Are drivers actually a wash?

[Orangey]

At some point in time, people started saying ATI had bad drivers. The fact that Nvidia were not ATI meant their drivers were de-facto "good". People kept parroting this for years despite not knowing what it meant, or having a bad experience (possibly due to pebcak) and swearing off ATI/AMD for good.

Is there a way to end this perception with clear criteria for good and bad releases. It seems to me Nvidia have had more bad ones lately but that's perception based off of number of threads on here. I suspect that if you could come up with a rating system for driver releases and compare them for a period of say, 12 months, you could scientifically define which are better.

Is that worth doing or are there too many variables?

 

[arc@css]

Different architectures, so it would be harder to do a comparison.

My personal experiences :

ATi / AMD : more robust hardware with a few niggles with driver installation, though no problems in game. Poorer performance when AA applied. Great IQ - better sense of 3d perspective (no reference to 3d itself).

nVidia : Less robust hardware, more reliable driver installation, but more inclined to deliver artifacts / flickering textures. Lighter shades of colours, but generally not as vibrant. AA performance is good.

 

[spoffle]

For the most part, people will have largely the same experience with drivers whether it's AMD or nVidia, but something I've pointed out a few times now is that if you actually look at the history of drivers and driver issues, nVidia's had far worse big issues than AMD/ATi has, so it's always confused me a bit as to why AMD/ATi get the reputation for having dodgy drivers.

Out of AMD and nVidia, it's only nVidia that's had a class action lawsuit against them due to their software support, which despite AMD's apparent reputation, they never have. Most of the time when you hear about AMD's driver problems, it's from people who either don't use AMD hardware, and are basically relaying faulty information, or they can't see beyond their own experience, and how their experience isn't the definitive one. Another one is that most people aren't even remotely willing to entertain the notion that their problem is because of PEBKAC.

That's not to say AMD's drivers are flawless (which is usually a claim you see people make about nVidia's drivers) just that if you tallied all these issues up, nVidia's issues would be worse.

Some sites have done articles on it in the past, but it's hard to find, off the top of my head one of them was Tweaktown where they tested various AMD and nVidia drivers and their conclusion was that nVidia's Windows 7 drivers at the time were lacking quite a bit compared to AMD's in terms of stability.

I *think* what most people mean by "better drivers" is to do with the control panel, I've seen it a few times, that AMD drivers get slated because the person doesn't like the control panel, which is an entirely different subject.

 

[PorkPieCat]

i bought a high end amd card nearly a year ago and i've personally identified (as in i experience these bugs myself) more than a few large bugs in drivers (including a driver problem that resulted in several months of huge black triangle artifacts in every game i played - experienced by quite a few people online), as well as some bugs/omissions that have existed in amd drivers apparently since forever. i'm pretty meticulous so i know these are specifically driver issues from amd.

some other things include the speed at which nvidia seem to release driver optimizations for new games, and other things like how nvidia managed to implement opengl 4.3 in august, and amd drivers have yet to see a full release. that's half a year of difference and counting, and it's a feature that's really in plain sight.

amd (gpu division earns half revenue of nvidia) is just smaller with fewer resources. i don't think it's biased to admit that, nor is it particularly too important tbh. that said i love my gpu, and i also appreciate that there are amd representatives on forums, or those who are willing to listen to advice from reviewers and so on, and it's particularly gratifying to get driver bug fixes even if it takes a while. the artifact bug imho was incredibly distracting, and it took amd a full year to fix it but it felt pretty damn good when it was fixed.

 

[Suarez7]

 

[spoffle]

There's no reason this thread can't exist as long as people don't come in and cry about stuff they don't understand, or have experience of.

 

[Suarez7]

There's no reason this thread can't exist as long as people don't come in and cry about stuff they don't understand, or have experience of.

I know I just thought I'd post a funny gif in case it does receive the lock treatment.

 

[Soundood]

the difference between the two is the speed at which Nvidia, releases beta's and WHQL drivers, if something is up, it doesn't get time to fester in peoples mind,

ATI/AMD seem to drag their heals when it comes to updates and fixes, this should have got better a few years back when AMD took over, but it didn't.

for the record, im on the green team

 

[Rroff]

Problem is perception of issues and how big an issue they really are or aren't and some things might be more of an issue for one person and less of an issue for another. Also theres been times when one or the other has had bumps that tend to distort the picture if your not looking at it objectively.

