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Drivers, there much diff between Nvidia and ATI?

mark2410

mark2410

mark2410

Associate
Joined
2 Aug 2004
Posts
929
yeah yeah i still call them ATI when it comes to gpu stuff

anyway so, having had a ton of ball ache because of ATI drivers with windows 10. so far ive had zero probs with Nvidia but..... ive only one machine with an nvidia GPU everything else is ATI. however at this point im thinking next gpu might well be an Nvidia ta save future pain but a sample of 1 isnt really convincing.

so, i know that for years Nvidia peeps moaned that ATI drivers were terrible but is tehre really much of anything between them these days?
 
Had amd card(s) for a few years - even ran crossfire for a while, only swapped to nvida last year for the 980ti and over all my experience has been much the same, cant say either one was a worse experience over the other.
 
Honestly there is next to no difference. I have had issues with nvidia drivers on win 10, nothing major and this latest version seems fine. My mate in turn has had issues with the current amd drivers whereas the older version was fine. Sometimes drivers are bad but often it is a conflict with another program or botched install. Either way I wouldn't pick a single card based on drivers unless you have historic issues on your PC with amd or nvidia.
 
Single card system I would say there is hardly any difference - you'll get the occasional game that one or the other card dislikes for whatever reasons.

Dual+ cards, if pushed I would say historically nVidia have had the edge, but of recent times both are pretty shoddy when it comes to titles working on launch day.
 
No, not really.

There used to be perhaps, but not any more, especially for single cards.
 
mark2410 said:
so, i know that for years Nvidia peeps moaned that ATI drivers were terrible but is tehre really much of anything between them these days?
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Urban myths.

And a trip to NVIDIA Drivers thread, you will see many people with pitchforks and torches cursing the Nvidia drivers for months, regarding broken stuff. From gsync to you name it.

Both have issues, but all in all are the same. I would say vote to what you want and what's cheaper for what it provides.

I mainly had Nvidia cards for most of the time. However of the last 15 months having switched to AMD, and I am happy. Both 295X2 and R9 Nano are serving me well.

Next gen who knows. Depends what each one is offering, and at what price.

Having also a small distaste for Nvidia for no other reason other than the whole scandal with the GTX970, which was acceptable to be brushed under the carpet instead of throwing rotten vegetables and eggs at them.
However if AMD had done the same, everyone would be up on their arms, wanting heads to roll.
 
Just be greatfull that your whatever card you get the drivers aren't supported by Creative!

I can't say I spend my time messing around in the drivers so long as my games are stable and work I'm happy. I've owned both Geforce and Radeon carss for years and years now and both set of drivers have been good. I would say I prefer the Geforce interface its better laid out and easier to find things and setup custom profiles. Saying that Catalyst has been overhauled recently with AMD bringing a modern look and looks the bees knees.

If I were you just worry about price/performance.
 
Totally agree with most on here. Much of a muchness these days between Nvidia and AMD as far as drivers go. They have good and bad days on either side of the fence. Luckily they both have dedicated users in these forums who will help out anyone that has a problem.
:)
 
Both have their batches of issues. I reduced the chances of issues in the past by not having CCC installed since i only ever run single card. But the new Control panel seems fine.

And with AMD's driver overhead improvements lately, its all better than ever for AMD cards.
 
Both the same really. I've owned both Nvidia Cards & AMD. Never really seemed to have any issues. Currently on an R9 390 on the latest 16.1 drivers No issues so far the new modern look in the control panel is pretty smart imo :)
 
Historically ATI/AMD deserved the reputation they got - that largely stopped being true around the start of 2009 or so. As a gross generalisation nVidia have typically had the better drivers in the period since but its been a few years since AMD drivers actually sucked. nVidia had 1-2 negative headline making drivers in that time but the users actually affected by those issues were a tiny minority - while there were some odd patches like around the 195 and 320.xx releases where some nVidia drivers were a bit sub-par there was always a recent driver that worked fine even if you might sometimes lose some small performance optimisations in the more recent drivers - in contrast to AMD where if there were problems this often meant you had poor game support for a month or 2 which is one of the most important metrics for me when comparing the 2 on driver quality. Strangely enough this is something people seem to have very short memories about :S

Sadly nVidia seem to be on a bit of a decline at the moment the 350 series onwards seem to be causing quite a few issues at one time or another.

