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QA Consultants concludes that AMD has the most stable graphics driver in the industry.
- Thread starter shankly1985
- Start date
Soldato
Yep. AMD Drivers were greatly improve around early 2015, and especially 2016 with the new GUI and all the tweaking. fps cap that actually works, easy settings per game, very good overclocking facilities and no crash even at extreme unstable overclock, when Nvidia just hangs the system requiring hard reboot.
Also usually they fix thing fast. Except if is related to game engine, and was the reason didn't bought Vega 64 until two weeks ago. (Clausewitz engine needed major patch for all PDX games before AMD put a fix on their drivers)
But. Better late then never?
Since September 2016 geforce drivers, a series of monitors including the XL2730Z cannot operate properly with an Nvidia card. The same drivers that broke animated GIF and effectively even Facebook browsing, and took 5 releases of new Geforce drivers in 9 days to fix the issue animated gif bug and consequent crashes on other things. But the issue with the monitors not sorted....
The issues added to those drivers, makes the screen flicker at 144hz, and there is no sound over DP & HDMI. (before September 2016 drivers there is no such issue).
The thread with people complaining was 400 pages long by October 2016 in the geforce forums. (haven't looked at it since). And is not resolved even up to two weeks ago when I sold the 1080Ti.
Same monitor (XL2730Z) and Fury Nano, Intel IGP (6700K & 8600K), FuryX, Vega 64 have no issue to produce sound over the DP nor flickering at 144hz.
That about the quality of drivers..... (as I said not all monitors have this issue, only some 144hz ones).
Associate
Associate
A rather unusual comparison..
Associate
Good that their driver team is constantly improving their product. Their drivers right back to my 9800 Pro, X800GTO, X1950Pro, 3870, 4850, 5850, right through to the 290 I ended up having were always good for me.
Or perhaps they just see value in 'educating' the consumer.
Soldato
There's only 2 companies who would commission such an evaluation, people are going to find complaints regardless of who pays for it because both have vested interests in the results.
It's good to be cautious, but it's not good to outright dismiss it because you don't like the result. Anecdotally I've had more issues with AMD drivers, but that can be attributed more to the fact I was using crossfire at the time and I've had more experience on AMD products -- but equally I can say in the last 2-3 years I've had zero AMD issues and 1 nVidia issue, which would make them 100% worse
The GUI is definitely far superior on the AMD side too.
It's good to be cautious, but it's not good to outright dismiss it because you don't like the result. Anecdotally I've had more issues with AMD drivers, but that can be attributed more to the fact I was using crossfire at the time and I've had more experience on AMD products -- but equally I can say in the last 2-3 years I've had zero AMD issues and 1 nVidia issue, which would make them 100% worse
The GUI is definitely far superior on the AMD side too.
Associate
That would be infinitely worse percentage-wise Howling
I generally feel AMDs drivers are solid and much prefer the overall package, but as almost everyone is pointing out... Commissioned by AMD kinda makes it a PR excersise and fairly pointless.
I generally feel AMDs drivers are solid and much prefer the overall package, but as almost everyone is pointing out... Commissioned by AMD kinda makes it a PR excersise and fairly pointless.
This, of course, is very false - any company can do it - starting with AMD as the obvious because they want the myth busted, then Intel, then Apple, then such companies like HP, Dell, Microsoft, Sony, Matrox.
Even you can do it, I can do it, those guys with the YouTube videos - AdoredTV.
BTW, AdoredTV can focus on such surveys, not on meaningless, complex and heavy explanations why chiplets are better economy-on-scale than monolithic dies, meh...
The first problem is, how many studies did AMD pay for that showed Nvidia had better drivers but they didn't publish?
Second problem looking at the report the methodology looks lousy and I doubt there is any statistical effects there. Some of the finding just don;t make much sense and would indicate hardware issues rather than a driver.
I think the take home story is AMD drivers have finally caught up with nvidia so if you have issues now it is mostly due to bad luck and badly developed games. That is great for consumers.
Second problem looking at the report the methodology looks lousy and I doubt there is any statistical effects there. Some of the finding just don;t make much sense and would indicate hardware issues rather than a driver.
I think the take home story is AMD drivers have finally caught up with nvidia so if you have issues now it is mostly due to bad luck and badly developed games. That is great for consumers.
Caporegime
Not that I am gaming much in this weather but when I do game, I genuinely can't remember the last time I had a crash. My 1080Ti does well for me and I don't tend to update drivers every time there is a new one unless it brings something I could make use of.
Associate
Because "letting the results speak for themselves" has worked out so well for them in the past, right?
Consumers just don't care when amd has the better value, or just objectively better, product - they'll still flock to nvidia in droves. Who can blame amd for trying draw attention to their strengths in an attempt to claw back some mindshare?
If I was making a better product than my competition, selling it for less*, and on top of all that my competition was heavily anti-consumer, and customers en masse still refused to buy my product... well, it would be soul crushing!
*I know that is not necessarily the case right now, but it has been a few times in the past.
How far back are we going here? As I don't remember ATi drivers bad back in the 00s. Heck, I used to use the Omega drivers.
The only ever issues I ever remembered was the big silver control panel. It really wasn't an issue though, maybe inconvenience since it took 4 - 8 seconds to load.
https://techreport.com/review/7356/ati-radeon-x700-xt-graphics-card/3
Soldato
Back in the ATI era, Omega drivers were better than ATI indeed. But that was 12+ years ago. Since then a lot of water has gone under the bridge.
True the old style Catalyst were bit clunky to configure stuff, but for the last 2 1/2 years AMD has moved the drivers ahead to 21st century, while Nvidia is stuck still in the 90s.
And compare this
to that
NVIDIA's is from the XP era. You can see the old toolbar icons but yes, it's badly outdated. My big gripe is, even if NVIDIA manages to come out with a new UI, it'll likely be horribly buggy. I can guarantee it. As overall, NVIDIA's drivers has been somewhat poor quality in releases lately.
Soldato
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I see that Nvidia's control panel has not really changed or moved on since my 8800 days...Back in the ATI era, Omega drivers were better than ATI indeed. But that was 12+ years ago. Since then a lot of water has gone under the bridge.
True the old style Catalyst were bit clunky to configure stuff, but for the last 2 1/2 years AMD has moved the drivers ahead to 21st century, while Nvidia is stuck still in the 90s.
And compare this
to that
Soldato
Of course anyone CAN do it, my point was more there's only 2 companies who would do it (publicly at least). You could possibly see Apple maybe caring (to chose which cards go in their line up) but that would be internally, they wouldn't benefit from publishing the results so simply wouldn't. HP/Dell/MS etc have no incentive to compare nVidia/AMD drivers as they service both regardless.
The first problem is, how many studies have nVidia paid for and since none of them showed nVidia had better drivers they didn't publish anything?
The way you phrase it implies that nVidia drivers are better and this is a statistical anomaly, curious why you have this notion?2006/7. Just before Vista.
Actually, nvidia just borrows Windows' interface:
Associate
Plenty of brand loyalty in this thread!