John Carmack says NVidia drivers are 'consistently superior'

[mmj_uk]

For me drivers are 50% of the product and whenever I've had an AMD card I spend weeks if not months waiting for fixes, NVidia just works more often than not (they're not perfect but much closer to it).

There was a story a bit back about AMD looking to work more closely with developers hopefully that will improve things for them, there's nothing worse than buying a newly released game and not being able to enjoy it properly due to driver issues which I have always found happens a lot with ATI/AMD.

 

[Final8y]

For me drivers are 50% of the product and whenever I've had an AMD card I spend weeks if not months waiting for fixes, NVidia just works more often than not (they're not perfect but much closer to it).

There was a story a bit back about AMD looking to work more closely with developers hopefully that will improve things for them, there's nothing worse than buying a newly released game and not being able to enjoy it properly due to driver issues which I have always found happens a lot with ATI/AMD.

Not something that i have experienced.
But i rarely buy games on release or lets say play because even if the drivers were perfect, the game would not be so i wait for a few patches first.
I have never had a game show stopper AMD driver issue, the most i have had in was in OpenGL were 2 GPUs would work but 4 would not and that was fixed in the next driver.

And a story about AMD looking to work more closely with developers, you must have been leaving under a rock for the last 2 years.

It seems that your personal experience and John Carmack is way behind the times, BF3 with some users saying that they have not been able to use a newer driver for the last 5 months, now that would No disguised swearing. Thank you. me off only if i needed to upgrade for other games.
314.22 seems to be the driver that most get along with and that was march.

 

[murah]

recently Nvidia drivers havn't been that great but im sticking to nvidia for now just using older 314.22 drivers

 

[Yurihyuga]

Ok lets be serious here John Carmack don't give a monkeys. Nvidia will pay anyone with a name in the gaming business to advertise.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Ok lets be serious here John Carmack don't give a monkeys. Nvidia will pay anyone with a name in the gaming business to advertise.

If you read the entire thread, you would know the comment (answer/reply) was taken out of context from the question that was asked...

 

[andybird123]

Not something that i have experienced.
But i rarely buy games on release or lets say play because even if the drivers were perfect, the game would not be so i wait for a few patches first.
I have never had a game show stopper AMD driver issue, the most i have had in was in OpenGL were 2 GPUs would work but 4 would not and that was fixed in the next driver.

And a story about AMD looking to work more closely with developers, you must have been leaving under a rock for the last 2 years.

It seems that your personal experience and John Carmack is way behind the times, BF3 with some users saying that they have not been able to use a newer driver for the last 5 months, now that would No disguised swearing. Thank you. me off..
314.22 seems to be the driver that most get along with and that was march
.

I've been waiting over a year for them to get my 7970m working correctly with MechWarrior online, it only went open beta in September last year...
I sold a 7950 for the same reason as my 670's became available in their place

 

[Final8y]

I've been waiting over a year for them to get my 7970m working correctly with MechWarrior online, it only went open beta in September last year...
I sold a 7950 for the same reason as my 670's became available in their place

Its still in beta and its got plenty of issues for both NV and AMD users which points to the core of the game, that does not mean all NV and AMD are getting it but looking at the polls a high majority of users are. there is no point putting effort into something that is that has so many unresolved issues of it own which could change on a monthly or even on weekly bases and make anything that the driver fixed redundant and it looks like the issues are not even be down to the drivers in the first place, just like the Crysys 2 incident, driver was fine through the beta and then was broken on the final release code.
Even there own repair tool is buggy.
The only way for can interpret and conclude its an AMD issue is to say that 85%-95% of the players are AMD card users.
http://mwomercs.com/forums/forum/157-known-issues/
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/125123-crash-stability-feedback-12229/
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/115147-mwo-repair-tool-public-release/





I don't see any info of the developers pointing the issues at AMD's feet besides forced AA through CC.

Jan 09 2013
Ati/amd Anti-Aliasing Causes Invisible Textures.

Use of Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and other video card special settings may result in missing textures.

Steps to Reproduce
0. Boot the game on a system with an ATI/AMD video card with Anti-Aliasing enabled.
1. Login to the game.
2. Launch a match.
3. Observe all terrain is missing textures.

Notes
This issue can also occur if the game's shaders folder has become corrupted. To resolve, delete this folder and boot the game.

Workarounds

Disable Anti-Aliasing and AnisoTropic Filtering from the Video Card Settings prior to booting the game.