EDIT: Also AMD seemed to be holding themselves to higher quality drivers (and infact even the AMD statements on this are somewhat critical of their older efforts) through the 2nd half of 2015 but seem to have eased off a bit more recently - hopefully its something they pick up again through 2016.
 
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Rroff said:
Historically ATI/AMD deserved the reputation they got - that largely stopped being true around the start of 2009 or so. As a gross generalisation nVidia have typically had the better drivers in the period since but its been a few years since AMD drivers actually sucked. nVidia had 1-2 negative headline making drivers in that time but the users actually affected by those issues were a tiny minority - while there were some odd patches like around the 195 and 320.xx releases where some nVidia drivers were a bit sub-par there was always a recent driver that worked fine even if you might sometimes lose some small performance optimisations in the more recent drivers - in contrast to AMD where if there were problems this often meant you had poor game support for a month or 2 which is one of the most important metrics for me when comparing the 2 on driver quality. Strangely enough this is something people seem to have very short memories about :S

Sadly nVidia seem to be on a bit of a decline at the moment the 350 series onwards seem to be causing quite a few issues at one time or another.

EDIT: Also AMD seemed to be holding themselves to higher quality drivers (and infact even the AMD statements on this are somewhat critical of their older efforts) through the 2nd half of 2015 but seem to have eased off a bit more recently - hopefully its something they pick up again through 2016.
Click to expand...

That's just wrong.

I've owned AMD cards since 2003 - a 9800pro. The drivers then were perfectly fine, as stable as the NVIDIA cards I had at the time.
 
Not just about stability - people seem to have quite short memories when it comes to things like driver release schedules for new games, etc. (I can quote umpteen patch notes from games around that period where the developer coded in workarounds instead of making people wait til ATI/AMD caught up) and how long often a good proportion of ATI/AMD owners would have to wait for a properly compatible driver for a new game or have to swap between 2-3 different versions depending on what game they were wanting to play.

Was also about that time I was working in a job that involved building and supporting/fixing PCs and the number of times we'd have to deal with ATI/AMD driver issues far exceeded nVidia (which I doubt is true today).

EDIT: Hopefully someone can remember which review site used to do the yearly driver reviews looking back at the issues and performance increases from both sides over the previous year from around there which would back me up :S
 
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I haven't owned an Nvidia card since the 8800GT but I can't say I've not had any major problems with AMD drivers since then. I think one of my graphics cards has died since it has dropped off my device manager but then the computer is getting on a bit and could do with a bit of an upgrade.

Then again I never had any problems with the Nvidia drivers either. I did hear that there were some problems with Nvidias drivers when Windows 10 was released but I've heard that has since been fixed.

When I next upgrade my computer I'm going to be switching to Nvidia for various reasons and I don't expect to have many problems with that either.
 
Having used both Sli and X fire I can say there is no difference. That being said up until 15.12 catalyst you could just force X fire for games that did not support it brilliant feature which meant you did not have to make a Afr friendly profile. Wish they reintroduced it and hope nvidea do the same with sli.
 
a lot has been said about amd drivers of old but ive used ati/amd since the 3870 and I would say the number of times ive had any problems is 2 that I can remember, probably the same as when ive used NVidia, so my thoughts on does it make any difference to use NVidia or amd would be no there about the same
 
no; I've had issues with both.....but watched quality of Nvidia drivers drop lately and AMD has really seemed to pick up their game.......whether it stays that way we'll see; but difference no...there isn't
 
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