are ATI drivers better than Nvidia?

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bobthebaker

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i've been contemplating whether to buy a 7800GL or an X1800XL and as of right now it seems the better VALUE is the 7800GL since it is slightly cheaper for roughly the same performance.


However, searching through these "VS." kinds of threads, most people are claiming the 1800XL will probably surpass the 7800GL when ATI releases better drivers. I was curious why this was? Can Nvidia come out with competing drivers, or are ATI's drivers usually always better in increasing performance than Nvidia?
 
In my opinion, yes, they are better. I like the monthly certified driver releases. They are always stable on my system.
 
Although I can only presume, I imagien the X1800XL will surpass the 7800GT in benches as drivers begin to amture however at the moment the 7800GT is the better option in terms of value for money
 
The 7800 series is very similar to the 6800 series, so the drivers have already had time to mature. The X1800 series, however, is a wild departure from the X800 series, so there is still a lot of driver optimization to be done for the new architecture...

That being said, no one can say for sure the future holds...ati could release drivers to speed up the XL...but nvidia could do the same for the GT...

Right now the GT is simply a much better value than the XL...if you want to upgrade now, I whole-heartedly recommend the GT...if you aren't in a rush though, both pricing and performance of these cards will likely change somewhat over the next few months, and things may change...

And just a blanket statement...no...ati drivers are most definitely not better than nvidia drivers...
 
i don't know. i got a x850xt pe for the cheap price and the demos screenshots. nvidia makes better looking demos.
 
Wesley1357 said:
i don't know. i got a x850xt pe for the cheap price and the demos screenshots. nvidia makes better looking demos.
Click to expand...

What do demos have to do with anything?
 
Having just switched to a 7800GTX after using ATI cards for years now - ATI has more stable drivers in my experience. I've used Catalyst drivers for quite some time now and very few if any have caused hard lockups. These new 81.xx drivers from Nvidia, however, seem like they might be the source of instability I'm having right now. So I'm not real impressed at the moment. But in their defence - the 81.xx drivers are somewhat of a big change for them, adding support for multithreading.
 
Coming from a 9800 Pro I can say I liked ati drivers way better, NOT CCC though, nvidias are a pain in the neck when it comes to video card settings, aa, af, quality, etc.
 
ATI makes better demo, But PPL hate ATI catalyst drivers because they are horrible, my friend has an ati he dowloaded Omega drivers he loves the interface a lot better and finds that the card less problematic. Nvidia drivers have a neutral feeling, the work and get the job done, and ppl seem to like it better. ATI better card but worse drivers. If ATI would clean up theyr act I would change otherwise I stick with NVIDIA. My friend says only reason hes still using his ATI is the Omega drives and he detest catalyst.
 
I just noticed that everytime in past threads when someone mentioned that the X1800XL would likely surpass the GT as new drivers came out, there was never a rebuttal for the GT card so i figured there was a mutual consensus that ATI drivers were better or Nvidia drivers were already pretty much optimized and wouldn't improve anymore or something
 
Riptide_NVN said:
Having just switched to a 7800GTX after using ATI cards for years now - ATI has more stable drivers in my experience. I've used Catalyst drivers for quite some time now and very few if any have caused hard lockups. These new 81.xx drivers from Nvidia, however, seem like they might be the source of instability I'm having right now. So I'm not real impressed at the moment. But in their defence - the 81.xx drivers are somewhat of a big change for them, adding support for multithreading.
Click to expand...

Whenever a new card is released they all have some technical issues since most of the drives are designed for older card without being fully taken advantage of all technology of a card, 5-6months after most bugs are gone. by the way the new x1800xt with avivo is sweet. only thing i wish nvidia would do is optimise videos n streaming. I do aplaud ATI for handling so well true 32bit color and smart shader 3.0, big step up and working well outta box.
 
coming from ATI and now using nvidia.. ATI has good official drivers, nvidia has good beta releases.

ATI drivers are better since they come monthly and offer a nice array of fixes and optimizations
 
i think ATI drivers may be more stable right now I am having lots of problems with Nvidia drivers, (though it may just be the video card. Yikes! TI 4600 thats like 4 years old)
 
I've always used nVidia cards and have always apprecieated the driver team putting out drivers almost as many times as windows updates itself...yes there have been drivers that
are worse and some that are better but the way I see it nVidia's way of driver support is more
quantity over quality...but theres just so much that one week BF2 shadows are borked but
shimmering is gone...then the next week shadows are fixed but there is shimmering on certain
mode quality/performance modes.

ATI having CAT drivers released every month, they are gonna have more testing than nvidia
thus being more stable but in a months time...the amount of stable good performing drivers
from nvidia and ati balance out.

