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Are ATI Drivers Bad?
- Thread starter coughs
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Associate
Yep, perceived quality is important for the average consumer. Apple know how to work this very well.
I had terrible trouble with Maya and Mudbox 2011. In Maya using Viewport 2.0 would randomly glitch out to a black screen which required a restart to fix, or it would just crash the app completely. Also the right click context menu would corrupt the screen for a few seconds every time i brought it up. The viewport in Mudbox would go fubar after adding a new paint layer, where the only area of the screen that would remain active was a little square area left behind after selecting the layer options. The viewport would correct itself after toggling to sculpt mode and back, but this got seriously irritating after a while. Also i could only apply 1 viewport filter maximum, anything more than that and the model would turn completely white requiring a restart. When i searched about that particular problem a lot of people seemed to think it was a lack of VRAM, but when i switched out to my old 256MB 8600GT backup card the problem went away (as did the other issues).
Maybe i just got really unlucky, but 2 clean Windows installs while i had the Radeon did absolutely nothing to solve the problems.
Qaudro's are certainly very expensive but they are not rip off's by any stretch, if you are a professional they are worth every penny compared to desktop cards:
I have an app called 3D-Coat which can use CUDA for voxel sculpting, but my 8600GT is not powerful enough to bother at the moment and i prefer Mudbox for sculpting anyway (3D-Coat has superb re-topology tools though). Mental Ray in Maya also uses it (well iRay) but i'm not really interested in offline rendering at all.
CUDA/OpenCL/DirectCompute are all great, but none of them have any significant impact on my situation at the moment. I have no doubt that OpenCL will do well in consumer apps eventually (unless M$ throw a lot of money at DirectCompute and kill it off like they did to OpenGL in the consumer space), but in the professional market Nvidia have such a big market share advantage (over 80% even after the Cypress based FireGL's launched) that i wouldn't be surprised at all if CUDA continued to dominate for a long time. Nvidia have made some questionable business decisions over the years, but i think investing so heavily in GPGPU earlier than everyone else has paid off pretty well.
Who knows though really, GPGPU is still in it's infancy, it's way too early to call anything with certainty i think.
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Soldato
For a single card setups I've never had a problem with either ATI or Nvidia, both are rock solid, Crossfire and SLI setups are a different kettle of fish due to the complications of running multiple video card setups and now we have Eyefinity technology that adds yet more complications.
There's a lot of hystria about drivers but 9/10 there just fine, people who genreally say they have had troubles have been overclocking, using hacked BIOS's, running 3rd party tools to override driver settings so it's no wonder they get problems from time to time.
I completely understand that FireGLs and Quadros have their places, by rip offs, I meant when some one will buy one only use it to display the viewports in their applications.
Soldato
I think this maybe one of the reasons why ATI drivers get slated. This is the install manager for the drivers and yet it look like it was designed with Windows 3.1 in mind. Now to be fair I've just this moment updated my video card drivers and I took a screen grab as soon as I saw this and the drivers installed fine and kept my overclock (seriously how can some of you make such hard work of installing drivers?) but the installation isn't even using v2 of .net framework.
Associate
That's actually exactly what they are designed for though, and what the SpecViewPerf 11.0 benchmark tests. If you want GPGPU for offline rendering/general compute tasks etc... then you buy Tesla/FireStream. Quadro/FirePro are for working with massively complicated models and scenes in real time.
Soldato
I've never had a problem with either. I'm one of the rare people that will buy ATI or Nvidia. My last 2 cards have been Nvidia but for no particular reason. I think the main problem is; when people experience an issue with games/graphics they are too quick to assume it's because their card is Nvidia/ATI ESPECIALLY if it is their first card from either one.
the same can be said with OS's. If someone installs a new OS and at any point there is an issue with a game, it automatically becomes a 'Windows 7 issue'
the same can be said with OS's. If someone installs a new OS and at any point there is an issue with a game, it automatically becomes a 'Windows 7 issue'
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Soldato
oops
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For the likes of what we've been talking about? Viewports in CAD apps such as Revit/ArchiCAD/3DS Max/Mudbox/zBrush, a quadro or FireGL is completely unecessary.
Owned 5850 and 470
Single Ati drivers are ok as are drivers for single nvidia card.
Its crossfire / sli support that is different in quality.
A lot of people like to bash ati drivers but its not true, they are not bad. 99% of whining is because of user related mistake, aslo nvidia drivers gets same people making same mistakes and whine too.
All in all single card drivers are equally good on both sides.
Single Ati drivers are ok as are drivers for single nvidia card.
Its crossfire / sli support that is different in quality.
A lot of people like to bash ati drivers but its not true, they are not bad. 99% of whining is because of user related mistake, aslo nvidia drivers gets same people making same mistakes and whine too.
All in all single card drivers are equally good on both sides.
Especially because people are known to slate ATi drivers, it's only reasonable to suggest hat people will think that first when they don't know any better.
I had a 3870X2 that looked like dodgy drivers initially, as it'd bluescreen when running any 3D applications. It turned out to be failing VRAM that was causing the problem. The failing RAM would crash my PC before I'd see any graphical corruption (at first, which is why I thought it was drivers) until I started getting quite bad graphical corruption. The error on the bluescreen was "atikmdag.sys" which looks like a driver issue. I've also had various problems that looked like other graphics card problems, only for it to be a dodgy motherboard (graphics card worked fine in another motherboard).
100% truth.
Associate
Yep exactly for those things. Zbrush uses a software renderer so GPU makes no difference there (even Intel graphics is on par with the top Quadro) but for AutoCad/Maya etc... there is a massive difference. You can download the SpecViewPerf benchmark and see for yourself here:
http://www.spec.org/gwpg/downloadindex.html
Consumer graphics cards are serviceable for hobbyist work like what i do, but they don't even come close to workstation cards for serious work.
What's "serious" work? I've used consumer graphics cards for "serious work" (in ArchiCAD) and they performed fine. I didn't feel like I needed anything better.
I'd consider a serious work being 8hrs a day of rendering for business purpose, anything of personal use or that's less time shouldn't matter much really but if you know that you can save yourself 2-3hrs of work each day then the extra is obviously worth it.
Associate
I always thought the ATI drivers were good, especially with my HD 5970 although the nvidia drivers I am using now on my 480 SLI are good as well I coudn't say one is better than the other.
Associate
I mean serious work like designing cars or any other massively complicated objects for manufacture in Autocad, setting up huge scenes in Maya/Max for film work etc...
Like i said download SpecViewPerf and you'll see how consumer cards handle that level of complexity. You simply can't work productively on these kinds kinds of things at 2fps (just to be clear i mean 2fps in the viewport just trying to navigate the work) on a GeForce or Radeon.
I'm sure you've done some pretty complex stuff in ArchiCAD, i've done some pretty heavy stuff in Maya/Mudbox myself, but when you actually see the datasets that professionals work with you soon realise there is a whole other meaning to the word 'serious'.
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