ATI should learn from Nvidia

[Freddie1980]

Well it's to be assumed considering nVidia are a much bigger company than ATi with a lot more money and far more resources.

ATI are brand not a company and AMD is a huge company, both have about the same market capitalisation and how many people do you need in a driver team? I would say it's more to do with who's being hired as opposed to how many are being employed. Given that AMD churns out regular WHQL driver releases every month whilst Nvidia's WHQL drivers can range from 2 a month or 1 a quarter I find speculating on numbers hard to fathom.

 

[kylew]

You're right it doesn't matter, however you're saying something on the Internet that you can't backup. Only assumptions.

If we're gonna talk about things being correct, do please take note ^.

As for "Not being able" to back it up, I didn't say I can't, but what's the need to, when as I said, we all know nVidia is a much larger company than ATi?

 

[kylew]

ATI are brand not a company and AMD is a huge company, both have about the same market capitalisation and how many people do you need in a driver team? I would say it's more to do with who's being hired as opposed to how many are being employed. Given that AMD churns out regular WHQL driver releases every month whilst Nvidia's WHQL drivers can range from 2 a month or 1 a quarter I find speculating on numbers hard to fathom.

Well as I said, it doesn't really matter how many people work on the drivers, I don't believe ATi to have "bad" drivers like the misinformed like to claim. Driver wise, ATi and nVidia are as good and bad as eachother.

As for ATi being a brand, not really. Radeon is a brand, ATi is a company owned by a larger company (AMD). It's like saying Eidos is a "brand" because it's owned by Square-Enix, it's still a company in its own right.

Before AMD, ATi was a company, and they still are.

But yeah, it doesn't really matter how many people are on the driver team.

 

[jigger]

It's all about customer service though. A graphics card is more than the physical card, and the R&D that goes into it. Just because ATI's driver department is maybe smaller than Nvidia's doesn't mean that they shouldn't work hard to give customers a good user experience.

I don't think anyone can question ATI's work ethic or customer support, and in terms of actual product performance and R&D ATI are currently quite literally years a head of Nvidia IMO. From a driver interface point of view things are a little difficult to quantifie. I actually feel the Nvidia driver/software packages are full of needles bloatwere. Some very nice looking well designed bloatware, but bloatware non the less. The first thing I usually do is go though and remove a load rubbish I don't need or want and that's not really adding to my user experience if I honest, but I can see how this might make things a little simpler of the guy who has bought into the whole Nvidia, CUDA, FizzX, 3D VR surround sound Viking helmet thing, as he can just setup all his kit and simply be walked through the whole set up process with minimal user input in a nice one size fits all bundle.

I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia's driver team were bigger than the whole of ATi's staff.

That's probably quite an accurate comparison. I cant find any actual numbers but I remember someone from Nvidia talking about how they could produce a better driver, quicker due to size of the team compared with ATI. I think it was one of the H E X U S interviews.

 

[jigger]

NVM

 

[coupe69]

The way I see it, it's the whole package when you buy a GFX card and currently compared to nvidia ATI's package is inferior.

I've been saying this for ages now, you've only got to look at the long threads you get when ATi release their latest cats to realise that whilst they make good, fast, cheap cards their drivers and/or control panel are not quite up to scratch.

Check the sticky out at the top of this very forum "ATI Radeon Guide and Catalyst Driver Updates", where's the Nvidia sticky? this says to me one of two things,

either A: this forum is a tad biased towards ATi hardware or B: Nvidia drivers and control panel simply work well enough to not warrant having a sticky.

The simple fact of the matter is if you buy a Nvidia card like Raven said you get the whole package. Fair enough some of you might say "we don't need PhysX, 3D, Cuda etc etc" but for me having a pc is all about being able to turn as much eye candy on as possible.

 

[KillBoY_UK]

i personally find the nvida drivers easier to use as well i just hate how nvidia are trying to cripple ati with physix and just genrally buyin game makers to make things run better on nvida so far play to ati for making a better all round card just imrpove your drivers please as you are capable of big things like eyeinfinty and the 5xxx series so why not work that little extra on drivers ?

this , i do prefer nVidia layout to control panel of there drivers and ive never had a issue with them , ATI's are not bad in that regard but could be far better and i have had issue with the drivers (nothing I've not been able to fix) but I am a happy Radeon 5850 owner

 

[darren.head]

I bet AMD see ATI as a Brand!
Both sides have been doing this stuff since the days of the Riva 128 and rage pro so they should be able to get it right by now. Their products shouldn't need workarounds they should just work!
That goes for both sides.

 

[kylew]

I've been saying this for ages now, you've only got to look at the long threads you get when ATi release their latest cats to realise that whilst they make good, fast, cheap cards their drivers and/or control panel are not quite up to scratch.

Check the sticky out at the top of this very forum "ATI Radeon Guide and Catalyst Driver Updates", where's the Nvidia sticky? this says to me one of two things,

either A: this forum is a tad biased towards ATi hardware or B: Nvidia drivers and control panel simply work well enough to not warrant having a sticky.

The simple fact of the matter is if you buy a Nvidia card like Raven said you get the whole package. Fair enough some of you might say "we don't need PhysX, 3D, Cuda etc etc" but for me having a pc is all about being able to turn as much eye candy on as possible.

Well we know nVidia release drivers less frequently, so any driver updates that cause problems, will crop up, less often.

It doesn't take much effort to find thousands of posts on other forums from people complaining about nVidia drivers having problems.

I will maintain that they're as bad as eachother, because I think they are. Any nVidia cards I've had, no issues, any ATi cards, again no issues.

 

[kylew]

this , i do prefer nVidia layout to control panel of there drivers and ive never had a issue with them , ATI's are not bad in that regard but could be far better and i have had issue with the drivers (nothing I've not been able to fix) but I am a happy Radeon 5850 owner

I keep saying though that drivers and control panel aren't the same thing. If you interact with it, then it's the control panel, not the drivers.

 

[RavenXXX2]

I think we can all agree that driver wise ATI an Nvidia are mostly comparable " except in the muti-gpu department, nvidia owns that area " but Nvidia produce way better software to support their cards, ATI must do better.