Yes (109 votes [89.34%] - View)
No (13 votes [10.66%] - View)
Oh my goodness there is one issue that is partly specific to AMD, lol.


Sli Compatibility Is Needed

No (9 votes [6.82%] - View)
Yes (123 votes [93.18%] - View)
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/66081-sli-compatibility-is-needed/

Sli Functional Workaround; Few Graphical Glitches

Warning: turn off AA if you use this workaround, it causes dark grainy splotches.
Also causes some flashing of the mech damage glow.

http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/118183-sli-functional-workaround-few-graphical-glitches/

you will have to leave this to PGI to patch MWO for SLI, currently no combination of bits/compatibility/settings/profiles will get SLI to work properly for MWO, i'd know cuz i have tried.

the closest thing i have tried is using crysis3 bits, and it does enable it, but it wont run properly.

you will get sli performance when not much is going on, but as soon as it gets busy in battle, your performance will drop lower than what you'd get without SLI.

that and you will get constant flickering unless you have thermal vision or night vision on.

i reckon sli will work properly once the dx11 patch is released, which they said they are working on, but wont give an ETA.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=376161

AMD Crossfire
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/25392-amd-crossfire/
Works even though its NV backed game.

98% of the issues on the official forum is purely down to the game.

 

[layte]

While the OP was phrased as to be nothing more than trollbait. The sight of some of the more tedious AMD fanboys lining up to state how clueless John Carmark of all people is utterly hilarious. The guy is a genius, you can say what you like about the games, but the tech behind them has always been superb.

Did any of you actually read the full article before mashing face to keyboard?

 

[Boomstick777]

While the OP was phrased as to be nothing more than trollbait. The sight of some of the more tedious AMD fanboys lining up to state how clueless John Carmark of all people is utterly hilarious. The guy is a genius, you can say what you like about the games, but the tech behind them has always been superb.

Did any of you actually read the full article before mashing face to keyboard?

After Nvidia 320.18, anyone coming out saying Nvidia have better drivers than AMD is going to get some flack. The fact it was John Carmack, (See RAGE 'Google' worst game ever) makes it an even more moot point. These threads are much harder when your non biased, makes it all seem even more lame

 

[Final8y]

After Nvidia 320.18, anyone coming out saying Nvidia have better drivers than AMD is going to get some flack. The fact it was John Carmack, (See RAGE 'Google' worst game ever) makes it an even more moot point. These threads are much harder when your non biased, makes it all seem even more lame

Its funny how some users use broken and or unfinished graphically bug ridden games to back up there opinions.

Ironically HD7970GE is better in OpenGL games than GK104. Many older games are OpenGL games. As far as Far Cry goes, what issues did you have with AMD cards? The weak performance in FC titles was attributed to HD4870/4890 series, especially Far Cry 2. That has been fixed a long time ago with HD5870 and forward.

You didn't mention what happens to NV's performance in "games no one plays". What I mean is less popular games in your Stream library. On the driver side, the argument would be a lot more valid for NV if their cards actually performed well in random games "no one plays". The opposite is true. NV's cards lose badly in non-AAA games. Why is that?

Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon
Dark
HL Black Mesa
Carrier Command
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
Dead Island Raptide
Neverwiner Dungeons & Dragons
Warframe
Firefall

AMD's 7970GE continues to outperform 680 without any trouble outside of the most popular games and by large margins. That tells me NV primaril spends their time focusing on the most popular games while AMD's drivers are more consistent overall. What happens if I want to play a game no one heard about? It gives me more comfort that AMD's 7970GE will trounce 680/770. This isn't based on intuition by real world gaming performance in less popular titles where 680 trails by a long shot.

Real world data shows AMD's cards perform faster in less popular games NV doesn't specifically target. Add to that latest GE titles where NV needs 780 to compete (GRID 2 and COH2) and I don't really understand why people keep saying NV's drivers are better. Scientific evidence shows otherwise. Stating NV's control panel looks better or complaining about restarting the PC after a complete driver install is one of the weakest arguments for NV's superior drivers. Most people prefer NV's drivers since they have used NV for the last 10 years and are reluctant to switch. NV already had 2 drivers that killed their GPUs. So much for their superior driver record.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35229795&postcount=148

I'm done.

 

[OLDPHART]

AMD V's Nvidia Hand Bag war, the hand bags will never stop swinging, l'v had both and they are as bad as each other at the end of the day.

