Nvidia vs Ati Advice

DigitalPrime · 13 Oct 2012 at 09:36

To be honest, Nvidia in todays world is all about hype and gimmiks. People go on about driver support, But if everyone was honest, they would say both have similar issues. One just hikes its prices due to its reputation of been the best, but is it really? But when it comes to grunt PC gaming, Both are the same, there is something for everyone in every price range. It just depends on the price in which you want to pay and for what reasons.

Red or green, You will win either way!

Marine-RX179 · 13 Oct 2012 at 09:56

DigitalPrime said:
To be honest, Nvidia in todays world is all about hype and gimmiks. People go on about driver support, But if everyone was honest, they would say both have similar issues. One just hikes its prices due to its reputation of been the best, but is it really? But when it comes to grunt PC gaming, Both are the same, there is something for everyone in every price range. It just depends on the price in which you want to pay and for what reasons.

Red or green, You will win either way!

Clearly you didn't follow the launches. AMD hiked the prices because Nvidia didn't launch their cards at the same time, and when they launched the GTX68x card, they priced it accordingly to AMD's 79xx cards price. The only difference is that AMD gradually dropped their prices, but Nvidia didn't follow. But then again, OcUK just had the PNY (I think) GTX680 on sales for just £330 the other day. This is the price that GTX680 should be at, not only on quick sales.

MANFACE · 13 Oct 2012 at 10:14

Can of worms.

icehot · 13 Oct 2012 at 10:34

What ever is the best value for money per generation of card....

I had an ATI 5850 as I felt this was the best bang for buck at the time, then I bought a Nvidia 560Ti as I felt this was the best bang for buck at the time.

Either vendor offer great products.

no_1_dave · 13 Oct 2012 at 11:17

DigitalPrime said:
People go on about driver support, But if everyone was honest, they would say both have similar issues.

Driver support and driver issues are completely different.
Both have issues. One is timely and helpful about sorting them with a forum where you actually get a reply from the driver devs.

psychodil · 13 Oct 2012 at 11:24

no_1_dave said:
Driver support and driver issues are completely different.
Both have issues. One is timely and helpful about sorting them with a forum where you actually get a reply from the driver devs.

Yes their forum is really helpful

MANFACE · 13 Oct 2012 at 11:33

Well, I was looking forward to my new MSI 7970 lighting coming today - paid extra for Saturday delivery - But, DPD have mislaid a pallet of OcUK's somewhere, good job I rang both.

Nice one DPD..NOT.

whyscotty · 13 Oct 2012 at 11:41

Mojo said:
As always, your budget dictates what you buy. Bear in mind however, that the 7950 is £230+, and to get another 5-10% performance at stock you're looking at about £300+ (670/7970) or £370+ (680, not worth it). The 7950 will overclock to 7970/670/680 levels in many games anyway.

Why is the 680 not worth it?
Do you own one, or ever owned one?

gregster said:
There is always something about AMD I just don't like but can't put my finger on it...It reminds me of when I was young and single and was out on the pull. I would set my target high with ideas of pulling Megan Fox (Nvidia) but as the night went on and time was running out, I knew I would end up with the Dot Cotton look alike (AMD).

MANFACE said:
Can of worms.

+1

spoffle · 13 Oct 2012 at 11:45

no_1_dave said:
Driver support and driver issues are completely different.
Both have issues. One is timely and helpful about sorting them with a forum where you actually get a reply from the driver devs.

I'm assuming you're getting a crap load of support from the nVidia forums then?

whyscotty said:
Why is the 680 not worth it?
Do you own one, or ever owned one?

The price to performance ratio is very poor.

gregster said:
There is always something about AMD I just don't like but can't put my finger on it...It reminds me of when I was young and single and was out on the pull. I would set my target high with ideas of pulling Megan Fox (Nvidia) but as the night went on and time was running out, I knew I would end up with the Dot Cotton look alike (AMD).