I for one though love the nView display features of nVidia's drivers...plus couple that with a
more stable gaming platform and a single slot solution (on my GTX) and all the things that
nvidia does for the gaming community...I've got no reason to leave graphzilla.
 
Yes and no.


ATI Pros:
1. Montly official releases
2. Known issues are typically not longer than fixes
3. CCC is getting much better
4. Fixes all the time

NV Pros:
1. Stable
2. Great HDTV support with custom resolutions

ATI Cons:
1. Suspect HDTV support
2. OGL (doh)

NV Cons:
1. Quarterly, at best, official driver release
2. Buggy betas floating everywhere
3. Suspect AF filtering
4. Known issues typically longer than actual fixes

These are IMHO after running both for the past year plus.
 
I tend to like the ATI drivers better. Nvidias are nice and all, but the monthly whql driver releases really impressed me. But I hated CCC and used ATI Tray Tools to make changes, didn't even install CCC. ATI drivers also used more resources than the Nvidia's.

But overall, Ati's were much more stable and less buggy. Nvidia could learn from them when it comes to driver releases...
 
I've owned a few of each company's cards over the years and nvidia always seemed to have the better drivers but things change.

lol I still get a chuckle out of the "I have nothing to go on, but I assume *random ati card* will surpass *random nvidia card* with a couple driver updates" posts. If you have a reason to think so fine but the "just because" stuff is pretty stupid...
 
Deadsexy said:
lol I still get a chuckle out of the "I have nothing to go on, but I assume *random ati card* will surpass *random nvidia card* with a couple driver updates" posts. If you have a reason to think so fine but the "just because" stuff is pretty stupid...
Click to expand...

the X1800XL surpassed the 7800GT in openGL apps with a very simple MC tweek they added to the 5.10's

i think you only have to use the .net drivers if you install CCC, i have my X1800XL here, just waiting on my new motherboard to use it on, and i'll test out this "falible" CCC people keep complaining about - if its REALLY that bad
 
bobthebaker said:
i've been contemplating whether to buy a 7800GL or an X1800XL and as of right now it seems the better VALUE is the 7800GL since it is slightly cheaper for roughly the same performance.


However, searching through these "VS." kinds of threads, most people are claiming the 1800XL will probably surpass the 7800GL when ATI releases better drivers. I was curious why this was? Can Nvidia come out with competing drivers, or are ATI's drivers usually always better in increasing performance than Nvidia?
Click to expand...

In my experience, no. I have had more compatibility issues with games (even not running at all) with ATi drivers, rather than nVidia's.
 
Trimlock said:
the X1800XL surpassed the 7800GT in openGL apps with a very simple MC tweek they added to the 5.10's

i think you only have to use the .net drivers if you install CCC, i have my X1800XL here, just waiting on my new motherboard to use it on, and i'll test out this "falible" CCC people keep complaining about - if its REALLY that bad
Click to expand...


BTW thats only in the D3 engine not all OGL games ;) . It still gets its ass handed to it in all other OGL games.

Drivers btw both companies are very stable, the only time I've had issues with ATi was when I tried to install a card without a fresh install even when using driver cleaner, never had any issues with nV though without fresh installs (justed used driver cleaner).

Ogl performance is ok with ATi (will be a while before they get their cards to run on par on all Ogl games with nV though), for professional apps like Maya or Max they don't match nV.
 
OP I think you question was as far as performance improvements. I'll put it like this. ATI has just launched it's new architecture and since it' s a new product they have alot of headroom and with a programable memory controller things seem like they will only get better for the X1800 series. The 7800 Series has been out for about 6 months now and I think their drivers can probably get slightly better. What's happening now is not a testament to how well one company codes drivers for their product it's about how mature the product is. Overall in the past history Nvidia has been known to squeeze out more performance in their drivers time after time rather than ati. But I'll admit Ati's driver team has been quite agressive recently and they are now posting drivers on a monthly basis. Performance boost come at least every other month so things have been looking on the up. In the end if you want to invest in the card that 6 months down the line will perform better, noone knows but there is a great chance that will be the X1800 series. I have nvidia cards but I believe this to be true and it doesn't bother me, because I don't think they are gonna be that much better but since your in a good position maybe this will help you choose what's better.for you.
 
razor1 said:
BTW thats only in the D3 engine not all OGL games ;) . It still gets its ass handed to it in all other OGL games.
Click to expand...

not only in the D3 engine games, it was also in Chronicles of Riddick that it surpassed the GT as well, i haven't seen any other OpenGL games tested, are there any other recent games just released in the past year that are OpenGL other then Chronicles, Doom3, and Quake4?
 
i love when people make sweeping assumptions and pass them off as fact. WIth such a vague question like that by the OP, i can just imagine the offtopic possibilities. But personally, I like nvidia's drivers more and think that CCC is ass and the regular cp not much better. only time i will buy ati and deal with thir driver interface is if the performance and/or price margin is great enough like it was with the 9800 series. As long as the X1800s doesnt beat the 7800s by a huge margin, its nvidia all the way for me. What i have noticed is that while owning both brands of cards, i never ran into a problem that needed a driver fix to work and i usually found myself updating drivers just to get better performance rather than trying to get an application to work.
 
