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Are Nvidia drivers really better than Amd's?

D.P. said:
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.
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That would explain why AMDMatt had so much hassle trying to calibrate his iiyama recently, if the drivers are basically adding digital vibrance by default it would throw off any attempts at calibrating the monitor using a windows icc profile alone

As for the topic at hand, I've always had less problems with nvidia, AMD mobile drivers were particularly wretched
 
For single GPU's (99% of gamers, I'd assume) both vendors have really great drivers.

For multi-gpu setups, Nvidia is better by far. With AMD crossfire, you could be waiting months to get multi-gpu support in new games, making your second/third/fourth card completely worthless for that game.
 
Used AMD cards from 2009-2014 and didn't have any real issues with their drivers, apart from the fact that there were no proper Windows 8 drivers for the 4870 I was using at the time it came out. Been using Nvidia cards for about six months now and haven't noticed any difference. Maybe it's different for multi-card setups, but the whole AMD drivers thing has always seemed like nothing more than an internet meme to me.
 
My experience is that nvidias drivers arnt as good as AMD's,i was regularly experiencing game driver crashes and other issues(multi monitor ect) since i switched bak to nvidia with a 970,took until December to get a decent driver IMO.
I had a 660 a while back too,certain drivers just hated some games,it was really a bit of a pain.

Had a 280x,never ran into any issues whatso ever,even on new release games.Sometimes their was long gaps of time between releases,but honestly i never found myself 'waiting' for a driver to play any particular title.

Its really not a big difference either way in all honestly,your always able to find plenty of people who are suffering major driver related issues and are waiting for fixes from both vendors.


One thing both vendors need to do is to stop moving important features to seperate programs like Geforce experience and Raptor(or whatever its name is atm)

its annoying as hell that stuff like shadowplay and GameDVR require me install other bloatware jank, :/
 
Its closer than you think.

having owned both sets of cards for a decent length of time I can say with confidence that if AMD have worked with the developer to optimise a game, the results are generally far better than the Nvidia gameworks rubbish they have been producing in the past 6 months.

You can really see a stark contrast in performance where AMD and the Developer have collaborated and produced great results. They don't have many games like this but when they strike gold, its a home run i.e. really great frame-times and smooth perf. beyond what you see in most games, whether its running nvidia or amd.

I also find the ability to enable 1,2,3,4 GPU's in increments very useful on AMD, on my Nvidia setup I need to enable a single card or all 4 at the same time.

I have found the extra software Nvidia bring to the table very good, I really like shadowplay.

AMD's multi-monitor support is superior and I have some annoyances with the Nvidia driver in terms of the way it handles the switching between primary and secondary monitors. It has a bug which I need to work around every-time.

That said, Nvidia have been first to the table with launch-day game ready drivers in some scenarios and for some reason, my favourite game, Elite: Dangerous is lacking AMD Crossfire support whereas SLI is supported.

I was stung badly with the 7970 driver transition, it took just up until around the announcement of the 290X for things to sort themselves out. I was running for 9 months on the original pre-7970-release beta driver. In the end they fixed pretty much everything but by then it was too late, the PR damage to AMD had been done.

I did not switch away from AMD because of the drivers, they were very tight when I switched over the 980's, I just could not run the 7970s in my rig any longer, they were too hot. Now I have switched, my angst is more against the Game Devs than Nvidia, the devs have been churning out some half arsed junk lately in terms of 3D engine code. Some notable bright spots aside (Code Masters, Crystal Dynamics, MGS TFP, Unreal Tournament 2015).
 
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Not had a single nvidia driver issue since I swapped to nvidia when I won a gtx 460, then purchased a second for sli then single 580 to sli 580 then a single 680 to a 780 and now settling on 2 of them untill something more worthwhile for me comes along. This has been across countless installs of win 7/8/8.1 and some time on 10.

I've found them to just work reliably, which is why nvidia are my first choice at the moment
 
I've never really had a problem with either Nvidia or AMD/ATI, but then again I've used a single card solutions; I did use a GTX295, but sold it within weeks because of issues with sound glitches, obviously it was a long time ago.
 
I switched from AMD to Nvidia and back to an AMD card last year and many times before that in the past (had nothing to do with drivers btw). My finding were there is no difference between them. All the cards works flawlessly for me as far as drivers are concerned.

That said I think Nvidia have a slight edge as they seem to release drivers more often. I have never had SLI or CrossFire, but it seems to me the gap becomes bigger when you speak about more than one gpu in a system. SLI just seems better supported drivers wise, don't think many can argue with that.

All that said, is it worth paying a huge premium for nvidia for the difference? As single cards goes, no. SLI, that's a diferent story. I would take a 290X 8gb at £280 vs gimped 970 3.5gb any day of the week and would not even consider a 980 at £400+.
 
whyscotty said:
Joking aside - Nvidia drivers have sucked lately for multi Gpu's
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I guess lately they are as bad as each other then. That's why whenever I find my self considering a dual gpu setup, it does not long for me to come to the conclusion that they are just not worth the hassle or the money.
 
With my 970 after I upgraded to new drivers I got bad stuttering so had to go back again. But I have also had to go back with amd but that was with beta drivers and I did a lot more updates on amd.
 
TNA said:
I guess lately they are as bad as each other then. That's why whenever I find my self considering a dual gpu setup, it does not long for me to come to the conclusion that they are just not worth the hassle or the money.
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In the majority of games the performance can be well worth the money, especially at higher res's. AMD just seem to be lacking with profile updates unlike NVidia who seem to get them out near enough on day one of the game launch.
 
Watlinguk said:
In the majority of games the performance can be well worth the money, especially at higher res's. AMD just seem to be lacking with profile updates unlike NVidia who seem to get them out near enough on day one of the game launch.
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That would depend on the individual really. Are you someone who tends to buy games the day they come out all the time (£30-£40 a pop :eek:), or pick them up on sale for half the price 2-3 month later example? Maybe someone who plays mainly one or two games all the time and now and then a few others.

In my case I do not find it being worth paying the extra, but some like yourself might. That is for people who are reading this to consider before choosing. But honestly, single card, AMD drivers are fine in my humble opinion. They just need to go back to month driver releases, which AMDMatt said they will be, so no problem really.

I am looking to get a Radeon 390 myself when it is released soon. I will keep an eye out on the driver situation until then.
 
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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Agreed.

I don't know if I can do it now, but I used to be able to usually tell what vendor from looking at the video / image quality.
 
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