The sad thing is people actually go on like that over nVidia. nVidia has the same irrational (and quite creepy) love from its fans that Apple has.

I know you're gonna claim you're joking, but I don't buy it, it'll be a case "based on your reaction I know that I was only joking".

tommybhoy · 13 Oct 2012 at 12:34

@OP,

Go with what Rroff said, but you are paying a premium I'm afraid, as what's wrongly posted above, you get faster performance for less money with AMD, not cheaper for the same level of performance.

It will cost about £100+ to go 670 SLi over 7950 CrossFire-it's the best way to put it due to forum rules.

LOL Matt.

In regards to Nvidia Forum help, then imo, too much of a coincidence that the 6 series has had a huge pita with issues, stutter, surround to name a few, in comparison to what they usually have, for it still to be closed despite not having customers credit details. I have never seen that amount of flak directed towards them(out with card destroying drivers).

The Facebook link they posted when it went down only lasted a few days as well as the grief was just directed there.

AMD are far from rosy either, zero core and lack of performance at the start of the 7's life cycle to name a few and even it out, but one doesn't have a bigger halo than the other.

As I use both, the best bang for buck is my winner, every single time.

whyscotty said:
Why is the 680 not worth it?
Do you own one, or ever owned one?

Having sent back a perfectly good 7950 because I'm anal about noise and getting a 7970, there's nothing in it(gaming) when both are overclocked.

Waste of money imo, with all the good things you here about 670's, I'm presuming it's the same for team green.

gregster said:
I knew I would end up with the Dot Cotton look alike

No point blaming AMD when you kick off and look like

no_1_dave · 13 Oct 2012 at 12:41

spoffle said:
I'm assuming you're getting a crap load of support from the nVidia forums then?

When Alan Wake came out I was running SLI and 3D Vision.
On release of Alan Wake there was no SLI profile & 3D Vision was broken. Was a very poor show on Nvidia's part. The only thing that redeemed them to an extent was that the driver devs were listening to forum feedback & updating people on the forum with progress.

Obviously I would rather no problems at all, but often you can rate a company on how they deal with a problem. IMO AMD have gone down hill. I used to love my 9800 pro back in the day and ATI did everything they could to try & please customers. Fast forward to now & trying to get them to give any updates on fixes they should be working on is a nightmare.

Martini1991 · 13 Oct 2012 at 12:43

On the AMD Drivers front, the 12.8 drivers and 12.9 BETA both crash with 7850's and 7970's on Windows 8.
I have to use the ones that install on the Windows 8 installation (Microsoft 1.2 WDDM or whatever)

Without fail installing 12.8 or 12.9 beta's, games will crash, it's not limited to me as I've several PC's doing it, fixed by not installing a driver.

I don't know how Nvidia's support is for W8 and their 6XX though.

But I'm sure I'd previously ran working W8 Consumer Preview drivers with my 7970, so no idea what's happened between using Windows 7 drivers on that install, and using official Windows 8 drivers.

I'm on a fully legit Windows 8 Pro 64 bit.

Gregster · 13 Oct 2012 at 13:12

I bet you are great company at parties spoffle....

Tephnos · 13 Oct 2012 at 13:44

Martini1991 said:
On the AMD Drivers front, the 12.8 drivers and 12.9 BETA both crash with 7850's and 7970's on Windows 8.
I have to use the ones that install on the Windows 8 installation (Microsoft 1.2 WDDM or whatever)

Without fail installing 12.8 or 12.9 beta's, games will crash, it's not limited to me as I've several PC's doing it, fixed by not installing a driver.

I don't know how Nvidia's support is for W8 and their 6XX though.

But I'm sure I'd previously ran working W8 Consumer Preview drivers with my 7970, so no idea what's happened between using Windows 7 drivers on that install, and using official Windows 8 drivers.

I'm on a fully legit Windows 8 Pro 64 bit.