Up until around 2009 AMD and ATI before them had a terrible track record, tons of legacy issues that never got fixed, or got fixed and then cropped up against 3 driver revisions later and so on.

Around that time when AMD drivers started to evolve nVidia had a period of about 6 months where they put out some absolutely shocking drivers for awhile... you could point at this period and say nVidia's drivers are bad also but if you look at it in detail even tho the majority of drivers really were absolutely rubbish for awhile there there was always one driver available that was rock solid - however thats not necessarily great from a consumer point of view trying to work out what driver they should be using or having lots of issues because they don't realise the latest and greatest driver release is actually sub par and they should be on a driver 2 releases earlier.

Personally I believe that if you look at it objectively the days of saying "nVidia drivers are good ATI/AMD drivers are bad" ended around the start of 2009 but that doesn't mean they are equal. I also think that from an objective stand point that nVidia have a track record of more timely game support and actually fixing problems one of the biggest flaws I see when comparing the 2 is people saying "they both have issues therefore they are both equal" which isn't true at all.

If I was grading them as 1 to 10, 1 being really dire, I'd put nVidia at 8 and AMD at about 6.5. (If current trends continue I could see AMD moving upto a 7 and nVidia dropping back to a 7.5).

 

[spoffle]

the difference between the two is the speed at which Nvidia, releases beta's and WHQL drivers, if something is up, it doesn't get time to fester in peoples mind,

ATI/AMD seem to drag their heals when it comes to updates and fixes, this should have got better a few years back when AMD took over, but it didn't.

for the record, im on the green team

Well that's generally how it goes "I use nVidia, AMD's drivers are this, that and all this".

AMD has been releasing a fair few drivers lately, and will be doing so on a regular basis, it's part of their Gaming Evolved programme, but if you're using nVidia, I doubt you'd realise just how many drivers they have been releasing.

If you go to the nVidia forums, you'll see that your claims aren't quite right anyway.

 

[LtMatt]

Most of the time when you hear about AMD's driver problems, it's from people who either don't use AMD hardware, and are basically relaying faulty information, or they can't see beyond their own experience, and how their experience isn't the definitive one. Another one is that most people aren't even remotely willing to entertain the notion that their problem is because of PEBKAC.

Spot on.

My opinion is neither side is perfect and both suffer from issues. I fail to see one side substantially better than the other in this regard. Both sides will have issues and both generally deal with them sooner or later. Anyone that is not biased will think the same way.

 

[PorkPieCat]

Well that's generally how it goes "I use nVidia, AMD's drivers are this, that and all this".

AMD has been releasing a fair few drivers lately, and will be doing so on a regular basis, it's part of their Gaming Evolved programme, but if you're using nVidia, I doubt you'd realise just how many drivers they have been releasing.

If you go to the nVidia forums, you'll see that your claims aren't quite right anyway.

i don't think his analysis was terrible. the black artifact bug was horrible, and a lot of people had it. you may not have experienced it but it was a real pain. it took amd a full year to fix it. a year! both companies likely experience a similar volume and magnitude of bugs, it's just nvidia seems more able to deal with them in a prompt manner. but i would never let something like this influence my decision on which gpu i bought

 

[spoffle]

Spot on.

My opinion is neither side is perfect and both suffer from issues. I fail to see one side substantially better than the other in this regard. Both sides will have issues and both generally deal with them sooner or later. Anyone that is not biased will think the same way.

Being unbiased is one thing, but lots around here use unbiased, and positive synonymously.

If you actually look through the history of AMD/ATi and nVidia in driver terms, nVidia does come off as the one with the most issues.

My opinion on the matter itself is that most people will have the same experience of course, but it doesn't change that if you either go back and look, or experienced it yourself, that nVidia has the track record of driver issues despite AMD's apparent reputation.

 

[LtMatt]

If you actually look through the history of AMD/ATi and nVidia in driver terms, nVidia does come off as the one with the most issues.
.

That may be the case but im not naive enough to pass judgement on their drivers because of that as i know that neither are perfect and both will have their fair share of issues. I'll leave the die hard biased fan boys to slate so and so's drivers.