Having just come from x800xt pe to 7800 gtx IMO ATi drivers are far superior. I NEVER had to reinstall a catalyst driver EVER . Only when I got an updated release. I've had these gtx's for about a month now and I'm sick to death or reinstalling them. Nview is the biggest heap of shit and buggy as fuck, it causes me no end of problems. Plus the endless amount of beta drivers is insane, fixes one thing, fucks another. I'm sticking to official releases from now on, altho the 81.85 doesn't agree with nview on my rig. Fingers crossed it hasn't fucked up recently.....but I'd vote catalyst any time.
 
Tigerblade said:
Having just come from x800xt pe to 7800 gtx IMO ATi drivers are far superior. I NEVER had to reinstall a catalyst driver EVER . Only when I got an updated release. I've had these gtx's for about a month now and I'm sick to death or reinstalling them. Nview is the biggest heap of shit and buggy as fuck, it causes me no end of problems. Plus the endless amount of beta drivers is insane, fixes one thing, fucks another. I'm sticking to official releases from now on, altho the 81.85 doesn't agree with nview on my rig. Fingers crossed it hasn't fucked up recently.....but I'd vote catalyst any time.
Click to expand...

I agree with everything MR. Tiger just said
 
no one tells you to install beta drivers and i hope you aren't basing your dislike of nvidia drivers purely on your experience with beta drivers. that wouldnt be very smart. nview is a big reason why nv's drivers are sometimes considered better than ati's drivers.
 
XamediX said:
no one tells you to install beta drivers and i hope you aren't basing your dislike of nvidia drivers purely on your experience with beta drivers. that wouldnt be very smart. nview is a big reason why nv's drivers are sometimes considered better than ati's drivers.
Click to expand...

I'm basing my statement on official 81.85. If you read my post again you will see reference to official 81.85.....at the mo I'm back on 78.01 and they are working...for now. But then I must be dreaming about these problems I'm having with nview if you say so.... :rolleyes:

nview is good when it works tho
:)



I mention beta drivers for the insane amount that is released. So am I to gather that you diagree with that view?

At the end of the day it doesn't change the fact that the only time I had to reinstall drivers for the xt pe was on a new Cat release.
 
Nvidia's driver system has its merits. You get new features and improvements much faster than with ATi drivers, thanks to the beta driver releases on nzone. Of course, these may break some things, so you definitely need to read the release notes before installing.
 
Trimlock said:
not only in the D3 engine games, it was also in Chronicles of Riddick that it surpassed the GT as well, i haven't seen any other OpenGL games tested, are there any other recent games just released in the past year that are OpenGL other then Chronicles, Doom3, and Quake4?
Click to expand...


Where did you see it surpass in Chronicles? Haven't seen that.
 
Tigerblade said:
I'm basing my statement on official 81.85. If you read my post again you will see reference to official 81.85.....at the mo I'm back on 78.01 and they are working...for now. But then I must be dreaming about these problems I'm having with nview if you say so.... :rolleyes:

nview is good when it works tho
:)



I mention beta drivers for the insane amount that is released. So am I to gather that you diagree with that view?

At the end of the day it doesn't change the fact that the only time I had to reinstall drivers for the xt pe was on a new Cat release.
Click to expand...


Add so the Official WHQL Cat's don't seem to break anything. Hmm I seem to remember Cat 5.9 bringing speed down on all games?

Each company has thier issues beta or WHQL, doesn't really matter. Its well know that WHQL doesn't mean jack.
 
razor1 said:
Where did you see it surpass in Chronicles? Haven't seen that.
Click to expand...

this was a post on another forum, it was a personal test, but seeing as i spent 45minutes trying to search/dredge through the forum to find it and could not find it, i'll take back that comment, regardless the comment saying that future driver releases giving performance being baseless is already proved wrong as the card has obtained fairly increadible speed boosts on the D3 engine based games

also, is there any other games released in the past year that are OpenGL other then D3/Q4 and Chronicles? i don't have chronicles, nor do i want to buy it (have it for the xbox) but i wanted to test this out on other demanding games if i can
 
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