To be fair, I'd never become a first adopter of anything for this reason. I always wait for others to deal with the problems for me until everything is worked out.

humbug · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:32

no_1_dave said:
I didn't mention problems. I mentioned support. You were ts quick to jump on the "he mentioned the word "drivers" in his post, he must be dissing AMD" train that you didn't even read the post properly.

If you post about a problem on the Nvidia forums they will read it and respond. There are even Nvidia driver devs regularly active on the forums & fix bugs based on forum feedback. You do not get that with ATI at all. In fact, trying to advise AMD about a driver issue is about as useless as telling a brick wall the problems you are experiencing. It's a shame.

AMD don't have an offisial forum, you talk to them directly.

Actually when i complained about AMD's 12.6 Drivers in general their customer support put onto one of their own engineers, i spent some time with him talking about some of the issues, he seemed very keen to me to know every little detail of what i was experiencing, what i had seen others experience and what fixes i and others had used.

He told me bluntly he / they knew about problems with Drivers and were working on it.

Later Drivers, 12.7 / 12.8 are solid and without those troubles.

So in my experience the notion that you don't get feedback from AMD or that they don't listen is utter nonsense.

You don't do it through forums, they don't have forums for that, you contact them directly and they will talk to you.

Gregster · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:45

^^ £1 a minute by any chance?

Marine-RX179 · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:46

Tephnos said:
To be fair, I'd never become a first adopter of anything for this reason. I always wait for others to deal with the problems for me until everything is worked out.

One thing that always baffles me is that AMD got great hardware there's no doubt about it...but I can't understand why the launch driver is always like only able to deliver 80-90% of what their cards are capable of, and people have to wait like 4-6 months before it is deliver at its full capability (BF3 is one example of this). If people didn't know better, they'd think they outsource people to write drivers for them rathar having their people that know their hardware inside out on the job

I mean if AMD had the current driver performance at launch, there would had been fewer people that went Nvidia purely based on BF3 performance.

LtMatt · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:54

How to report an issue with the AMD 12.9 drivers.

http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D20B2F3EB8

Or you can moan about it on a forum and hope it gets fixed.

no_1_dave · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:54

Marine-RX179 said:
One thing that always baffles me is that AMD got great hardware there's no doubt about it...but I can't understand why the launch driver is always like only able to deliver 80-90% of what their cards are capable of, and people have to wait like 4-6 months before it is deliver at its full capability (BF3 is one example of this). If people didn't know better, they'd think they outsource people to write drivers for them rathar having their people that know their hardware inside out on the job I mean if AMD had the current driver performance at launch, there would had been fewer people that went Nvidia purely based on BF3 performance.

They do this to see what Nvidia come out with, then they launch a new driver to out perform it. At the end of the day though it is the consumer that that suffers because of the degraded initial performance. They should release the proper driver with the card. Nvidia have done this too in the past, it really annoys me that companies do that sort of thing.

LtMatt · 13 Oct 2012 at 14:58

Marine-RX179 said:
One thing that always baffles me is that AMD got great hardware there's no doubt about it...but I can't understand why the launch driver is always like only able to deliver 80-90% of what their cards are capable of, and people have to wait like 4-6 months before it is deliver at its full capability (BF3 is one example of this). If people didn't know better, they'd think they outsource people to write drivers for them rathar having their people that know their hardware inside out on the job I mean if AMD had the current driver performance at launch, there would had been fewer people that went Nvidia purely based on BF3 performance.

no_1_dave said:
They do this to see what Nvidia come out with, then they launch a new driver to out perform it. At the end of the day though it is the consumer that that suffers because of the degraded initial performance. They should release the proper driver with the card. Nvidia have done this too in the past, it really annoys me that companies do that sort of thing.

Nice theory but far more likely that the change to GCN took them some time to adapt. Only now are we starting to reap the full rewards of that.

I'm guessing the 8970 launch will see much better performance right off the bat as it won't be a completely new architecture.