• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Are Nvidia drivers really better than AMD?

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

Soldato
Joined
18 May 2010
Posts
23,801
Location
London
Thinking of upgrading my 5870.

I keep hearing that Nvidia drivers are better than AMD's. However is this really the case?

What about all those vpu recovery issues not so long ago?

From what I have seen and heard Nvidia seem to have just as many driver issues as AMD.

Im thinking of going green when kepler comes out, something in the 7870/7950 caliber.
 
better is a matter of opinion and tends to depend on what games you are playing. Neither are perfect, and I have had no more problems with one than the other really
 
I would say no tbh. They both have there issues. Some will tell you they had nothing but hastle with nvidia and vice versa. If your experience with your 5870 was bad then give nvidia a try.
 
I had a bad expereince with my 5870, but my 7970 is just fine. Go with whatever you can get the best deal on.
 
I have come across a few of issues with games as new drivers come out with AMD Drivers, this was using a AMD HD5850 and HD 6950, I don't have any issues with my GTX 580 with any drivers.

  • Mount & Blade: Warband - Graphics all warp on the map, within 30 minutes or so of play, have to quit the game and restart using a AMD HD5850 or HD 6950, when I switched to Nvidia GTX 580 their is no issue.
  • Wolfenstein Enemy Territory - Does not work anymore with AMD/ATI Cards - crashes to desktop within 10 seconds of play, when I switched to Nvidia again the game worked with no problems.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV - slow stuttery framerate when using the AMD HD5850 or HD 6950, when I played this game on my Nvidia GTX 580 the game had smooth framerates.
 
Last edited:
opethdisciple said:
Thinking of upgrading my 5870.

I keep hearing that Nvidia drivers are better than AMD's. However is this really the case?

What about all those vpu recovery issues not so long ago?

From what I have seen and heard Nvidia seem to have just as many driver issues as AMD.

Im thinking of going green when kepler comes out, something in the 7870/7950 caliber.
Click to expand...

Yes but... lol

istock_can-of-worms.jpg
 
for me after what happen with AMD drivers with Rage/Battlefield 3 and Skyrim (allmost 6 weeks for a Xfire driver) is half the reason why i switched from 5850 xFire to GTX480 SLI , i dont plan on using AMD again still the drivers for the major releases are much better and quicker comming even if there beta.

So in short I would say Nvidia's drivers are better than AMD's at the moment in my opinon
 
I'm sure they both are as bad as each other generally but Nvidia definitely had the worst issues.

E.g. 590's with no power draw limits and over stressed VRM's going bang and the HAWK menu screen allowing the GPU's to burn out.








Just saying.
 
nVidia's software support is somewhat better than AMDs.

Both have their problems but you have to look at the scale of these issues rather than the ignorant "they both have issues so they are just as bad as each other response".

Typically issues with nVidia drivers are more limited to a sub-set of their users i.e. the 590 issues, TDR problems which are mostly limited to some 460/560 customers. When thing go wrong with nVidia drivers it tends to be somewhat more spectacular but usually fixed quickly and as I mentioned doesn't generally affect a widespread number of users.

AMD issues tend to affect a far larger number of their customers, they aren't as quick as nVidia in getting support for new games as a generality and usually take a lot longer to fix problems - tho its not so bad these days for a long time legacy issues like problems with rendering hardware surfaces in 2D would keep on rearing their heads generation after generation.
 
Last edited:
Performance wise, probably not.

Nvidia has a lot more devs, thus have more complicated and configurable drivers, in a way. This results in more being broke sometimes, for example they're apparently suffering with massive input lag in Win7 currently.

Some will aruge that SLI is better than Xfire, otherwise will argue the opposite, personally I still think dual cards are less then desirable from either side, but lots here double up anyway.

Personally I think it's about the same, maybe nvidia do have a slight advantage, but not enough to make it into the context of my purchase decisions, and severly outweighed by the fact they disable stuff like Phsyx if you have an AMD card installed.

Pick the best card that suits your needs for the price, can't really go wrong with that practice. If your'e planning in having two cards, then it's possibly worth considering.
 
Here is a daft question, say I find a bug in a game - is their a specific place or email address I can send the issue to? so it can be fixed?

Obviously it could be an issue with the gaming code from the developer too.

Only place I could find with AMD was their forum board with the admin but always fell on deaf ears.

