are ATI drivers better than Nvidia?

Drivers will never be perfect - there are too many chipsets out there, many of which cut corners on compatibility (Via, especially their older K7 chipsets, anyone?), as well as too many applications that cut corners as well, for the driver teams to have a cakewalk.
 
I love ati drivers....and hopefully I'll like the nvidia ones too since I just ordered a 7800gt :cool:
 
Tigerblade said:
...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....
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I'm not disagreeing with you, im just pointing out what it looked like you were basing your opinions on. I havent heard many reports on nview being broken as much as i hear of ati lack of multi monitor support. But im not saying your imagining anything. Plus whats wrong with a bunch of beta releases every so often and then an official drops like lol every quarter. Just read the readme's, wait till the other early adopter noobs fubar their system with it and decide whether or not its for you. So i say, bring on the betas... same with ati.
 
XamediX said:
wait till the other early adopter noobs fubar their system with it and decide whether or not its for you. So i say, bring on the betas... same with ati.
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That's a very poor view to be having over drivers. Also, a main point of WHQL testing is to basically nullify all chances of a BSOD..
 
Tigerblade said:
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.
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Same here for the most part. There was a problem with Catalyst 4.x and CoD. Affected my 9700Pro. Hard lockups. Had to go back to 3.9 to fix that. But it's the only time I had any significant issues and have been using X800/X850 since then.

I just switched to a 7800GTX and 81.85 seems to be hard locking my system. Going back to 78.03 seems like it has fixed it, though I'm not 100% sure yet.
 
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.
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I've been using nview for years and have never had a problem with it...in fact I think nview is what really separates nvidia's drivers from ATi's, nview makes hydravision look like a windows 3.1 app...

I've never had to reinstall a whql nvidia driver unless I was upgrading...and I've been using their cards for almost a decade...
 
The official crapped on my dual screen setup, back to 78.01s for now. :eek:
 
^eMpTy^ said:
I've been using nview for years and have never had a problem with it...in fact I think nview is what really separates nvidia's drivers from ATi's, nview makes hydravision look like a windows 3.1 app...

I've never had to reinstall a whql nvidia driver unless I was upgrading...and I've been using their cards for almost a decade...
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For about 2 weeks, every 2 days, without fail, the nview buttons would disapear from my windows. When renabled they wouldn't work until I reinstalled the drivers. That was with 81.85, 78.01 have been going about a week now with no probs.

Now can you imagine how annoying it is to uninstall, restart, reinstall, restart, renable nview ...etc every couple of days? To say I've had this new rig about 3weeks, nview isn't top of my most favoured progs list.

Ultramon and Cat's worked flawlessly for months on end. Even Cat updates didn't affect anything. Yes ultramon has nowhere near the option nview has, but IMO the ATi solution is the more stable and therefore better. (not saying ultramon is ATi, just comparing with the probs I've had. Agree with Hydravision tho, complete toss.)

Ask me again in 6 months tho ;)
 
Been using a 9700pro since it first came out...ATI drivers have always been pretty decent. Some had bugs I agree, but the fact of getting WHQL drivers every month was a great idea. Now I only wish Nvidia goes that route....releasing beta drivers, isnt the way to go :/
 
Last July I bought a 6800, At first I liked it..it had some minor improvments over my 9700 Pro. Until i acctually started playing games on it...I found that the Nvidia Drivers gave me nothing but glitch after problem. One after another. After getting the card stable on some 78.xx BETA drivers I ordered a new LCD monitor. After pluging in the new monitor the system wouldnt startup. It would reboot after trying to load the Nvidia Drivers. (I was trying to get dual monitors to work).


Last week i just decided to take the loss on the 6800 and i bought myself a X800XT. I pluged in the second monitor and installed the 5.10 drivers without any problems. All my games run perfect now. And my second monitor can be hooked up to the video card without rebooting.


Needless to say I will now and forever own an ATI Card. My last four Nvidia cards have been more trouble than they were worth.
 
Tigerblade said:
For about 2 weeks, every 2 days, without fail, the nview buttons would disapear from my windows. When renabled they wouldn't work until I reinstalled the drivers. That was with 81.85, 78.01 have been going about a week now with no probs.

Now can you imagine how annoying it is to uninstall, restart, reinstall, restart, renable nview ...etc every couple of days? To say I've had this new rig about 3weeks, nview isn't top of my most favoured progs list.

Ultramon and Cat's worked flawlessly for months on end. Even Cat updates didn't affect anything. Yes ultramon has nowhere near the option nview has, but IMO the ATi solution is the more stable and therefore better. (not saying ultramon is ATi, just comparing with the probs I've had. Agree with Hydravision tho, complete toss.)

Ask me again in 6 months tho ;)
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I think this 81.85 release is just unstable...I've heard of several people that can't even install them...I'm still on the 78s myself...and not a single problem with nview...
 
IMO ATi has had better drivers since the beginning the two have been "competing" against each other. ATi has always put alot of work into them, have to give them props there.
 
ellover009 said:
they are both equally inferior, lol
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QFT

I've had both Nvidia and ATI cards. Let me explain how they work.

Nvidia

Tends to forget about the previous generation extremely fast. Some driver improvements maybe only seen in new video cards. People who have older video cards get left out.

