nVidia drivers vs. ATI drivers ?

P

Phantom_24

n00b
Joined
Apr 19, 2005
Messages
28
Just wanted to see what the consensus is on the latest drivers from both. Currently using the ATI X700, and I HATE the Catalyst crap with the .net backbone as its a total system pig.

Looking at jumping ship to the 7800GT, as I had enjoyed my lowly TNT back in the day, but I wanted to know if the Geforce drivers were heading down the .net road as well, since it's supposed to be required for Vista.
 
ATI drivers are great. I have also used in the past a TNT2 and Geforce 2. In general I think over the past couple of years ATI drivers are far superior to any Nvidia driver I ever used. Most of this praise is because they come like clock work every month. Nvidia's are always beta and take the game approach to "when it’s done".

ATI is always fixing problems, and are coming up to par with Nvidia on stability.

Just don't use CCC, it is crap.
 
I see no problem with the beta approach. For the most part, the beta releases are stable and include fixes for current problems.

There was really no reason for ATi to start the .NET machine so early; though it's also not entirely .NET's fault the CCC runs so abysmally. Why bother with an image-intensive GUI with a built in 3D renderer? nVidia's control panel is quick, concise and lacking of any unnesessary 'features'. I suspect that nVidia will develop and test their .NET applications in-house until the release of Vista as would typically be done by any reasonably sane entity.

ATi's driver team does a good job of fixing issues, but like nVidia, some are simply never resolved or take an excessively long time to fix. ATi has yet to fix what should be the relatively simple Quake 4 Ultra mode bug.
 
Stability and regularity from both is a wash to me. But nVidia's can have "always on top" and "transperancy" for most application windows.
 
ati's drivers are related to the devil from my expirence with a 1800xt the other day, complete mess. wouldn't uninstall, etc. nividia ftw, works great using dvi out to an hdtv on a 4xagp geforce4 no problems with scalling, over cut, etc.
 
ATI drivers havnt given me as many problems as Nvidia Drivers have, but for the love of god, I hate CCC with a passion and will vote for nvidia drivers because of CCC
 
Aren´t drivers going for .Net all the way with future Vista etc? In this light I would see ATI having a real upper hand vs Nvidia. Then again I could be wrong, no idea where I got this into my head in the first place. :D

I really don´t see why people hate CCC so much, they have always worked for me flawlesly. Gotta admit the first releases very very poor, but lately they have become much quicker. Then again I don´t use the CCC interface that often, just set AA and AF from tray icon so I don´t notice the "start up" time so much.

Maybe people should take care of their computers better and check what kinda software they use. Example Norton Internet Security is total system hog and was partly reason why CCC was very slow for me at the beginning. I reasently moved to a lighter firewall and overall my system got faster including CCC.
 
I much prefer ForceWare to Catalyst. Even some basic stuff, like setting up custom screen resolutions is impossible with ATI's driver unless you install .NET or third party software. Just ridiculous. With ForceWare it's a grand total of four mouse clicks. Done.

Or how about a basic monitor calibration function? Nowhere to be found in Catalyst.

Overall ForceWare is far more flexible, well designed and better supported, especially with OpenGL apps and utilities.
 
Can't say I've really used forceware (never had a nvidia vieo card) and so I can nly commet on the ati side. I have to say I've never experienced slowdowns by using CCC and also find it a breeze to use than less-friendly, third-party software.
And for those that really hate moving to a .net framework application just wait until vista where both ati and nvidia will be using it - then we will see how much of a 'slowdown' it is :rolleyes:
 
Never had a problem with CCC, with the 3D Renderer and fancy skin disabled, it loads in a few seconds.

The biggest thing I like about ATI's drivers are that they release a working, stable, complete version every month with clear and easy to understand version numbering (left of the decimal point is the year, right of the decimal point is the month released).
 
The main thing to remember is that Nvidia video cards will only work with Nvidia drivers and that they will not work with the ATI drivers. So it is best to chose which video card that you want to use and then only install the drivers that go with that card.

Then it just gets a whole lot easyier.
I am waiting to get the new nvidia 7900 1gig OC card when it comes out in a few weeks.
Then I should be able to play solitaire without any lag and get some good frame rates for once.
 
I've used the ATI drivers and couldn't stand em.

Nvidia's drivers aren't sluggish and they are very easy to work with.
 
ATI drivers come every month.. it's like a present.
The fixes are great and the newer releases seem to make the cards better and better... I love ATI drivers.

A lot of people HATE CCC, so why don't you use the basic CCP, it doesn't use .NET or have any visual GUI or any of that shit.
 
tornadotsunamilife said:
And for those that really hate moving to a .net framework application just wait until vista
Click to expand...

Screw .NET, and screw Vista.