Drivers could be good one moment bad the other, they do or say anything to stick a knife in each other's back's.

Its all about the almighty $ at the end of the day, those hand bags must be really heavy by now.

 

[Rroff]

Its funny how some user use broken and or unfinished graphically bug ridden games to back up there opinions.

Yeah lets just forget about the posts where I proved without a shade of doubt that AMD drivers were the cause of massive amounts of issues to consumers with that game and that none of those issues existed on nVidia cards. Never mind that the companies in question also publicly stated as much.

As for the other parts of your quote looks like someone has gone out and cherry picked benchmarks that prove their point. (indeed one of those games if you benchmark different points of the game it will hugely swing between AMD and nVidia). If your metric is purely how older games play performance wise then its close to 50/50 who wins overall. There is a huge amount more to how good drivers are than just how they perform however.

 

[Final8y]

Yeah lets just forget about the posts where I proved without a shade of doubt that AMD drivers were the cause of massive amounts of issues to consumers with that game and that none of those issues existed on nVidia cards. Never mind that the companies in question also publicly stated as much.

As for the other parts of your quote looks like someone has gone out and cherry picked benchmarks that prove their point. (indeed one of those games if you benchmark different points of the game it will hugely swing between AMD and nVidia). If your metric is purely how older games play performance wise then its close to 50/50 who wins overall.

You have proved nothing and you continually repeating that will not make it so, we have had this out over t RAGE before, the first thing i did was google and see both NV and AMD having issues, some were similar and some unique to each brand, you then posted a Vid of how it was on your setup i then ran the game for the first time on my Quadfire 5970 and it behaved the same.

Wooho there is a slim possibility that this buggy steaming pile is slightly less buggy on NV cards if we waste loads of time investigating.

Stop trying to hang so much on the brands over a single steaming pile of a an implemented game. AMD even had a profile ready for an update of RAGE that didn't come out, whether that update eventually came out with the DLC i have not looked into.

BF3 is much more important and there has been regression for many NV users.

You can carry on with your RAGE by yourself.

 

[Rroff]

All I will do is re-quote the relevant part from the patch notes

- Implemented workaround for AMD driver crash right after intro cinematic
on Win 7 32-bit systems.

- Disabled UBOs because they are causing animation issues with AMD drivers.

- Don't allow swap-tear to be enabled on AMD while the extension is not
exposed because it may crash.

- Using an AMD graphics card, you may experience black flickering
artifacts on flags, banners and zip-lines if you run in full screen
mode. This has been identified as a graphics driver problem. We are
actively working with AMD on a solution to this problem.

- Using an AMD graphics card, you may experience black grid lines on
some graphical user interface (GUI) elements like the in-game mini-map.
This has been identified as a graphics driver problem. We are actively
working with AMD on a solution to this problem. If you find the grid
lines particularly distracting, you can add the following to the RAGE
launch options in Steam as a temporary workaround.

- If you have an AMD graphics card with a dual core CPU system you may
experience severe hitching and low frame rates. This has been
identified as a driver problem. We are actively working with AMD on
a solution to this problem. As a temporary workaround you may add the
following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:

Anyone who is objective can make their own minds up whether there were AMD driver issues with the game or not - my original posts shows that these issues were not present on nVidia cards and shows how few issues there were on nVidia cards that were down to nVidia driver issues rather than game bugs. One thing that went partly under the rug also was that a large number of AMD setups were rendering a lot of textures at quarter resolution that made a game that already had issues with texture resolution in some areas look even worse.

 

[Final8y]

Wooho there is a slim possibility that this buggy steaming pile is slightly less buggy on NV cards if we waste loads of time investigating.

Yes and NV has bugs that AMD didn't have and we can pick game after game to show that.
Is only the bugs that AMD have that matter


Rage Updated

Known Graphical Issues
----------------------

The following issues were found using NVIDIA graphics hardware with
the GeForce R285 Driver or AMD graphics hardware with the AMD Catalyst
11.10 Version 2 Preview Driver.


- If you turn up both the screen resolution and anti-aliasing settings
to high values in the video settings menu and/or you enable
"GPU Transcode" then the screen may no longer update on some hardware
configurations. This means your system does not have the necessary
video memory to run with these high settings. You can re-enter the video
settings menu and lower your settings to restart screen updates.

