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I predict we're going to see dramatic improvements from AMD
- Thread starter Havana_UK
- Start date
I would say yes
Sorry, you've lost me!
Historically speaking AMD/ATi's drivers have been much more buggy/unstable than Nvidia's, better drivers is one of the benefits of Nvidia ownership that a lot of people use to self justify paying the extra money for the same performance (or on the other side of the coin, worse drivers is one of the trade offs of saving money with AMD).
Its not a thing of the past either, it took AMD roughly an entire year to fix a driver issue with the 7900 series that could cause complete system lockups in a few games (older ones that should not have been a problem). This forced a lot of gamers, myself included to have to switch to Nvidia (and going 7950B - GTX670 was not a cheap easy process with water cooling involved >.>).
I have bounced between AMD/Nvidia ownership a number of times since my beloved 3DFX bit the bullet, but I won't be going back to AMD anytime soon as once again my confidence in them has taken a heavy knock completely due to their driver issues
Soldato
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Historically speaking AMD/ATi's drivers have been much more buggy/unstable than Nvidia's, better drivers is one of the benefits of Nvidia ownership that a lot of people use to self justify paying the extra money for the same performance (or on the other side of the coin, worse drivers is one of the trade offs of saving money with AMD).
Its not a thing of the past either, it took AMD roughly an entire year to fix a driver issue with the 7900 series that could cause complete system lockups in a few games (older ones that should not have been a problem). This forced a lot of gamers, myself included to have to switch to Nvidia (and going 7950B - GTX670 was not a cheap easy process with water cooling involved >.>).
I have bounced between AMD/Nvidia ownership a number of times since my beloved 3DFX bit the bullet, but I won't be going back to AMD anytime soon as once again my confidence in them has taken a heavy knock completely due to their driver issues
This.
Coming from someone who was an avid AMD supported in the K7 / Athlon days, and someone who has owned 4 AMD GPU's over the years;
As much as some people want to love AMD for being cheaper, that cheapness does come with a cost.
I know I'm going to get insults thrown at me yet again for mentioning it, but I have never once had to do a complete re-install of windows that was itself a fresh install after a single drivers "upgrade" with nvidia... however doing this with AMD drivers has driven me to give up on them again, at quite some personal cost... how likely is it that I will forgive AMD a 3rd time.
At least with Nvidia drivers you can just reinstall the older drivers and they just work in my experience. The cost of AMD drivers is still too high in my opinion. And that's not to say that Nvidia drivers are flawless, they drop some clangers too from time to time, but usually the steps needed to get back to working are far fewer than with an equivalent AMD issue.
I totally get that some people use AMD and don't have any where near the problems I've had, that's great for them. However if the problem is PEBCAK then why do I never have problems with nvidia drivers.
And, when directly asked, would I inform someone else of my experiences with a particular brand of anything, let alone graphics cards, yes I would, though apparently that is totally unacceptable on this board.
I also know that some people have had problems with Nvidia drivers, again, I totally accept that if that is what they say. Good luck on the red side.
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Soldato
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Massive surge?
In what way?
in the hearts and minds of OCUK forum goers
certainly not company profits
in the hearts and minds of OCUK forum goers
certainly not company profits
... Or sales, or market share, or new hardware, or new deals for closer relationships with developers (etc). TressFX is about the only 'new' feature to have emerged from AMD this year.
I'm not trying to put AMD down or anything - they're maintaining a reasonable market share in 3rd party add-on cards (around 35%), and they arguably represent better value for money than Nvidia right now (as is usually the case). But it just seems odd that someone would characterise the last three months as a "massive surge"... A better description would be "business as usual".
Smart man.
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Soldato
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the reply you will get on here is that "this board" only cares about gaming cards, so the market split that includes lower end AIB's is not "relevant", no matter how much of the companies profit (or loss) it drives
Do you have any figures for high-end cards? I'd be interested to see what the current split is. I've only seen figures for overall add-in boards (and for total 'GPU' sales which Intel obviously dominate).
Soldato
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For now
And whilst you are fiddling about with drivers/caps/AB/Trixx and anything else you need to fiddle with, us Nvidia owners are deep into our games
Yawn...
Allow me to drop a grenade in here as i run in the opposite direction.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6857/amd-stuttering-issues-driver-roadmap-fraps
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6857/amd-stuttering-issues-driver-roadmap-fraps
Soldato
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No, I don't, the only split I can find is from Mercury research a few years ago and I'm not about to pay several thousand dollars for their latest report
Soldato
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Having bought graphics cards now for over 20yrs and having sampled pretty much all brands, sadly we are down to only Nvidia and Amd. In my opinion most of the nonsense regarding 'who is the best' is down to purchase justification and a touch of brand snobbery. There is nothing between both of them when it comes to drivers, one gets an edge, the other claws it back and so on and so forth. 'Nvidia has always had better drivers' is a myth perpetuated by Nvidia and nvidia owners. Its rubbish, they are both good and bad and I will continue to purchase my graphics cards based on performance and value for money, I dont care which brand that may be. Would love a Titan but hey.........
^^^ That is beautiful actually 
I've been looking into microstutter for years (I wrote a little program to quantify microstutter in FRAPS benchmarks a couple of years back). I'm glad to see that the hardware manufacturers are finally taking it seriously. The loss of a few FPS to get regular frame output is going to be well worth it for real-world gaming; the game will seem smoother even if the output FPS is slightly lower. For competitive benchmarking, where you only care about the raw number of frames rendered, it should obviously be disabled.
I've been looking into microstutter for years (I wrote a little program to quantify microstutter in FRAPS benchmarks a couple of years back). I'm glad to see that the hardware manufacturers are finally taking it seriously. The loss of a few FPS to get regular frame output is going to be well worth it for real-world gaming; the game will seem smoother even if the output FPS is slightly lower. For competitive benchmarking, where you only care about the raw number of frames rendered, it should obviously be disabled.