QA Consultants concludes that AMD has the most stable graphics driver in the industry.

[humbug]

See post 164

Ah ok, thx

 

[Gerard]

The key phrase there is "without messing with anything amd looks more vibrant "
AMD by default uses a higher vibrancy. that isn't necessarily better image quality. If you are professional working with images you will be using a much lower vibrancy, contrast and screen brightness.
You can tweak that in the Nvidia control panel to match AMD, but it is purely a personal preference.

It is like al;l the TVs in the show room, with contrast and saturation ramped way up. Looks good to the layman but anyone who really cares about image quality will be turning that right down. I have my monitors calibrated for photographic work. They are pretty dull strangely dim with the brightness right down. But, it makes editing photos much easier.

Maybe, but for gaming amd cards generally give the game a better look with their default settings. It was very noticeable to me back when i used to play TF2, my gtx 295 setup made the game look overly dull whereas my 6970's made it look more cartoon like which is the look they went for.

 

[fadingfool]

Maybe, but for gaming amd cards generally give the game a better look with their default settings. It was very noticeable to me back when i used to play TF2, my gtx 295 setup made the game look overly dull whereas my 6970's made it look more cartoon like which is the look they went for.

Noticed this when I switched from an R9-270 to the 970 - the nVidia colours' were washed-out until I had a play in the settings.

 

[heatonpkmassive]

Maybe, but for gaming amd cards generally give the game a better look with their default settings. It was very noticeable to me back when i used to play TF2, my gtx 295 setup made the game look overly dull whereas my 6970's made it look more cartoon like which is the look they went for.

I would agree with this, I remember my 5850 looked better than my mate's 285.

 

[D.P.]

Maybe, but for gaming amd cards generally give the game a better look with their default settings. It was very noticeable to me back when i used to play TF2, my gtx 295 setup made the game look overly dull whereas my 6970's made it look more cartoon like which is the look they went for.

You just have to understand that this is a personal preference and easily changed if you prefer over-saturated colors

 

[4K8KW10]

You just have to understand that this is a personal preference and easily changed if you prefer over-saturated colors

Higher digital vibrance makes low-PPI displays, which all non-4K displays are, look somehow more acceptable. It makes the larger pixels not that annoying.

 

[tommybhoy]

But AMD is more stable

But you wouldn't have a clue how stable NV is


Last real issues I've had with NV drivers was the 350 branch with the TDR bug, they did get it sorted but it took a wee while, I don't install every driver released however and have most of the bloat installed as I've got a few Shields dotted about the house so need all the baggage-but ultimately even though the bloat installed, it's just as solid as the AMD drivers I used previous to moving over years ago(minus the ~4 month+ lack of any AMD drivers with game profile updates at all when they were really, really struggling for cash-imo it really was squeaky bum time and touching cloth for AMD.)

Some users discovered the 970 vram issue because they were loading up their 980's that they also owned in the exact same instance and didn't exhibit stutter, I had 970's and ultimately loved them to bits but was glad they discovered the problems.

Once NV addressed the vram usage issue in drivers which mostly restricted it to run under 3.75Gb(it categorically did stutter in some vram heavy titles-Lotr SOM was a great indicator of the stutter)because ultimately, I was left with a better performing product after ramgate.

Once they worked on the driver, the stutter was gone.

Which full credit to NV(after trying to dupe reviewers and the PC community with dodgy spec sheets) they did put the work in to improve and give a much better end experience post ramgate.

So whether or not there are any claims over whose better/stable, like when I used AMD, I'll go off of my own experience over some one else's claims.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

Enjoyable discussion none the less though.

Lets be honest, AMD/Nvidia will fix their drivers at some future point. But it's good to know where they stand now.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

 

[EastCoastHandle]

^^^
He clearly understood what MS Crash does changes. He explained that it changes resolution, placing the computer to sleep, waking up from sleep, screen rotations and more. Yet, because no games were used it's not a fair test?

Can he or is he able to differentiate a test suite for the OS vs gaming benchmark test? Because he confuses the 2. It's clear he would prefer, by implying, to see benchmark results. However, performance isn't the metric here, it's stability.

That was a very clunky way of implying he didn't like nvidia to be exposed in this fashion IMO.

