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Are ATi drivers as bad as people make out?

major issues for me, tried both 5870 and 5970 all kinds of problems on brand new i7 installation. tried 10.3 / 4 / 5 / 6.

I have my own IT company so I'm by no means a newb.

Just changed over to a 470 and everything is peaceful again ;)
 
Having made the switch from Nvidia to ATI, I feel the ATI drivers aren't as good - but the card is much quieter and cooler and performs just the same - so all in all, I think it's worth it.
 
bobert50 said:
Currently on 5870 and its a fantastic card but i wish i could install nvidia drivers for it :D
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billysielu said:
Having made the switch from Nvidia to ATI, I feel the ATI drivers aren't as good - but the card is much quieter and cooler and performs just the same - so all in all, I think it's worth it.
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What do you mean by not as good? I've noticed at times that pepople say they prefer a ATi/nVidia drivers, when what they're actually talking about are the graphics card's control panels.

Is it the control panel that you mean?
 
coupe69 said:
Now I'm not wanting to start a flame war here, I'm just intrigued in hearing peoples thoughts on ATis more recent driver releases.

The last ATi card I had was an X1950XTX and can't remember the drivers being that bad, but reading through the thread on the latest 10.7 cats it appears as though lots of people seem to be having issues.

So is it all down to user error? or is there an element of truth when somebody states that "ATi drivers sux"?

Let's try and keep it civil in this thread guys, like I said I'm interested to find out because who knows the next round of video card updates may entice me to swing for the red team again :)
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Drivers are bad I mean I have 5000 series cards setup in some complex crossfire arrangement with flashed BIOS's so I can bypass the over voltage limit that ATI deliberately imposed on us in the name of safety of our hardware, I run 3rd party apps to override the 2D clocks set by the official drivers oh and there overclocked as well yet for some reason I get issues with these cards. It's not on, really not on. :mad:
 
ATI drivers aren't bad, 90% of them bring improvements every month, Crossfire issues are solved relatively quickly.

I just got a single BSOD - drivers related according to whatever it stated. I doubt it's the new drivers, it's more likely my overclock, I guess we will find out later. Never happened to me before as I wasn't even stressing the machine. Well, nevermind.

Back to the quality of drivers, there's a single issue I have with the recent releases, it's idle clocks that remain higher than they could be. I don't really fancy the change and am being forced to use a third party app to set auto switching between 2D/3D profiles.
 
kylew said:
What do you mean by not as good? I've noticed at times that pepople say they prefer a ATi/nVidia drivers, when what they're actually talking about are the graphics card's control panels.

Is it the control panel that you mean?
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I think mainly its the fact that im far more used to the nvidia drivers which of course i will be as i've had more of them.

However, ive never had anything that buggers up what i want to do on nvidia drivers over the years yet ive had countless ati problems with their cards yet its always been driver based and never the actual card.

This frustrates me! :)

The most recent huge annoyance was the inability to keep windows xp and get 120hz on a 5870 but i'm on windows 7 now anyway.

Its just irritating having these sort of niggles on a fairly regular basis.
 
From my own experiance I can't remember ever having an issue with any ATI drivers (single or Xfire), my current pair of 5870 have worked perfectly on all driver versions since the 10.2s when I added another. Also for the record I can't think of any issues I've had with Nvidia drivers either, but your always going to get some conflict somewhere along the line due to the infinite combination of components and software PC's offer so I surpose if your one of the unlucky ones who has a bad combination of components you'll obviously be pretty miffed.
 
bobert50 said:
I think mainly its the fact that im far more used to the nvidia drivers which of course i will be as i've had more of them.

However, ive never had anything that buggers up what i want to do on nvidia drivers over the years yet ive had countless ati problems with their cards yet its always been driver based and never the actual card.

This frustrates me! :)

The most recent huge annoyance was the inability to keep windows xp and get 120hz on a 5870 but i'm on windows 7 now anyway.

Its just irritating having these sort of niggles on a fairly regular basis.
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It seems like you're talking about the control panel more so then. :)
 
I found the drivers fine for single card, though a bit flaky for Crossfire, it's the control panel that I think ATI could do with working on.
 
Only ever had ATi driver problems a long time ago back in the 9 series or so days, although not 100% sure that the issues where the drivers although an NV card fixed the issue. Since then I've done installations for friends on a 5770 (Coming from NV drivers, used driver sweeper and no problems at all) and a 4850 on a fresh windows install, again no issues. Didn't like the control panel though, but the drivers are solid as any NV drivers I've used.
 
On my 5830 the original 10.2 drivers ran fine, and everything since has had issues.

Running 10.6 at the moment with no issues at all so far... (Touch wood).
 
Touch wood, so far I've not had a single problem with my 4870x2 apart from 1 driver version a number of months back that caused you to get 5-15 fps once the second chapter had loaded in a l4d2 campaign unless you disabled crossfire.

5870's have been good, up and down depending on the versions. Eyefinity needs some more work still from both the game dev and cats side. Some (bioware) flat out refuse to support multi display.

One thing ati need to work on is giving the control panel a complete overhaul. It's a total mess, bloated and annoying to use. They also need the ability to natively support manual profile editing. Radeonpro will do for now though.
Nvidia's control panel is far better laid out and supports profile tweaking, perhaps they should take a leaf out of their book.

In summary, for single cards they are great but can be a little more tricky when it comes to cfx and/or eyefinity.
 
Never had any major problems with ATI drivers (on Windows 7 now - I had major problems with nvidia drivers on Vista) but I do get some bizzare issues when installing ATI drivers sometimes, like CAT 10.7s, first install failed with bizzare error messages that make no sense but second install worked fine :confused:
 
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