I remember when their was an issue with NVIDIA cards with EverQuest, compass line not being rendered/drawn, someone managed to contact an Nvidia Engineer who diagnosed the problem and passed on the solution to the EverQuest Programmers and it eventually got fixed, as an example.
 
As an AMD owner I will say yes, I prefer Nvidia's drivers.

I like the control panel and the ease of changing settings.
 
I ended up switching from a 5850 to a 480 because of drivers. It depends some what on your setup and I don't know how much the amd drivers have improved now.

I had problems with running 2 monitors on my 5850 flickering and such and then I had problem with flash video forcing the card to a lower clock which meant I couldn't work in a 3d package or play a game on one screen while running a tutorial or tv on the other with out major slow down.

I think it really depends on your setup and what you do though. People are going to have problems from both sides. I will be sticking to nvidia from now on though mostly because I feel their drivers work better for the kind of 3D and game work I do and I can use things like CUDA and physx.
 
Last edited:
i have only used nvidia for 2 years before moving to the better side,so can't really compare 2y vs 7y but from what i can remember the few times i had issue's with ati driver's it was my own fault.
 
KillBoY_UK said:
with AMD drivers with Rage/Battlefield 3 and Skyrim (allmost 6 weeks for a Xfire driver) is half the reason why i switched from 5850 xFire to GTX480 SLI
Click to expand...

Nvidia had just as much driver issues/problems in all those titles too, it wasn't just AMD, you just need to look at various forums.

They both have their fair share of problems, although a lot of the time imho it's down to pebkac.

I had a glitch in Skyrim that caused constant crashing, it would have been so simple to blame the drivers, but considering it was happening with both vendors in separate rigs points the finger firmly with the game engine and not the driver.

If someone doesn't have something else to test on then the blame usually falls firmly on Nvidia/Amd's feet.

The amount of threads in this forum asking about CrossFire/SLi information after the hardware is sitting in the (sometimes woefully underpowered)machine is astounding, meaning that a lot of people don't have the slightest clue what they are doing.

I couldn't care less about what vendors gpu's in my system, I care more for the fps that I can enjoy for my cash.
 
I've had little trouble with ATi drivers, a few niggles which admittedly I haven't yet seen with Nvidia, but I'm more than happy with both. I do think Nvidia generally perform better under moderate or heavy AA use, so for the time being that's where I'll stay until I see a substantial improvement in the red camp.

Though, I must admit that recently I saw a 7950 run a particularly taxing scene in Metro 2033 with AA, and I was both impressed and surprised; however I'm not sure I fully buy into the lower power draw / money saving marketing that AMD churn out. Is it really that much cheaper to run say a 6970 instead of a 480 over the course of a year, or are we merely talking about a tenner?
 
Last edited:
I would deffo say each to his/her own. I have had both ATI and Nvidia but other than the odd niggle, both have been great.

Rroff I agree with here. Pretty much both have issues but AMD seems to affect the larger number and Nvidia a smaller number but still both have issues.
 
Well, earlier this week I upgraded the AMD 6850 within my second rig to a 6950. You would think that would be an easy enough change but I had no end of problems. The process I used was as follows.

1. Uninstall Cat 12.1's and power off.
2. Removed 6850, Install 6950 and power on.
3. Install Cat 12.1's and reboot.

After the above "simple" changes several of my games wouldn't load and I had occosional corruption onscreen. At first I thought the new 6950 was faulty, but it was not. I took a full image of my Win7 build and then did a fresh OS install. Everything worked! Confuzzled, I reloaded my old Win7 image and began, removing and reinstalling programs to se what the cause was. After many hours of effort I found the solution.

Upon advice from another forum I performed the following slightly different process.

1. Uninstall Cat 12.1's and power off.
2. Download and run Driver Sweeper under Windows Safe mode and uninstall all AMD registry leftovers;
3. Install Cat 12.1's and reboot.

Everything worked perfect, and I only wasted about 12 hours of time and effort to get there.

I have never had these sort of issues with NVidia drivers. Why AMD cannot remove all their own system junk during a proper uninstall I do not know, but I do know they have casued me unnecessary problems and that counts a mark down towards future purchases.

So, to answer OP's question. YES, from my experience NVidia drivers are less buggy and better. Not being able to jump between same generation AMD cards is an extremely poor show from AMD.

I currently own a 6850, 6950 and GTX580.
 
Last edited:
I found Crossfire a pain to get working properly consistently, although this was during the 5800 series era so I've no idea if they've improved since. SLI's been a breeze. Single card stuff they've both been ok really.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom