Which side has better drivers - Nvidia or AMD?

Which side has better drivers?

  • AMD

    Votes: 75 30.6%

  • Nvidia

    Votes: 170 69.4%
  • Total voters
    245
A

Apostrophe

n00b
Joined
Nov 15, 2005
Messages
36
I consider myself brand-neutral in the Nvidia VS AMD battle, but recently I've stuck on the Nvidia side of the fence because in the past I had some trouble with the ATi drivers. That was a few years ago, however, and I was wondering if the situation has improved.

I'd like to ask for your opinions on which company has better software for their cards. The benchmarks are all well and good, but something like this is also important when making a decision to buy.
 
I've alternated between both and never had significant issues with either. The one time I can think of that I had trouble was when I used one of those "driver cleaner" programs. Smooth sailing since I stopped using that stuff.

I've been using an ATI/AMD 4890 pretty much since it was released in my current machine, updating the drivers almost as soon as the WHQL versions are offered, and I've had no problems. I was using an Nvidia 8800gts prior to that, again, without driver issues.
 
nVidia hands down. It's not even a valid question. :D It's purely rhetorical. Not only have I been frustrated with ATI/AMD drivers, but countless other friends as well. AMD has awesome hardware, but shit for drivers/software and support. It seems the drivers with new cards are getting worse and worse. It takes them so long to come out with fixes. I'd rather pay more for a refined product that works the first time. *ahem* nVidia. I just can't stand how slow nVidia is to adapt DP support on their cards. That I can give to ATI. It's love hate pull from both sides.
 
honestly neither of them are consistent. both companies have issues. while yes it takes AMD longer to fix much more basic issues, as of the last year or so Nvidia's quality control on their drivers have been garbage. 2 card killing drivers in a single year makes ya kinda wonder.
 
I'm not brand dedicated, but ATI really has scared me away for a while. I'll wait a while and see how things smooth out. So far nVidia is looking more promising though... for now.
 
There's no denying ATI has had a rep for horrible drivers.

I fail to understand that though. I've owned plenty of cards from both sides and of the problems I have had with any, none of them had anything to do with the drivers. I think it comes down to personal experience. You can have a miserable experience with a gtx 580, or an excellent one, and the same would go for a 6970. Just depends how lucky you are.
 
Say what you want about ATI's drivers, but at least they never released a video card killing driver like Nvidia did (even if they were pulled in a matter of days--some people DID lose their cards...).

And someone above said they released TWO card killing drivers in one year? Links, please?
 
cant comment on ATI, but nividia's entire windows 7 driver set is broken, I am using their 182.50 drivers in win7 which were designed for vista.

why do I consider it broken?

1 - the HDCP stuff breaks nvidia scaling with aspect ratio option which I use a lot.
2 - there is a 30% drop in 2d desktop performance.
 
Im not for or against either brand,have had both but from the complaints I have read it does seem AMD drivers are lacking in some areas.
 
Mostly had Nvidia cards, including a sli rig, now have an ATI card and the drivers are much smoother to use for me.


Y.
 
I'm on Catalyst 10.11 on a 880G, and here's what I've noticed:

Sometimes, when quitting a game, my cursor becomes the top left part of the cursor (the part that does the clicking) repeats vertically about 10 times. So I get something that looks like a giant text bar, except it's made out of mouse cursor heads. And then when the round "Windows 7 hourglass" comes, I see 10 copies of the top left quarter of the circle animating.

In some games, alt-tabbing in and out causes all windows to be resized several times, flickering really badly in the process. The resolution's changing, but there's really no need to shuffle which program was on top on my second monitor and resize the windows several times whenever I alt-tab into or out of Homeworld.

The Catalyst Control Center sometimes acts like I'm clicking on the "Welcome, Information Center, Displays" dropdown several hundred times per second. Simply ridiculous, how did that one make it through QC? It was reproducible.

EDIT: I've had a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 some time ago, and I never had any problems with it.
 
can't help but laugh when these threads come up hearing how nVidia has great drivers. Most people have pretty bad crashing problems with fermi based cards. myself included. 5 people with the same 4xx might have to use 5 different drivers because they aren't stable. I installed 3 different drivers on my current 460 and 2 of them crash hard.
 
I just wish NVIDIA would fix that scaling ratio issue, everytime I would try to select "Use NVIDIA scaling" it would just revert back to its default settings and I hate it when the screen gets all stretched out because I'm using HDMI. Very annoying and NVIDIA has not bothered fixing this shit.

