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Are ATI Drivers Bad?

RavenXXX2 said:
You probably wouldn't own up to having stability problem anyway... I go by all the threads and complaints around the web regarding xfire and they do tend to have more problems than SLI users, it's the simple truth. Oh look another disgruntled xfire user on the tube...http://www.youtube.com/user/bumsoil#p/a/u/2/242pfTv5e9M they are everywhere, xfire drivers are good one month and shocking the next.



Anyway the majority of xfire problems effect the 5000 cards, are you running any in xfire?
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Of course I'd own up to it, the point is that driver issues are so grossly over exagerated. I don't have 5 series crossfire, I have a 5870 on RMA though, so I will do as soon as it's replaced.

To post a video to "back up" your claims doesn't make sense to what I'm saying though, it's not like I'm saying it's impossible and never ever happens. To think it never happened would be ridiculous. But having had quite a few crossfire setups my self, and having no problems with it (nothing major that I can remember), I know that it's not "that's how they are".

If I wanted to claim that SLi is shoddy and unstable (and no I'm not) I could find examples of it being unstable and use that as "back up".
 
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All drivers have problems.

People don't seem to understand how complex a driver for a gpu is....

It's very complex, so if you think the driver is bad go to uni, get a degree in programming then try and fix the driver....
Until you try stfu and use what the people who ARE qualified make for you graphics cards.
 
Jokester said:
Indeed there isn't a month that goes by, without ATI users moaning about the latest driver set breaking something, something which you don't see with Nvidia driver releases much at all.
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Probably because they don't release them on a monthly basis. And we all know that people mainly speak up when they've got a problem too. I have a lot of experience of people raging about how hardware A is crap and software B is crap and vowing never to buy that brand/make again, only for it to be a case of PEBKAC and they're completely unwilling to accept it, even after telling me they did something unconventional that caused the problem. This is about various different peices of hardware and software of course, but it's still applicable. From my experience, a lot of people refuse to accept they've caused a problem themselves and instead blame the hardware or software.
 
Phoenixdancer said:
All drivers have problems.

People don't seem to understand how complex a driver for a gpu is....

It's very complex, so if you think the driver is bad go to uni, get a degree in programming then try and fix the driver....
Until you try stfu and use what the people who ARE qualified make for you graphics cards.
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That's like telling some one not to complain that their ceiling has fell down because they're not a contractor. :confused:
 
kylew said:
Probably because they don't release them on a monthly basis. And we all know that people mainly speak up when they've got a problem too.
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To a certain degree this is true. but a lot of the time, ATI driver releases seem to be driver releases for the sake of doing a monthly driver release. The impression I get is that this hurried churning out of drivers is leading to lack of proper beta testing.
 
I wouldn't say ATI drivers are bad... that may have been true in the past but they seem to have put a lot more effort in since around early 2009. That said I still hold the opinion that they still aren't as well rounded in all areas - there still are some underlying issues where they haven't had as extensive testing and support as they could have. 5770 CF especially seems quite problematic even on drivers that work fine with 58x0 CF fine.
 
Jokester said:
To a certain degree this is true. but a lot of the time, ATI driver releases seem to be driver releases for the sake of doing a monthly driver release. The impression I get is that this hurried churning out of drivers is leading to lack of proper beta testing.
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I can't comment on beta testing as I've never been "in it", but I've heard from people that they have a large beta testing programme, and any drivers released have been worked on for three months prior to release.

I am some one who updates their drivers as soon as one is released (graphics wise at least) and I can say that any problems I've ever had, I know have been down to my self. The last major issue I had was when flashing my old 4850s with a custom bios and the ATi drivers not liking something in the bios settings. As soon as I fixed the problem, everything was good again.

Aside from things like that, I have no issues with drivers.
 
There not bad, just not as good as nvidia.

Monthly driver updates from ATI are pretty pointless, most of the releases have brought me nothing new, in some cases even when being released after a new game they still have no crossfire profiles for that game and you end up waiting another month.

