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Are Nvidia drivers really better than Amd's?

africanos23 said:
Sadly I had 4xR9-290s MSI Gaming 4G hitting crazy temps which left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I played around with a R9-290 Tri-X that could handle the heat better (57c at full load) and was a lot happier.

I prefer the plug-n-play option though with Nvidia, with little to no hassle on the software and bug side of things.

Will have to wait and get the Titan X to give a unbiased opinion. You never know if I would get ticked off :).
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Msi gaming though alright for single configs is not that good for multi with the heat being dumped in the case. I personally have not found Amd any less plug and play. The Titan-x will have to come down a lot in price for me as in principal even though I could buy it I could not give that money away on a single card. If it was 3 times as powerful as a 290 maybe but with the 390X coming soon I think it will be the card to go for. Maxwell seems to have lost it's advantage with the Titan-X as heat and power consumption is much higher compared to the 980 and fans have to be ramped up to compensate.
 
I'd actually be interested in talking about this.

I have an R9 295x2 + a 290x in my PC and so far I feel like more often than not I'm not reaping the benefits of it at all. It's very frustrating I have to say. From the outside it looks as though Nvidia are better off, but I'm aware this may well be a grass is greener thing.
 
win8.1 said:
Msi gaming though alright for single configs is not that good for multi with the heat being dumped in the case. I personally have not found Amd any less plug and play. The Titan-x will have to come down a lot in price for me as in principal even though I could buy it I could not give that money away on a single card. If it was 3 times as powerful as a 290 maybe but with the 390X coming soon I think it will be the card to go for. Maxwell seems to have lost it's advantage with the Titan-X as heat and power consumption is much higher compared to the 980 and fans have to be ramped up to compensate.
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On another forum I see most people are very happy performance/temp wise or are going under water for 2+ cards.

Crazy prices are crazy prices that's for sure. In terms of heat and such I will need to see for myself.

Drojman said:
I'd actually be interested in talking about this.

I have an R9 295x2 + a 290x in my PC and so far I feel like more often than not I'm not reaping the benefits of it at all. It's very frustrating I have to say. From the outside it looks as though Nvidia are better off, but I'm aware this may well be a grass is greener thing.
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Hense my idea of going to 2 faster cards rather than moving to three . Scaling and drivers have never and probably will never be there to compensate even though cheaper.
 
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Ayahuasca said:
Some of them might just be saying it but some are also genuinely frustrated and will make the switch.

It's not good losing any customers when you've already lost over 10% discrete GPU market share in under a year.
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Of course some people would be frustrated. If they feel they are better off with Nvidia then they should try them out if they can justify the price. I personally have never seen much difference but then I usually stick to one gpu each upgrade. Hopefully this is a one off for Amd though.
 
Has AMD released drivers that killed cards?

Vaguely remember it happening twice for Nvidia Great if you still have manufacturer warranty and receive an upgrade for an old model killed off.
 
I remember how a large portion of complaints on AMD drivers was about Catalyst control panel, which Nvidia fans found difficult to use. But that's clearly an iq issue not drivers.
 
To be fair, I haven't really had any problems with either company as such. I thought I was having driver trouble with the GTX 970 and posted about it regularly on the NVidia forum for months, but it turned out I was being affected by the memory issue, not a driver one. It hadn't all come out at that stage though.
Out of all the cards I have purchased recently the only one that impressed me was the one in my sig. With a small overclock it was able to easily beat the 970 and was actually not far off the score of the stock 980.

Here are my results:

GTX 970 stock clocks http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4454352
R9 290 @ 1180 core http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/5905455
GTX 980 stock clocks http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/6299486

I can't accurately compare temps as the R9 290 I used has a massive cooler on it, while the other 2 were reference design, so obviously ran a little hotter.
 
image quality has been stated a couple of times, i found out of the box amd was better but a couple of tweeks in nvidia control panel and both will look the same
 
The few times I've tried ATI/AMD cards I've never had much luck with them, always getting the ATIKMDAG.SYS errors. Since then I've just stuck with NVidia as they've never given me any problems.

Put a new Radeon card in a machine at work recently and, what do you know, occasional ATIKMDAG.SYS errors, from which it sometimes recovers and sometimes doesn't. No logical reason for it whatsoever.

I realise that there are plenty of people who have the exact opposite problem, where AMD cards work fine and they have problems with NVidia ones. Maybe it's certain combinations of graphics card and motherboard, who knows.

Not saying one is any better than the other, all I know is that I've given both a try over the years and NVidia is far more stable for me personally so I stick with those for that reason alone. Must say that these ATIKMDAG errors have been a recurring thing for years now and, whatever is at the root of them, you'd think they'd have fixed it by now.
 
Rroff said:
There are differences to the image quality (colours) - shouldn't be but there is - if you have them side by side on identical monitors its noticeable if you look for it.
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Most of this is simply down to the choice of contrast, vibrancy and saturation- Nvidia choose a more natural selection while AMD push for the punchier look like TVs on default settings. You can make the AMD graphics more natural and tone things down or if you want the overly vivid look on Nvidia you can push things up.
 
Vertigo1 said:
The few times I've tried ATI/AMD cards I've never had much luck with them, always getting the ATIKMDAG.SYS errors. Since then I've just stuck with NVidia as they've never given me any problems.

Put a new Radeon card in a machine at work recently and, what do you know, occasional ATIKMDAG.SYS errors, from which it sometimes recovers and sometimes doesn't. No logical reason for it whatsoever.

I realise that there are plenty of people who have the exact opposite problem, where AMD cards work fine and they have problems with NVidia ones. Maybe it's certain combinations of graphics card and motherboard, who knows.

Not saying one is any better than the other, all I know is that I've given both a try over the years and NVidia is far more stable for me personally so I stick with those for that reason alone. Must say that these ATIKMDAG errors have been a recurring thing for years now and, whatever is at the root of them, you'd think they'd have fixed it by now.
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Smae for me. I had computers with a few ATI/AMD cards (work computers where I had no choice) and there were loads of problems, especially in Linux. I've had far more nvidia cards and never had a single problem that I can remember.

So if I was to buy a new card why would I want to take the risk with AMD when there is a large host of ongoing problems? Maybe I'm unlucky but I don't dare, nvidia just works for me.
 
one thing i noticed with nvidia drivers is they are hard to clear off, i went from amd to nvidia with no problems but going back to amd i had a few problems even using ddu, ended up doing a fresh windows install to sort it
 
when i had a pair of 970's i changed limited rgb to full and texture qaulity to high and could not tell the difference between the 970 and 290
 
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