit that in general I am pretty happy with the 260 and I have concerns about the ATI drivers. If anyone of has tested both companies which of the two drivers would you consider the best?

Thank you
 
nVidia's drivers have been pretty poor lately, especially with Windows 7.

Tweak Town did an article about nVidia versus ATi in the driver department, and ATi beat them by quite a large amount.

To be fair, Windows 7 is not yet officially released, so nVidia still have release drivers to pull out, but the most accurage answer to your question is that ATi's drivers are fine for windows 7, nVidia aren't currently worth looking at until they release something new, and who knows when that'll be?

A 5850 is a very good card and worth of upgrading too. It'll be around 2x the performance of the GTX260 at best currently. On average I think it's around 1.7 times faster.
 
To be fair, if it's the article I'm thinking about it was comparison of performance between Vista and 7 and Nvidia had made the smallest performance improvement - it could have been down to the ATI drivers not being as good on Vista.
 
I would expect the ATI drivers are more optimised atm as AMD have been working more closely with MS over DX11 than nV have. That said though have driven both nvidia and ATI cards under win7 since win 7 beta - I prefer ATI driver solution though I do think the driver look revamp could have been better
 
I'd recommend going for the 5850, official win 7 drivers are being released either today or tomorrow I believe by ATi, so we are expecting some great improvements over the beta drivers.

Both manufacturers will contain some minor issues I'm sure, nothing that won't get sorted out. I think drivers shouldn't be too much of a worry for your decision, nobody can know how they will run until official win 7 drivers are out on both ends. Go for the 5850, you won't regret the dx11 goodness =D
 
x64 and x86 ati drivers seem pretty solid on win7 for me ....usually if theres a driver problem its usually down to the person who installs them.....
 
I have machines with both Nvidia and AMD cards and drivers. Both are meh.. the same.

Both work fine on well setup machines, both give problems in rare difficult to duplicate situations.

TBH the majority of "problems" reported are imaginary, fanboism, incompetent and/or incapable endusers or lately, stooges sent by the hardware companies to infiltrate message forums to randomly plant seeds of doubt in potential customers.
sekret.gif
 
Unfortunatelly ATI still has worse drivers. I have been testing the new 5850 since Friday vs my old GTX 260 in Windows 7. There are several games that have issues with ATI:

Anno 1404 missing land textures.
Resident Evil 5 not showing the cutscenes or some gameplay where you only press X or Y in the controller.

Will come back with more games later
 
I have had no problems with ATI drivers, the 5000 series will benifit from having the most updates to their drivers so i would go with the 5850.
 
yannis76 said:
Unfortunatelly ATI still has worse drivers. I have been testing the new 5850 since Friday vs my old GTX 260 in Windows 7. There are several games that have issues with ATI:

Anno 1404 missing land textures.
Resident Evil 5 not showing the cutscenes or some gameplay where you only press X or Y in the controller.

Will come back with more games later
Click to expand...

If you look at the article you will see it about tried & tested gfx cards that have been out for quite sometime & not cutting edge less than a month old card with its first set of official drivers.

Now if your 260 was a new just released DX11 card then you would have a more valid point.
 
Biffa said:
stooges sent by the hardware companies to infiltrate message forums to randomly plant seeds of doubt in potential customers.
sekret.gif
Click to expand...

Heh, if I was them I'd be doing that too.

Cheap to do, you can type as much libel as you want about your competitor without much risk of being exposed and when you get right down to it, doesn't take much to worry uncertain tech buyers.

For example I swear to any given deity that hundreds of people must have misread that anandtech article on Foxconn sockets failing at extreme overclocks as:

Socket 1156 being unreliable whatever the clock
Any motherboard using Foxconn being unreliable whatever the clock
Foxconn being crap

And that was a genuine article.

Mind you, if you're sharp enough what you can counter that with are your OWN reps planted on forums to intercept bad reports on your products and be surprisingly helpful in resolving them.
 
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Im waiting for a 2gb possibly 4gb 58**, so i can buy twin 24" Dell U series and then im done with gfx cards for a good 3 years :D
 
Goodmorning!

After some more testing...
Anno 1404 is corrected with 1.1 patch. However at 1920x1080 everything is full apart from AA which is down to 2AA. At more AA performance is not good.
Red Faction Guerilla works fine at full details, same resolution.
War Front Turning Point the same.
Fan noise at idle is non existant but on full load is more noticeable than the GTX260.

Anyway the GTX 260 will be sold and I will keep the Radeon, since it IS faster at 1920x1080
 
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