I've had games crashing with both NVIDIA and ATI drivers, even right now NVIDIA's drivers I'm experiencing games crashing.
 
A couple months ago I was looking into getting a GC and started a thread about AMD driver conditions. The majority commented that both sides have issues. So I looked around the web for user comments. I found it's a crap shoot. I can't believe both AMD and Nvidia take ALOT of our money and give us a questionable product. Sure the hardware is great, but what good is it if it isn't stable due to drivers!( or worse burns said card) Stability and quality should come first, then the optimizations for game. It seems like these companies are two caught up in the FPS race.

sorry, let off a little steam
 
Hmm, problems from people with both ATI and nVidia cards. Clearly the only way to go is Matrox.
 
I only own an AMD card, but to be perfectly frank, if the Catalyst drivers are better then it's a very sorry state of affairs.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
I only own an AMD card, but to be perfectly frank, if the Catalyst drivers are better then it's a very sorry state of affairs.
Click to expand...

The only major gripe against nVidia drivers is some older versions in the 19x branch, at time of release, didn't spin up the fan... yet kept running the GPU. It mostly affected G92 cards, killing them outright.
 
Both side have issues since it's impossible to design a driver for every possible PC configuration for user needs.
ATI on the other hand ignore obvious flaws in their drivers from one release to another.
One Hotfix corrects the problem and the other causes another issue. ATI needs better QC.
 
i have both cards Nvidia and Ati use both and let me tell you

ati drivers are BIG JOKE compere to nvidia
 
I run crossfire 5850s and I hate the drivers ATI.AMD put out,.... they almost seem to get worse

I have NV cards at work and the drivers are always top notch
 
they both have issues.. but reason i keep going to AMD, this is gonna sound stupid, its because i can make profile keyboard shortcuts. switching between my projector and monitor is so easy when i dont even have to have the projector on
 
I'm pretty disgruntled with ATi's drivers. Partly the reason I'm jumping ship back to nVidia for now.
 
I think there are too many variables involved to simply this down to one simple poll question.
 
From NVidia I had 7600GT SLI, 8800GTX, GTX 280 SLI, 9800GT, GTX 460SLI. Never an issue.
From AMD I had 5870. Had issues with monitor going to "sleep". Had to keep changing driver with poor results.

So my vote goes to NVidia.
 
SpeedyVV said:
From NVidia I had 7600GT SLI, 8800GTX, GTX 280 SLI, 9800GT, GTX 460SLI. Never an issue.
From AMD I had 5870. Had issues with monitor going to "sleep". Had to keep changing driver with poor results.

So my vote goes to NVidia.
Click to expand...

While your vote is just, its also silly. Your comparing owning a slew of NV cards to ONE Ati card. Maybe you have a bad card, maybe you had a bad cable, maybe you needed to try other drivers. Just my opinion of course.

That said I voted against ATI.AMD as well.

I have had numerous cards from both sides, and most of my experience with both has been about the same. My SLI setup with my 8800GTX's was a nightmare (at best) and my 4870 X2 has been a non-stop pain in the ass. All of my single card ventures were pleasant on both sides and I had little-no problems with drivers on either end.

The main reason I voted NV right now is that while my SLI experience was poor, it was consistent. The Xfire/4k series driver shuffle has gotten real old, to the point that it is likely my next card will not be ATI.

Also a poll like this is going to result in most people voting for what they currently are using. The real question is who has Product X with bad driver experiences.
 
I've had both cards within the last release, no issues with an drivers other than ati mouse corruption with multiple displays
 
I've owned multiple cards from both camps (though my last 3 cards have been AMD) and have never had driver issues until recently with AMD. Never anything I would consider dealbreaking but little annoyances or having to find just the right driver to get everything working properly. Never had a single issue with Nvidia.
 
This article (and I'll go on a limb to say the author knows far more than I do) explains that ATI(AMD) has historically gone the route of designing specialized, highly optimized hardware in lieu of software, whereas Nvidia takes the opposite approach (designs general purpose hardware and highly optimized software). However, AMD has seen the light of more general purpose APIs like OpenCL and Direct Compute, and is beginning to invest more energy on software.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT121410213827&p=1

warning: long, technical article
 
I don't care for Nvidia as a company. I feel that have poor morals and don't care about their customers due to confusing renaming schemes, locking mixed gpu in order to force people into buying their products and, they are more concerned with PhysX being a marketing tool rather than something to move PC gaming forward.