 

[spoffle]

i don't think his analysis was terrible. the black artifact bug was horrible, and a lot of people had it. you may not have experienced it but it was a real pain. it took amd a full year to fix it. a year! both companies likely experience a similar volume and magnitude of bugs, it's just nvidia seems more able to deal with them in a prompt manner. but i would never let something like this influence my decision on which gpu i bought

Oh I'm not saying anything like that, and it isn't what I meant. I know full well that AMD have issues, they both do, I'm just saying historically speaking, nVidia's the one with the worst issues. Drivers that fried GPUs on more than one occasion, drivers that didn't work for games at all (nVidia's Windows Vista release drivers). Tweaktown did an article about nVidia's drivers versus AMD's in Windowss after that report came out that shown nVidia's drivers were responsible 30% of Windows crashes, that also shown that nVidia's drivers weren't as stable as AMD's drivers.

That may be the case but im not naive enough to pass judgement on their drivers because of that as i know that neither are perfect and both will have their fair share of issues. I'll leave the die hard biased fan boys to slate so and so's drivers.

I'm just talking about stuff like the above.

 

[Rroff]

Oh I'm not saying anything like that, and it isn't what I meant. I know full well that AMD have issues, they both do, I'm just saying historically speaking, nVidia's the one with the worst issues. Drivers that fried GPUs on more than one occasion, drivers that didn't work for games at all (nVidia's Windows Vista release drivers). Tweaktown did an article about nVidia's drivers versus AMD's in Windowss after that report came out that shown nVidia's drivers were responsible 30% of Windows crashes.

This is one of the things I'm talking about - drivers that fried people's GPUs for instance yes its a big nasty sounding issue but in reality it only affected something silly like 0.003% of users and the driver was pulled within hours and a replacement fixed driver up the next day. So you have to look beyond just weighing it in terms of issues but what the response is like to the issues and how widespread those issues are.

nVidia drivers at the time that report came out were in a significantly higher number of PCs than ATI/AMD drivers so having a higher number of reported problems isn't suprising, that doesn't really reflect on the overall level of support or quality of the drivers and the software support behind them.

Something that for a long time was a very definite indisputable trend was that nVidia would have a release driver for a game out atleast by release day and often a week earlier and often another driver release out a week or 2 later if there were major problems, an AMD driver update which supported the game properly was often delayed upto a month after release and a subsequent driver release fixing post release issues could be another month or 2 after that (its something that AMD themselves recently highlighted as a factor in not giving customers the experience they wanted and have been trying to change over the last couple of months).

 

[spoffle]

This is one of the things I'm talking about - drivers that fried people's GPUs for instance yes its a big nasty sounding issue but in reality it only affected something silly like 0.003% of users and the driver was pulled within hours and a replacement fixed driver up the next day. So you have to look beyond just weighing it in terms of issues but what the response is like to the issues and how widespread those issues are.

The fact that it happened at all is bad enough, but it also happened more than once. However, pulling the drivers a few hours later doesn't show how many people downloaded it, what with unofficial mirroring and so on.

nVidia drivers at the time that report came out were in a significantly higher number of PCs than ATI/AMD drivers so having a higher number of reported problems isn't suprising, that doesn't really reflect on the overall level of support or quality of the drivers and the software support behind them.

I don't think that is the case, I'm pretty sure it was around the time when AMD's market share went up quite a bit due to them being very competitive.

Something that for a long time was a very definite indisputable trend was that nVidia would have a release driver for a game out atleast by release day and often a week earlier and often another driver release out a week or 2 later if there were major problems, an AMD driver update which supported the game properly was often delayed upto a month after release and a subsequent driver release fixing post release issues could be another month or 2 after that (its something that AMD themselves recently highlighted as a factor in not giving customers the experience they wanted and have been trying to change over the last couple of months).

I'm not disputing this part, but now you're seeing the opposite with AMD having release drivers out and nVidia complaining that they didn't get access early enough, if you believe their comments on the Tomb Raider situation.

 

[LtMatt]

AMD and Nvidia received the same final game code on Tomb Raider. Don't believe the PR on that one folks.

 

[Sin_Chase]

This thread is worthless as people will just attempt to nay-say any polarising opinion and dismiss any opinion/data/research that reflects badly on the side which they chose/prefer/fanboy for/own.

There is no discussion to be had here and this will turn into pointless flame bait.

 

[LtMatt]

This thread is worthless as people will just attempt to nay-say any polarising opinion and dismiss any opinion/data/research that reflects badly on the side which they chose/prefer/fanboy for/own.

There is no discussion to be had here and this will turn into pointless flame bait.

No harm in trying.