Also Nvidia's slow driver release can mean a game may have a bug for months. Unlike ATI cards which get updated monthly. Also Nvidia driver versions are confusing. Always some beta released that may or may not be better for your video card.

ATI

Seems like every year a driver bug is found in the ATI drivers that magically make a huge performance increase. I remember when Doom 3 was still being worked on and John Carmack helped ATI find a major bug in their drivers which when fixed increases the performance by a lot. I remember this when I had my Radeon 8500.

While ATI may release drivers more often then Nvidia, they have crap support for other OS's.

NOW it doesn't matter which card you own. You'd probably get more money out of a ATI card then a Nvidia card as far as Windows XP driver support.

Eventually either a ATI card or Nvidia card will have a problem with a game. It seems to happen often for both companies. John Carmack knew what he was doing when he moved to the Xbox 360. ATI and Nvidia need to get their drivers working. Really working.
 
Dunno if this'll matter to other people, but when i started taking 3D gaming seriously, local driver support for 3D stereo was what secured me to the green corner. How much more 3D can you get :p
 
ChronicTrees said:
Riddick is a D3 engine game.
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No it's not.
It made by a swedish company called Starbreeze

The Starbreeze Engine is the technology base being used for all projects at Starbreeze. It is a proprietary game-engine fully owned by Starbreeze AB that contains all technology needed to develop and run an advanced in-door or semi-indoor game. It has been under development for over 7 years and is currently supporting PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube platforms, and is currently being extended onto next-generation platforms.

The Engine has been successfully used and expanded during the development on Enclave (PC, Xbox), Knights of the Temple (PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube) and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC, Xbox).

Key features:



  • Cutting-edge lighting, including real-time shadows from all lights, high quality shading with normal mapping. (Xbox / PC)

  • Light-mapping per light-source. A lighting model for PS2 and GameCube that is semi-compatible with the fully dynamic Xbox/PC lighting model.

  • In-house developed tool-set for level building, scripting, normal-map generation, material editing, texture compilation, animation set compilation, etc.

  • Powerful sound-system with Dolby Digital 5.1 support

  • High character detail with facial animation, lip-sync and behavior system

  • Advanced bone-animation system featuring skeleton LODs and layered animation
    playback directly from a compressed animation format.

  • Rag doll physics

  • Powerful visual scripting system for impressive event driven game-play

  • Action driven AI developed in close relation with animation

  • Streamlined build-process for efficient Q/A and short load times.
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Terra...
 
If ATI and NVIDIA were any other type of hardware manufacturer, except maybe sound, they would be strung the hell up for how bad their drivers are when compared to chipset, mass storage, ethernet, or virtually any other hardware componant requireing drivers.. Granted, graphics drivers are generaly far more complex than any other driver in your system, but that does not excuse them from the fact that they are responsible for so very many crashes on pc's.. That said..

Nv has pretty much had good drivers since the beginning, provided you could figure out which betas worked well with the game you were trying to play.. That can be a chore..

Ati has improved greatly since the 8500 era.. Their drivers seem to work well enough in just about any game going..

I think that they are pretty much on par these days.. Not enough of a difference to use drivers as a criteria for deciding your next purchase..

Unless you are Linux user.. Then it's still NV all the way..
 
I used to love nVidia's drivers, they USED to be rock solid and would work with everything. But over the last few years nVidia has become slow to fix issues and there have been more of them. Right now I would give ATi the edge in terms of drivers.
 
i have seen crashing and instability with ati's and also with nvidia. i have seen stability for both of them more than the latter. nvidia releases betas? what, ati doesnt? nvidia doesnt force you to use the beta drivers that get released and i have sworn that there have been 2 official drivers released within the last month.
 
For ATI to release a set of drivers on a monthly time period you have to wonder if any of their drivers isn't still in Beta.

Nvidia is no better. There was a time when Nvidia drivers were more stable then the rest of the drivers in my computer system.

You have to wonder if this is caused by Nvidia and ATI tweaking the stability out of their drivers.
 
I think the OP's question was based about performance improvements from time to time but since this has migrated to stability, My 2 cents about this is as follows, It is my findings after owning 4 ATI cards and now on my 3rd set of nvidia cards that Nvidia drivers are more stable with one exception. When a new game is released it requires a beta driver to even run at all where it will run on the current Catalyst (like crap) but at least it will run. Once the drivers are finalized afterwards the game performs well on both. This is my findings and own personal experience. There have been several things that made games unplayable on ati drivers like the punkbuster bug to name one of many. Thank goodness they finally fixed that. Recently ATI has been doing well with whql drivers on a monthly basis.
 
ChronicTrees said:
After having cards from both companies, I would say not to even base your choice on the drivers.
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QFT, honestly ATIs drivers just seem bleh in 2D, but i never have any problems with either companies drivers really, dont base your decision on it
 
Lord_Exodia said:
I When a new game is released it requires a beta driver to even run at all where it will run on the current Catalyst (like crap) but at least it will run. Once the drivers are finalized afterwards the game performs well on both.
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QFT... I couldn't get FEAR to run on my 7800GTX until I installed the newer beta drivers.
 
R1ckCa1n said:
QFT... I couldn't get FEAR to run on my 7800GTX until I installed the newer beta drivers.
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Hey you want bleeding edge, you pay the price for it. Everyone knows that. I also know that most of my stability with drivers is because i have an older card (6800NU).
 
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