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Are ATi drivers as bad as people make out?

They do a good one every four or so months. 10.4 for me have been ideal. Have tried the newer ones, while not drastically bad they just haven't been great.

Not being able to overclock, and keep the 2d clocks the same without having to use a 3rd party programme is pretty slack on their part.
 
Never had any real problems with either red or green teams, apart from when recommended to 'always use driver sweeper' which ended up not letting me install the new cat driver on a 4870.
So I never used that again as the only solution was a re-install.
Now I always install over the top of my previous cat driver with no problems so far with my 5870.
 
Have never had any problems with Nvidia or ATI drivers. You will always have a handful of problems with frequent driver releases, but fanboys blow these things way out of proportion and try to use it to troll.
 
I play a lot of rfactor and Race On online and have recently gone back to ATI after about 5 years with nVidia because of what we call the nVidia driver bug, I could rarely finish a race because somewhere along the line a bsod would happen with nv4dsp.dll error, been back with the red team since May and If I havent finished a race it`s because of my poor driving :D I installed 10.7 yesterday and they seem fine, all clocks as normal but I always use driver sweeper to clean out the old ones first.
 
I've been using both nvidia and ati gpu's over the years and tbh, I could easily state that probably all or at least nearly most of the ATI driver problems are related to:

ERROR 40 ( it means that the problem sits 40cm away from the screen :).
 
PhoenixUK said:
I've been using both nvidia and ati gpu's over the years and tbh, I could easily state that probably all or at least nearly most of the ATI driver problems are related to:

ERROR 40 ( it means that the problem sits 40cm away from the screen :).
Click to expand...

Also known as ERROR PEBKAC. :p
 
jigger said:
If you go back to around 2003-2004 (IIRC) ATI had a few big problems. The ATI purple sky strobe thing sticks out but Nvidia had that no clip issue.

Considering everything from over the last 5 years its been pritty even on the support front IMO.

Nice to have you back Kyle.
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it stems from before they did the catalyst thing they were known for shoddy drivers around the radeon 8500 times , with the radeon 9800 they started to improve and with x800 they relaunched the drivers as catalyst to try and get rid of the bad driver image and promised so many drivers a year, i think it was one driver per month?
 
arknor said:
it stems from before they did the catalyst thing they were known for shoddy drivers around the radeon 8500 times , with the radeon 9800 they started to improve and with x800 they relaunched the drivers as catalyst to try and get rid of the bad driver image and promised so many drivers a year, i think it was one driver per month?
Click to expand...

That is what it is now, so sounds about right.
 
I think its more down to the control panel.
Back when I had a 9800 pro the control panel was clunky with no real logic to it, basic functions like profiles and digital vibrancy didnt exist. I'm not sure if they do now as that was my last ATI card. I upgraded to a 6800 GT and found nvidia drivers hugely better, options where you'd expect them to be, simple and automatic game profiles kept up to date with every new driver... Just far superior.

I'd imagine ATI have improved their drivers since then, but then on every new release there are a huge amount of fixes, some for games that have been out for months which makes me wonder why they were still broken & not fixed earlier.
 
no_1_dave said:
on every new release there are a huge amount of fixes
Click to expand...
Wait what? :confused:

Would you prefer a new driver with no fixes?

Both nv/ati have large numbers of fixes when they release a new driver set. Some drivers break games, both old and new. It's custom to fix them in the next revision. Both are susceptible to this.

However, I think you are talking about performance increases not fixes. Crysis still occasionally gets attention when it comes to improvements and it's quite an old game now. That said, the phrase 'but can it play crysis' was coined for a reason.
 
no_1_dave said:
I think its more down to the control panel.
Back when I had a 9800 pro the control panel was clunky with no real logic to it, basic functions like profiles and digital vibrancy didnt exist. I'm not sure if they do now as that was my last ATI card. I upgraded to a 6800 GT and found nvidia drivers hugely better, options where you'd expect them to be, simple and automatic game profiles kept up to date with every new driver... Just far superior.

I'd imagine ATI have improved their drivers since then, but then on every new release there are a huge amount of fixes, some for games that have been out for months which makes me wonder why they were still broken & not fixed earlier.
Click to expand...

New hardware can be a cause for new fixes, as well as the games getting patched and so on.

It's never a case of "It's done and that's it" because even if the game's no longer getting patched, if it's popular people will continue to play it on newer and newer hardware each time they upgrade.

Plus, it can be a case of, when one thing's fixed, it could mean another problem shows up due ot the fix.
 
Meh, its probably very close now. However I feel the way nvidia have integrated 3D vision with full individual game profiles and integrated physX etc into their profiles deserves some recognition. The only problem I still read on a regular basis regarding ATI is the game profiles one. Why cant they just integrate it?
 
ATI drivers have been good for me, just as Nvidias were too. Have not used xfire or sli tho.
 
There are profiles for ATi cards now with RadeonPro, additionally, ATi can't integrate 3D vision and Physx because they're proprietary nVidia technologies.
 
Never had anything more than very minor issues with either brand. As someone else said, it's most probably user error more often than not. I haven't experienced any major problems with xfire, the odd stutter maybe but only in a few games, if that.
 
RavenXXX2 said:
ATI drivers are great, xfire drivers, well that's another matter.:(
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+1

Until a few months ago I was using a single 4890, always installed drivers over the top and never had a problem. Before that a 4870 and a 1950, same story.

Then I installed a second 4890 and straight away got the random grass issue in BC2 although I got an amazing speed boost. It was a known issue and I was pleased to see it addressed in the 10.6's. However, after installing them over the top of my 10.5's I couldn't even boot into Win7 - I just got a bsod. I went back to the 10.5's and the random grass.

Installed the 10.7's (over the top as usual) and all seems ok now.

Over the years I have found ATI drivers fine. I know some people say ATI are slow to respond to driver issues but they put out hotfix versions from time to time to deal with issues, that's hardly slow to respond.
 
I don't see the problem with xfire ? althrough with that said the scaling can be poor compared with Nvs but in windows they are as bad/good as each other...linux....errrr :p
 
I've noticed a few driver issues with my x2, but none with previous single cards. I'm currently getting drops to 25fps in Alien Swarm on my 4870x2 with no AA.. That's just not right :(
 
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