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Is software and support a big part of your decision when choosing a card?

My previous cards are as follows.

7950GT
4870
7850
7950.

I've never consciously had a problem with any drivers. I've never ran a multi GPU set up though, so that's probably a big reason why.

As such, software support doesn't feature highly on my list, as I've been happy with AMDs sub quality drivers for my last 3 cards.

Feel bad for the guys waiting for there freesync though.
 
Definitely software support and drivers, especially Linux and openGL. For that reasons I have never purchased an AMD card in my life because their Linux drivers have sucked balls since dinasuars roamed the planet.
 
Tough question to answer, I've not brought an AMD card for years and I've never had an issue with NVidia drivers.

So I guess yes? but its not in stopping me buying an AMD card, but stopping me not buy an NVidia card.

That may change with the 390x, assuming all the facts in the 390x thread are true in that it will have 500% performance increase over everything, is hand delivered by Scarlett Johansson and Emilia Clarke and comes with a IOU and a direct line to God.

Still... every time I look in the AMD driver thread it doesn't fill me with confidence.
 
software support I couldn't care less about the best software for your GPU's comes free and not from the graphics card maker (nvid/amd) Geforce experience I can take or leave but I don't know where I would be without MSI afterburner, GPU-z, and Nvidia inspector (not made by nvidia)

driver support however is extremely important if I had to wait 4 months for a brand new driver to support some games I'd be cheesed off AMD really need to pull their finger out, a driver a month or every 45days would go a long way even if its just adding profiles for games. by the time 4 months has gone by those games have already been completed so it would have been nice to have the performance gains on day one.

Marine-RX179 said:
I enjoy gaming as well as watching anime/movies/TV series, and I find AMD's Resolution Enhancement's upscaling feature significantly improve the quality of the videos. I don't think Nvidia software/driver has this or similar feature?
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Nvidia does that too, I can upscale OR downsample movies
 
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PayneUK said:
Tough question to answer, I've not brought an AMD card for years and I've never had an issue with NVidia drivers.

So I guess yes? but its not in stopping me buying an AMD card, but stopping me not buy an NVidia card.

That may change with the 390x, assuming all the facts in the 390x thread are true in that it will have 500% performance increase over everything, is hand delivered by Scarlett Johansson and Emilia Clarke and comes with a IOU and a direct line to God.

Still... every time I look in the AMD driver thread it doesn't fill me with confidence.
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It's not a tough question to answer man. It's kinda like that skit in Viz with the kid who has a moped that runs on monkey semen.

It was fast and looked awesome, but where do you find monkey semen?

Hardware without good software is useless. This has been proven so many times over the years so I'll give a few examples.

Physx PPU. This worked for what? two games. No one supported it so it was sold to Nvidia and integrated onto their GPUs. IMO it was a waste of money.

Lucid Hydra (two revisions of). Ever heard of it? I doubt it. It was a chip integrated on certain motherboards that allowed more than one different brand GPU to work with others. As I predicted Lucid couldn't keep up with the drivers and it died a horrid death.

Xeon Phi. Fancy a PCIE device that adds 60 plus cores to your rig? no, me neither. Again, no software. You can pick them up for peanuts on the auction site because they were a total flop.

Intel Itanium. Great idea, no one could be arsed, in the grave it goes.

And most notably - Voodoo SLI. 3DFX made cheaper cores than Nvidia so could offer them in mutliple configs for far less money. IE - just before they died they made the 5000 series with two GPUs per card and the fabled 6000 series with four GPUs.

No one supported it. Had they? they'd have kicked Nvidia's arse but once again, no software support no dice.

I bought two Voodoo 2s and linked them up and added a 3Dlabs Oxygen as the main GPU. Know how many games supported it? none that I know of. Total waste of money.

Just look how long it took Nvidia to take that tech, refine it and get support for it (SLI that is). It took them about a decade, and that's only two cards. Three and four? are still not officially supported in game code so the drivers have to bodge it which is far from ideal.
 
Software and support for me is important. I suppose if there wasn't any software or support when you but that nice shiny GPU what use would it be? Useless mainly I reckon.

But at the same time both statements are important at the same time.
 
Yes it is important to me, if i've been waiting to play a new game then I want to have a good experience on release, it's bad enough when developers release stuff that needs a day 1 patch, sometimes not even fixing issues, but no excuse not to have optimised drivers ready - power means nothing if it runs like a turd
 
What typically happens when a card is sid tobe significantly faster it get 12FPS at 4K ultra settings but the competitor gets 10fps, so it must be 20% faster right?

The. At 1080p or 1200p which most people game at tooth get 80-100fPS with 5-10FPS, with different games doing better on some card or the other, so it makes absolutely no difference. Hence driver support, software support, game support is so critical.


The only time the preface really matters is if it allows you to change settings or there is significant performance difference, e.g one card does 35-45 in game and another does 75-90 then the fater card will likely be more playable.
 
PayneUK said:
...That may change with the 390x, assuming all the facts in the 390x thread are true in that it will have 500% performance increase over everything, is hand delivered by Scarlett Johansson and Emilia Clarke and comes with a IOU and a direct line to God...
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500% ??

Im buying 4.
 
4Ci9Iou.gif
 
I moved over from amd 5870 to a 670 all because of the drivers/software issues I was having. Mind you if amd would have released the ghz drivers sooner I would have gone 7970. But small things like custom game profiles and big things like windows reinstall after updating ccc drivers swaded me to NV.
 
Good driver support influences my gpu buying decisions a lot. As far as I'm concerned, both AMD and nvidia should always provide drivers that work well for single cards and at least 2 way crossfire/sli in time for all big releases. If crossfire or sli are unable to work properly due to some inherent limitation of the game engine (as per cod:aw for instance) then this is something I'm willing to forgive.
 
Not a big issue for me personally. I have had several green cards and several red cards(crossfire too) and never really had any big issues. Had minor problems but they have generally been fixed at some point. :)

So long as the hardware itself is up to scratch I can wait for driver/software fixes.
 
Final8y said:
You cant of been in to PCs long at all, 2 weeks at most and have never visited the official NV forum.
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I built my first PC in August last year so I haven't been into PC long at all really you're right. I built it with an R9 290 and came to realisethat AMD users get the short end of the stick in most cases. Nvidia users just feel more accounted for. Even games that are AMD optimized still run well on Nvidia. I've never visited the Nvidia Forum because I haven't felt the need to yet becuase most things just work.

As you said though, I'm relativley new to the whole thing so my opion doesn't hold much weight or merit. My expeierence is of someone who came into PC gaming completely indifferent to manufacturers.
 
PrinceNelson said:
I built my first PC in August last year so I haven't been into PC long at all really you're right. I built it with an R9 290 and came to realisethat AMD users get the short end of the stick in most cases. Nvidia users just feel more accounted for. Even games that are AMD optimized still run well on Nvidia. I've never visited the Nvidia Forum because I haven't felt the need to yet becuase most things just work.

As you said though, I'm relativley new to the whole thing so my opion doesn't hold much weight or merit. My expeierence is of someone who came into PC gaming completely indifferent to manufacturers.
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Right! so really you can only speak for yourself as you are clearly not aware of others complaints or non complaints of the things you mentioned which goes for both NV and AMD.
 
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