In some cases games are simply never fixed, e.g. The Settlers 7 STILL does not work with crossfire; of course nvidia have their share of problems but they do tend to release drivers with new game releases as and when you need them, plus the weekly beta's mean you always have the latest fixes.

In ATI's case you get told by lame beta testers over at rage3d you have to wait a month for new driver .. :mad:
 
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Over the last 6-8 months Nvidia drivers have given me some major problems, so I would have to say recently ATI have been much better.
 
Given the sheer number of CTD i have had with Eyefinity I would have to say yes ATI drivers are bad. However, I have not tried nvidia's triple screen equivalent.
 
coupe69 said:
Care to go into more detail, not had any issues at all tbh.

Or are you just trolling as usual?
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From what I can make out (i.e. in the GTX260/5770 thread) hes only just updated to anything newer than 195/196 drivers (which were pretty bad) on the nVidia side... from 197.45 onwards nVidia drivers have pretty much been a return to form. So its not suprising he thinks they are that bad.
 
Rroff said:
From what I can make out (i.e. in the GTX260/5770 thread) hes only just updated to anything newer than 195/196 drivers (which were pretty bad) on the nVidia side... from 197.45 onwards nVidia drivers have pretty much been a return to form. So its not suprising he thinks they are that bad.
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That'll be why then, how anyone can moan if they're not going to keep their drivers up to date is beyond me :rolleyes:
 
Gaming - No problems with either camp really, last ATI card i had was a 4850 and it was great. Only thing i would mark ATI down for is the CCC, i think it looks really amateurish and dated, this is a very minor issue though.

3D Apps/Other - Nvidia win here easily in my experience. As with anything YMMV according to your specific software packages, but i had a lot of issues ranging from minor annoyances to serious stability/compatibility issues (most notably in Autodesk apps).

If i had the money i would have separate workstation and gaming rigs, but i'm just a poor hobbyist so i have to make do with consumer graphics cards. I'll be grabbing a GTX460 or GTX470/475 soon purely because of the drivers. If it was just for gaming i wouldn't have a preference either way, i'd just buy whatever gave the best performance for my budget.
 
p0rks0da said:
Gaming - No problems with either camp really, last ATI card i had was a 4850 and it was great. Only thing i would mark ATI down for is the CCC, i think it looks really amateurish and dated, this is a very minor issue though.
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I find that most of the time this is what people are complaining about. nVidia's control panel is more streamlined.

3D Apps/Other - Nvidia win here easily in my experience. As with anything YMMV according to your specific software packages, but i had a lot of issues ranging from minor annoyances to serious stability/compatibility issues (most notably in Autodesk apps).
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I've had quite a positive experience with using Autodesk apps on ATi cards which has always made Quadros and FireGLs look like absolute rip offs just for that usage.

If i had the money i would have separate workstation and gaming rigs, but i'm just a poor hobbyist so i have to make do with consumer graphics cards. I'll be grabbing a GTX460 or GTX470/475 soon purely because of the drivers. If it was just for gaming i wouldn't have a preference either way, i'd just buy whatever gave the best performance for my budget.
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Don't you use CUDA apps? If there is any advantage nVidia have for 3D apps/CUDA, I can't see it lasting long because OpenCL stuff is starting to show up (I'm really looking forward to OpenCL Vray).
 
First off I had the GTX280 gimping drivers that Rroff knows full well about... Then I had the two very unstable update. After that I had issues with with my folding rigs after updates and even un-installing the dodgy driver and moving to the older *know stable driver* I had to install windows to fix ( very annoying ). I then had some BSD, getting dumped to the desktop issues after an update. And finally my last problem the Nvidia driver has stopped working reset to reinstall the drivers to find the install cant be completed for some unknown reason. I have had other niggling type issues but I like but I class them as minor problems, sprite detection issue and the occasional folding hicup that might be down to drivers.
 
They arent as solid as NV drivers but in my experience they arent as bad as some people make out. Still ATi's Achilles heel though, after all these years...
 
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