- If you turn up both the screen resolution and anti-aliasing settings
to high values in the video settings menu you may experience a crash
if your system does not have the necessary memory to run with these
high settings. To avoid this problem you will have to re-enter the
video settings menu to lower the settings. If you can no longer launch
the game after changing the video settings to high values you can add
the following to your RAGE launch options in Steam:

+com_safemode 1

The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam
and selecting "Properties". Then click on "Set Launch Options" in
the dialog that pops up. Adding this option will reset your video
settings to the default values the next time the game is launched.
When the game is launched in safe mode the game will show "safe mode"
in the corners of the screen. Do not forget to remove the safe mode
launch option after launching the game once to make sure you do not
lose your video settings each time you launch the game.

- Using a NVIDIA graphics card on Windows XP 32-bit or XP 64-bit, you
may experience a crash or hang when changing the screen resolution in
full screen mode or switching from windowed mode to full screen mode.
This has been identified as a graphics driver problem. We have spent
significant effort trying to work around this problem and were
successful in reducing the frequency of occurrence but a driver update
is necessary to completely fix the problem. We are actively working with
NVIDIA to make a solution to this problem available as soon as possible.

- Using an AMD graphics card, you may experience black flickering
artifacts on flags, banners and zip-lines if you run in full screen
mode. This has been identified as a graphics driver problem. We are
actively working with AMD on a solution to this problem.

- Using an AMD graphics card, you may experience black grid lines on
some graphical user interface (GUI) elements like the in-game mini-map.
This has been identified as a graphics driver problem. We are actively
working with AMD on a solution to this problem. If you find the grid
lines particularly distracting, you can add the following to the RAGE
launch options in Steam as a temporary workaround.

+vt_maxAniso 1

The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam
and selecting "Properties". Then click on "Set Launch Options" in
the dialog that pops up. However, note that adding this setting will
lower the general texture quality in the game.

- If you have an AMD graphics card with a dual core CPU system you may
experience severe hitching and low frame rates. This has been
identified as a driver problem. We are actively working with AMD on
a solution to this problem. As a temporary workaround you may add the
following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:

+jobs_numThreads 0

The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam
and selecting "Properties". Then click on "Set Launch Options" in
the dialog that pops up.

- If you are running RAGE in full-screen mode and you ALT-TAB to a
different application you may lose your VSync setting. When you
switch to a different application VSync stops functioning.
RAGE detects that VSync is no longer working and automatically switches
back to synchronizing to real-time to make sure the game time advances
in a consistent manner. We are actively working with the graphics
vendors on a solution to this problem.

Rage Updated


If after changing the Texture Cache to LARGE you experience a crash or
texture corruption (like a partially or completely blue world) then
the graphics driver may have run out of memory.

We are actively working with the graphics card vendors to resolve
any crashes.

If you do not experience a crash but you see texture corruption then you
may be able to get the large Texture Cache to work by accepting the change
and restarting the game. If you still experience texture corruption after
restarting the game you will have to set the Texture Cache back to SMALL.

You may also be able to improve the memory situation on your computer by
changing the Windows paging file management. Note that making changes to
the Windows paging file management may change the performance characteristics
of your computer. Any changes you make to your system configuration are
at your own risk. Always make backups of your system and revert these
changes if you notice undesirable side effects.

To change the paging file management on Windows Vista and Windows 7, first
press the "Start" button, then right-click on "Computer" and then select
"Properties" from the popup menu. Then select "Advanced system settings"
on the window that appears. Select the "Advanced" tab on the
"System Properties" window that is displayed and press the "Settings"
button under "Performance". Select the "Advanced" tab on the
"Performance Options" window that shows up next and press the
"Change..." button under "Virtual memory". Now uncheck the option
"Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" and make
sure that the option "System managed size" is selected on the
"Virtual Memory" window. Confirm the change by pressing the "OK" button
on each window. After making this change you will have to restart your
computer for the change to take effect.

To change the paging file management on Windows XP, first press the
"Start" button, then right-click on "My Computer" and then select
"Properties" from the popup menu. Select the "Advanced" tab on the
"System Properties" window that is displayed and press the "Settings"
button under "Performance". Select the "Advanced" tab on the
"Performance Options" window that shows up next and press the "Change"
button under "Virtual memory". Make sure that the option
"System managed size" is selected on the "Virtual Memory" window.
Confirm the change by pressing the "OK" button on each window.
After making this change you will have to restart your computer for
the change to take effect.