There won't be any shortage of people who follow MS like lemmings over a cliff, into an abyss of subscription-based software and an operating system whose main function is constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure they aren't downloading or viewing any copyrighted material or kiddie pr0n.

I won't be one of them. Ever.
 
Frank DC said:
Screw .NET, and screw Vista.

There won't be any shortage of people who follow MS like lemmings over a cliff, into an abyss of subscription-based software and an operating system whose main function is constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure they aren't downloading or viewing any copyrighted material or kiddie pr0n.

I won't be one of them. Ever.
Click to expand...

Great...

I take it you're ignoring the vast majority of people which do buy computers (normally from places like Dell). Because of this Vista will spread quite quickly - places like Dell putting Vista on its systems as soon as its released.
 
ATIs optimizing features are nice but the CCC is way to bolky and has way to many bolky start up services. Nvidia has nice calibration tools, ATI does have calibration tools but they arent as nicely laid out and ease of use as Nvidia. ATI drivers come out once a month which is nice and nvidia doesnt. They got there pluses and negatives. But I like Nvidias control panel better but hate there drivers and vis virsa with ATI. But I like ATI for there better IQ without AF but I like nvidia for its proformace. Always cons and postives.
 
I'd say go to the 7800GT.

I used to prefer the ATi driver with CP better because I could set seperate Ogl and D3D settings.

The ATi CCC does not allow that, and is a memory hog and has conflicts with .net 2.0

So...my order of preference is ATi with CP; nVidia; ATi with NO CCC and last but not least, ATi WITH CCC.
 
No contest, nVidia hands down. Any of you bastards who tried Linux know exactly what I mean. Unfortunately, no one can be told how aweful it is, you just have to see it for yourself. :(
 
1c3d0g said:
No contest, nVidia hands down. Any of you bastards who tried Linux know exactly what I mean. Unfortunately, no one can be told how aweful it is, you just have to see it for yourself. :(
Click to expand...

I'll have to give you that.. Ati nix drivers are subpar at best..

In the windows world, (where most of the gamers have to play), I think Ati and Nvidia drivers are on par with each other these days.. Toward the end of the 8500 series Ati drivers really started improving.. By the time we got to the middle of the 9800's era Ati drivers had really caught up to Nvidia, win driver wise any how..
 
wkstar said:
The main thing to remember is that Nvidia video cards will only work with Nvidia drivers and that they will not work with the ATI drivers. So it is best to chose which video card that you want to use and then only install the drivers that go with that card.
Click to expand...

LOL...that's indeed how you "choose" a driver to use on your card. unless you use both a NVIDIA and ATI PCI-E card in a SLI mobo...They you need both drivers :) LOL

Anyways...NVIDIA forceware ownz ATI's Catalyst(i have both)

1. monthly release doesn't mean better release
2.ATI's linux drivers still sucks
3. ATI hasn't matched SLI in market availability and price
4. ATI CCC sucks
5 ATI is missing monitor calibration software in their drivers
6 custom resolution is pain to setup in ATI cards.
 
Ati drivers have always been a let down for me. So much so that I stopped buying their products. I don't care if it's 30% quicker for $100 less. I will pay the extra and take a slight sacrifice in speed for stable and robust drivers. I will compare it to the sound card I just bought. It's a chaintek AV-710, I bought it cheap, it has crap drivers and now I regret buying it and wish I had bought something more expencive with proper driver support for features such as Asio and kernal streaming; little things. Nvida has more stable drivers and more support for the "little things" that I use on a daily basis.

I recommended my friend an ati card about a year ago because I was a huge ATI fanatic and he has regretted his purchase ever since because he switched to linux. (ATI has no linux driver support what so ever, this may or may not be of interest to anyone but you have to think that if Nvidia has immaculate driver support for linux they're just simply much better at making drivers for their cards)
 
I should also say I stopped buying Creative products because of poor drivers. To me it doesn't matter so much how quick something is or how many onboard features it has vs the competition if the drivers don't integrate well with the OS and other applications. So drivers are almost as important to me as the hardware.
 
Jesus_Faction said:
if youre running linux why cant you just use a PCI 2mb card
Click to expand...
My linux computers "inherit" their hardware.

When my main rig has passed it's prime, it becomes a linux box.

That's the reason why I need Linux compatible hardware.

Others may do fine with onboard, or some such thing. Heck even the default ATI drivers will be fine if you not doing anything special. To each their own.
 
My first graphics card was a 64MB GF4 Ti 4200. Then I got a 128MB Xtasy Radeon 9550. I hated the CCC; that was what influenced me to get a 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX OC (XFX) when I got my new computer.

So me, I'd go with the 7800 GT.
 
I've had both Nvidia and Ati cards and never had a problem with drivers for either. As good as each other in my opinion
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top