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Drivers, there much diff between Nvidia and ATI?

Ayahuasca said:
humbug it's quite clear he isn't talking about now, the issues years ago are all well documented and are the reason why AMD lived with a bad driver stigma for years.
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Same can be said for Nvidia, at least AMD never introduced a Driver that made your card go up in smoke, he doesn't want to talk about that.

The last time i had any sort of issues with Drivers worth mentioning was with a 6950, 2011, back when you could call them ATI.

The fact of the matter is for years now the drivers are pretty solid on both sides.
 
Rroff said:
Great if you've managed to avoid the issues - loads of people have been affected by thing like the mouse corruption bug (and other desktop elements) over several generations of AMD GPUs, a large proportion of AMD users experienced severe performance issues with for instance Farcry 2 on release resulting in an AMD hotfix eventually (which broke performance in older games for many people), etc. etc. which happened far more often on AMD with new game releases prior to 2009 than with nVidia by an order of magnitude and can be looked up on google, etc. as Ayahuasca said the reputation didn't come out of nowhere even if we accept that a good bit of it is people perpetuating a myth.
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Still remember HL2,which was of the most anticipated titles for years and the massive issues the FX series had with the game. Valve in the end had to downgrade the game to make it run fine on the FX cards. TWIMTBP program was instigated as a response to things like the HL2 problems IIRC.

I nothing but Nvidia cards by then and bought a 9500 PRO which ran games perfectly fine for 18 to 24 months until I replaced it with a 6 series Nvidia card.
 
humbug said:
Same can be said for Nvidia, at least AMD never introduced a Driver that made your card go up in smoke, he doesn't want to talk about that.

The last time i had any sort of issues with Drivers worth mentioning was with a 6950, 2011, back when you could call them ATI.

The fact of the matter is for years now the drivers are pretty solid on both sides.
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I'm not sure whose post you are reading and attributing to me but if infact you'd read my posts in this thread in detail I very much did mention those issues (i.e. 320.18 driver) :S but I also noted that those issues with GPUs in some cases almost literally exploding only affected a tiny tiny proportion of users (and infact the most recent one in subsequent testing was discovered to only happen with a toxic mixture of a specific nVidia driver plus a specific build of EVGA precision combined with either malware that used the GPU for mining, certain bitcoin mining clients or some other software that did similar GPU compute). You'd also notice that I said the days when ATI/AMD drivers were truly deserving of their reputation was previous to approximately 2009 never mind 2011. I also mentioned that through much of 2015 AMD had been producing substantially better quality drivers and if anything nVidia have been the ones where the standards have been dropping of late.

Even AMD in their recent PR statements related to recent driver improvement programs admit that their older track record (and ATI before them) left something to be desired.

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Still remember HL2,which was of the most anticipated titles for years and the massive issues the FX series had with the game. Valve in the end had to downgrade the game to make it run fine on the FX cards. TWIMTBP program was instigated as a response to things like the HL2 problems IIRC.

I nothing but Nvidia cards by then and bought a 9500 PRO which ran games perfectly fine for 18 to 24 months until I replaced it with a 6 series Nvidia card.
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The FX series was horrid - I only made it through that period due to the special edition Gainward 5900XT which being a second revision card after the 5800 ultra had some of the later fixes and being a special edition card could overclock to make up the pathetic performance of most of the other FX cards :S

That isn't really a driver thing though.
 
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Only major issue I had with AMD when I had a 290X was the HDMI audio driver, had to keep rolling it back to older versions, not had a problem with my TI, yet.
 
Rroff said:
I'm not sure whose post you are reading and attributing to me but if infact you'd read my posts in this thread in detail I very much did mention those issues (i.e. 320.18 driver) :S but I also noted that those issues with GPUs in some cases almost literally exploding only affected a tiny tiny proportion of users (and infact the most recent one in subsequent testing was discovered to only happen with a toxic mixture of a specific nVidia driver plus a specific build of EVGA precision combined with either malware that used the GPU for mining, certain bitcoin mining clients or some other software that did similar GPU compute). You'd also notice that I said the days when ATI/AMD drivers were truly deserving of their reputation was previous to approximately 2009 never mind 2011. I also mentioned that through much of 2015 AMD had been producing substantially better quality drivers and if anything nVidia have been the ones where the standards have been dropping of late.

Even AMD in their recent PR statements related to recent driver improvement programs admit that their older track record (and ATI before them) left something to be desired.
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Ok my bad :)
 
Having owned both AMD and Nvidia cards, I'd say my experience with both for single GPU setups has been the same - rarely ever problematic. I've only had one crossfire rig, and the only issues I had with that were related to timely crossfire support for new games. I've never owned a machine with SLI.
 
Rroff said:
The FX series was horrid - I only made it through that period due to the special edition Gainward 5900XT which being a second revision card after the 5800 ultra had some of the later fixes and being a special edition card could overclock to make up the pathetic performance of most of the other FX cards :S

That isn't really a driver thing though.
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It was also a software issue - its why Valve had to poke around with separate paths for FX cards in HL2. Nvidia should have done more on their side on the driver level,to limit the fallout from their own non standard DX9 implementation.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
It was also a software issue - its why Valve had to poke around with separate paths for FX cards in HL2. Nvidia should have done more on their side on the driver level,to limit the fallout from their own non standard DX9 implementation.
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Don't think there was much they could do software wise (atleast for the original cards) - it was about that time the nvidia stinger device existed which was basically CPU emulation of those kind of features - I'd have assumed they'd have rolled that kind of stuff into the drivers for the normal render path if it could be sorted that way.
 
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