That said, I think Nvidia makes better cards and has better drivers. ATI always seems to have to have major fixes or hot fixes in order to get things right with games. I've owned both brands throughout the years. I've been on Nvidia cards the past 3 years and outside of Windows 7 beta launch (where I needed to use Vista drivers), I haven't had any issues with Nvidia GPU drivers.

Now, as for chipset, I'm GLAD Nvidia got out of the chipset business. Their chipsets were not very good, outside of performance. AMD chipsets seem to be OK from what I've seen.
 
I have used both sides actively, and I really don't think it matters. If people were actually being truthful, they'd recognize that Nvidia TWICE killed gpu's with their drivers. Yet, the ATI = bad drivers stigma remains. I don't get it.
Regardless, I have had problems with neither, and I think it's not really a big deal anymore. ATI/AMD has even caught up to Nvidia with their Crossfire scaling drivers (68xx and 69xx series, wow!).
 
Where is the neither option?

I've owned Nvidia cards, I've owned ATI cards (starting with the 9700 Pro back in the "horrible drivers" heyday - they worked fine). I haven't had a single issue with either, I think they are both *AMAZING*. Everyone bitching about drivers doesn't know just how much shit drivers fix for crappy game developers. Seriously, if you write a video card driver that conforms 100% to the DX and OGL specs, you won't be able to run half the games out there. And somehow ATI and Nvidia can not only handle broken games, they manage to make them fly at the same time. Next time you see a game crash fixed by a driver, I can promise you that 99.9999% of the time it wasn't actually a bug in the driver, but a bug in the game fixed by the driver.

Truly spectacular work from both companies.

That said, since there isn't a "neither" option, I'm voting for ATI simply due to it have no arbitrary limitations. No limits on what motherboards can run CFX, no restrictions on having other video cards in the system, etc...
 
Yakk said:
Mostly had Nvidia cards, including a sli rig, now have an ATI card and the drivers are much smoother to use for me.


Y.
Click to expand...

My experience with ATI and Nvidia are quite different from yours. :p I find that Nvidia offers a smoothing gaming experience for me. The ATI card, while having a higher average FPS, seems to have lower minimum FPS. Thus, I experience FPS spikes during intensive game-play.
 
jeremyshaw said:
The only major gripe against nVidia drivers is some older versions in the 19x branch, at time of release, didn't spin up the fan... yet kept running the GPU. It mostly affected G92 cards, killing them outright.
Click to expand...

Right around that time there were a few drivers, WHQL drivers where you couldn't even use AA. Nvidia's drivers were pretty bad for a while there, right after they added AO.

That said I just picked up a 6870 and have been happy with it so far but I really miss transparent AA. I would say thats Nvidia's one major advantage over AMD. I didn't vote but for this reason alone I lean towards Nvidia.

I can't wait to try out some older games to see if they run any better on the 6870 than they did on the GTX280, mostly Planescape.

x3sphere said:
I think Catalyst drivers have the edge when it comes to AA configuration.
Click to expand...

LOL, thats ATI's one big downfall. You can't force transparency AA in any DX10/11 app. Even in DX9 apps AAA doesn't seem to work as well as Nvidia's transparency MSAA.

If you are referring to MLAA it's nice but it comes at such a large performance hit that I can't see ever using it especially when 4x MSAA looks much better.
 
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I love it when people post brain dead polls like this, and don't even include a "neither" option.

It's not a black and white world. If you're expecting such a clear separation in your poll results, then I'm sorry to disappoint. The fact is, your poll is mostly going to be filled-in by people who only remember the last time they've been hurt, not people who're willing to give a balanced perspective.

My recent experiences?

HD 4850 - had broken idle power implementation from day one, and new driver optimizations sometimes broke older games (Borderlands gray texture issue comes to mind).

GTX 460 - had issues with stuttering in BFBC2 for months. That meant that benchmark results of over 30 fps did not reflect "playable" settings. I also had issues with Fallout: New Vegas where the antialiasing would produce random flickering white flashes. The only fix for that was to hack my profile.

Both drivers suck equally badly, but in their own unique ways.
 
I had terrible experience with Myth2 and Nvidia TNT2U which gave horrible sprite corruption. Drivers that worked "better" screwed up other games.
 
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