Anisotropic Filter
------------------

The new "Anisotropic Filter" option in the video settings menu allows
you to increase the anisotropic texture filtering.

Anisotropic filtering is a method to enhance the image quality of
textures on surfaces that are at oblique viewing angles.

The anisotropic texture filtering in RAGE defaults to a low value to
accommodate for low-end graphics hardware. However, the anisotropic
filtering can be increased for high-end graphics hardware by setting
the Anistropic Filter option to HIGH in the video settings menu.

Do not force anisotropic filtering to the ‘on’ setting in the graphics
vendor control panel because this may cause rendering artifacts in
the game.

Note that increasing the anisotropic filtering may improve the
texture quality while it may also decrease the frame rate.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/6464/

The game is a buggy mess for both brands, stop splitting hairs.

 

[Rroff]

Wooho there is a slim possibility that this buggy steaming pile is slightly less buggy on NV cards if we waste loads on time investigating.

Yes and NV has bugs that AMD didn't have and we can pick game after game to show that.
Is only the bugs that AMD have that matter

The subject was about RAGE.

And tbh after your comment:

Not something that i have experienced.
But i rarely buy games on release or lets say play because even if the drivers were perfect, the game would not be so i wait for a few patches first.

I can't really take you seriously on this subject any longer, your perspective is obviously too deeply skewed to be anything like accurate.

 

[Final8y]

The subject was about RAGE.

And tbh after your comment:



I can't really take you seriously on this subject any longer, your perspective is obviously too deeply skewed to be anything like accurate.

It was about Rage, so what if AMD crashed when the game did this but crashed on NV if the game did that.

And you now artificially limiting the over all subject to issues of Rage to prove a general over all point is a contradiction of making a over all point when you only accept a single game to make it and even then that game is pretty much irrelevant and both sides needed game patches and drivers to fix it.

Originally Posted by Final8y View Post
Not something that i have experienced.
But i rarely buy games on release or lets say play because even if the drivers were perfect, the game would not be so i wait for a few patches first.

And and the quote you clearly don't understand.

I like to wait for reviews and not get ripped off and hopefully price drops with games im not so sure of with some exceptions, so yes i may wait a week, not once have i not played a game because of driver issues even on release day, if i don't play it it's because the game is broken and needs patches or i have just not gotten around to it with a huge backlog that i have, I spent too much time playing EVE and BF3.

Now if your saying that is not accurate because most games are bug free on release and all top quality and should buy without fear of getting burnt then yeah im inaccurate..

 

[Orangey]

I tried to make a thread a while ago to settle this issue once and for all, ofc it was locked within an hour or so.

 

[David Bisset]

Seems silly to try to 'settle the issue once and for all'
People will have different views. Some will be fans of one brand or another, others will just have had different personal experiences. Also over time things change so even if the issue could be 'settled' for right now by the next driver release it'd be unsettled once again.

Right now I have one of each and both have problems. The nVidia card gives me issues with Starcraft 2 and Mechwarrior, the ATI one just Mechwarrior. In the past however I've had other issues with ATI cards so just because its one game ahead right now for me doesn't mean i'll always buy their cards or anything.

 

[Rroff]

Seems silly to try to 'settle the issue once and for all'
People will have different views. Some will be fans of one brand or another, others will just have had different personal experiences. Also over time things change so even if the issue could be 'settled' for right now by the next driver release it'd be unsettled once again.

Right now I have one of each and both have problems. The nVidia card gives me issues with Starcraft 2 and Mechwarrior, the ATI one just Mechwarrior. In the past however I've had other issues with ATI cards so just because its one game ahead right now for me doesn't mean i'll always buy their cards or anything.

Its not something you can settle once and for all but you can look at long term trends - unless things go seriously wrong you can't really look at it on a driver by driver basis as often you will get <great driver><bad driver><great driver> aslong as there is a fairly recent driver that works well and supports all the latest games or a bad driver is quickly followed up by a good one that fixes all the issues then an individual bad driver its not always an issue.

Awhile back I posted a link to a dozen or so graphic driver round ups for 2012, 2011, 2010, etc. which unfortunatly I can't seem to find from searching that give a fairly accurate picture of what the overall trends have been for those years.

Your never going to settle it around here anyhow when you have people like for instance Final8y who by his own admission has limited experience of release day driver support for games but will still state the driver support for new titles between the different companies is of the same quality.