The Tests:

The team at QA Consultants ran each of the systems through multiple instances of CRASH, a four-hour automated program in Microsoft’s Hardware Lab Kit (“HLK”). CRASH contains a variety of graphical functions across DirectX 9, 10 and 11 including changes in resolution, color settings, screen rotations, color overlays, sleeping and waking up. Each system ran the four hour CRASH test, non-stop 6 times per day back-to-back for 12 days (for a total of 72 runs per system). Completing the entire four-hour CRASH routine would be considered a pass. Any application crashes, hangs or “blue screens of death” would be considered an immediate fail. The overall stability score was derived from the total number of passes divided by the total number of attempts. For simplicity, the results for all AMD and Nvidia systems respectively were aggregated into a single score for each of their drivers.

https://radeon.com/worldsmoststabledriver/

To those who believe it wasn't enough benchmarks please remember this isn't a gaming performance review. It's a stability test. The test they used was more than adequate to get a measurement from. Furthermore, you would never loop a game in order to find how stable a driver is in win10.

 

[AlphaOne]

He clearly understood what MS Crash does changes. He explained that it changes resolution, placing the computer to sleep, waking up from sleep, screen rotations and more. Yet, because no games were used it's not a fair test?

Yes because that's one area of driver stability, the other area is reliability during gaming, crashes, flickering, visual artifact .. etc. And to a gamer crashes are more likely to occur while gaming anyway. For example, a while ago AMD released a driver that wasn't able to run dozens of DX9 and DX8 games, If that driver was tested through Microsoft Crash kit it would have passed general stability but not gaming stability. Hence it wouldn't be really stable at all for gaming.

And Once more, wrong driver for Quadros, mismatched cards by provided AMD, AND a test that doesn't represent gaming = not useful material. The conditions of the test has been anything but fair.

 

[zophiel]

well done alphaone you have done your job of 16 spamming posts how good nvidia drivers are. you can give it up now....

as for the main point of the thread, both sets of companies drivers have good and bad runs. it just how quick they can fix the errors to make them work right.

i use both sets and generally they cause no major issues. the last ones that crashed for me were the nvdia ones on the 1080 i have in the kids pc, this was not very often either.

The wifes pc runs a vega56 and that has moments of crashing every so often to.

 

[Rroff]

placing the computer to sleep, waking up from sleep

Would have been nice to know what the last complete part of a test before a crash was and a look into why - for instance certain configurations persistently have problems with sleep/hibernate for whatever reason while an otherwise apparently identical system works fine (as can be seen in the general hardware and Windows sections of this forum :s).

I don't think these tests are in depth enough in their analysis to be any metric of driver stability without more of a breakdown of the results and looking into the why of failings to see if they were actually a driver issue or something else - rather a pathetic attempt for a professional company but I guess they were only engaged to produce superficial results and/or someone wasn't prepared to pay for what indepth testing costs.

 

[heatonpkmassive]

both sets of companies drivers have good and bad runs. it just how quick they can fix the errors to make them work right.

i use both sets and generally they cause no major issues.

You have to support either green or red on this thread, you can't be sitting on the fence like that

 

[TNA]

You have to support either green or red on this thread, you can't be sitting on the fence like that

lol

 

[4K8KW10]

Eurogamer are trolls

The best value option for AMD fans is the RX 580, which boasts better performance than the GTX 1060 but at a slightly higher cost, with a higher CPU overhead in DX11 titles and not-as-robust driver performance. By and large, it's still a great product though,

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-07-21-best-graphics-cards-2018-7001

muhhaha

 

[Rroff]

I'm assuming from the wording they are talking about in contrast to nVidia's DX11 hacks rather than driver stability.

 

[4K8KW10]

I'm more worried about their wording which calls potential RX 580 buyers AMD fans. Really and why?
While all others should be recommended GeForce of any type - is as if there is no contest anymore...

 

[mmj_uk]

It's not that shocking although I don't think I've ever bought a GPU having thought about who has the least crashy driver. The tests above wouldn't have picked it up but the biggest issue with AMD drivers is that once you go outside the AAA titles that they put a lot of effort into optimising for you tend to get more graphical glitches and/or sub-optimal performance in lesser known titles.

 

[bru]

I'm more worried about their wording which calls potential RX 580 buyers AMD fans. Really and why?
While all others should be recommended GeForce of any type - is as if there is no contest anymore...

Well in the context of the article Nvidia wins all the best card awards, except the best AMD card ones, so in that sense you would need to be an AMD fan to pick the 580.

Now whether you agree with their findings or not is a separate and entirely debatable point.