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Drivers, there much diff between Nvidia and ATI?

Dave2150 said:
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.
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So your own experience speaks for everyone at that time?

It is all well documented as Rroff has said, you don't just get a reputation like ATI/AMD did if your drivers were fine.

Nowadays I'd actually put AMD slightly ahead of nVidia as they seem to release quality drivers whereas nVidia seems to be more about quantity and hitting those day 1 release AAA titles.
 
Installed a R7 250 in a family members htpc this week and used the latest crimsons driver, straight away I got a MOM.implimation error. I had to remove Crimson and download the last non Crimson driver to sort the issue and remove the error. My first experience with Crimson wasn't a positive one.
 
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Both have issues. I run Nvidia in my main rig due to a driver issue with WoW, Eyefinity and DX11 with Ati that they don't seem interested in fixing. However, I have had a lot of driver crashes recently from Nvidia with their latest WHQLs.
Neither is perfect so just pick the ones that don't have issues in the areas you care about. The aforementioned issue with WoW pushed me to Nvidia but I would have no problem recommending either vendor's cards or drivers.
 
My own experiences and builds have made me see that both can do a decent job but neither are perfect. No major issues personally with either, so go with what suits you best.
 
From a 290 to a 970 i have experienced no difference between them. they are both pretty solid.
 
Rroff said:
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 remember playing all the AAA titles on release, such as the original COD, BF1942, Vietnam, BF2 etc, all without issue. Certainly never had to have a specific driver installed for each game, or any nonsense like that.
 
Blackjack Davy said:
YES! Nvidia fanbois know everything. Nvidia fanbois are infalible. Nvidia fanbois are your god!

In short answer no, of course not.
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Same can be said exactly the other way round, If anything making yourself look a little bit of a AMD Fanboi ;)

Personally (this is my own personal findings and every ones will differ, I am not a "fanboi" and always put my cash in the best bang for buck hardware) I did have Major driver issues with our R9 390, This extended to AMD tech support trying to sort the problem and their answer was just run it on drivers that are 5 updates old. This left me a little bitter towards them as they then did not reply again after my last email still trying to resolve the issue. One of the reps on here then suggested replacing files in the driver files ect and i got them working but it was a complete and utter mess of a botch. Personally i have never has an issue any where near that size with Nvidia and they also update their drives much quicker when there is a known fault. I think AMD are miles better than they used to be however from recent experience Nvidia nip it in the bud. Again no fanboi as i own a 390 and have suggested to friends and people on here to buy one as its a amazing card for the money. However from owning both i find Nvidia easier to navigate and less issues, Not to say i have not had any issues but AMD are the only ones to have had issues that actually stop me gaming Nvidia have never been to that extreme.

But i would still recommend AMD cards as great value for money and would not dismiss buying another due to drivers.
 
I dunno the Nvidia FX series were a tad ropey with games like HL2. Having said that the TI4200,MX440 and various 6000 series cards seemed fine as was the 9500 PRO and 9600 PRO I had.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I dunno the Nvidia FX series were a tad ropey with games like HL2. Having said that the TI4200,MX440 and various 6000 series cards seemed fine as was the 9500 PRO and 9600 PRO I had.
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Blimey those where the days lol! MX440 was the first "component" that i brought for my PC before then i always brought PC's ready to go. that was back in 2002-2003 ish.

I remember playing some weird game that seemed like a female character dressed in leather with an arm for a gun im sure. was a military type game for the life of me cannot remember but that was what got me into it all.

You have a better memory than me remembering drivers back the the 440 days :D
 
Randall8686 said:
Blimey those where the days lol! MX440 was the first "component" that i brought for my PC before then i always brought PC's ready to go. that was back in 2002-2003 ish.

I remember playing some weird game that seemed like a female character dressed in leather with an arm for a gun im sure. was a military type game for the life of me cannot remember but that was what got me into it all.

You have a better memory than me remembering drivers back the the 440 days :D
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Bloodrayne??

I even had a Geforce Go440 in a gaming laptop at the time too.

The FX series was the reason why I tried an ATI card for the first time. Horrible hardware and terrible drivers - its one of the reasons TWIMTBP was started IIRC.
 
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Dave2150 said:
I remember playing all the AAA titles on release, such as the original COD, BF1942, Vietnam, BF2 etc, all without issue. Certainly never had to have a specific driver installed for each game, or any nonsense like that.
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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.
 
mark2410 said:
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?
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I'm sure they're both fine in general but it depends on your system. I had horrendous problems with Nvidia drivers for ages and never had a problem with ATI's. It still puts me off buying nvidia cards after the nightmares I had with their Vista drivers but both drivers should be fine for most people nowadays. Most people even seems fine with the betas these days.
 
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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You do realise that in this thread you are pretty much the only one who is saying "loads of people have issues with AMD" while the rest of it goes on saying there is no difference between AMD and Nvidia.

Those loads of people on holiday?
Give it a rest Roff.
 
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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