ATI Drivers really that bad?

not saying ATI is in a bad state, just Nvidia moved faster on multi GPU support then ATI, not sure what ATI's direction was since theres not alot of performance differences from day 1 drivers to current ... as posted by the [H].
 
Trimlock said:
what i'm noticing with CFX is that the state they are currently is pretty much the same upon release with very minor speed increases, while nvidia was more focused on multi GPU support, especially 3+
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I wouldn't say that necessarily. In 2D gaming SLI isn't scaling at all past two GPUs. Scaling beyond two has been horrific with NVIDIA GPUs in the past so that's nothing new. Its been bad for both companies but slightly worse on ATI's side.
 
nvidia has the advantage of supporting new games right away, whereas often times you'll have to wait one or two revisions to get AA enabled in a new game (e.g. borderlands!).

and yeah, for whatever reason right now ati's drivers are absolute crap for crossfire. hopefully they fix that up.
 
Mr. Wolf said:
The contempt you both hold towards anyone who claims problems with ATI drivers is patently evident in your own comments. Instead of offering something helpful, you choose to insult. The fact that neither of you seem to understand what you type makes further interaction pointless. :rolleyes:
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Have I ever refused to help?:D
 
Amazing how this topic magically springs up every time Nvidia has a new GPU release.
 
I've never had issues with ATI drivers, and I've had a Rage Pro, 9700pro, x850xt, x1950, CF 3870s, and now a 5850. At one point I had a Geforce 2, Geforce 3 and a Geforce 4 Ti, then went back to ATI. I had stuttering issues with the Geforce 3 and 4 then the fx series came out and I didn't like so I went back to ATI and have had no issues since. I use the CCC to control graphic settings, video settings and I use Overdrive. With the 5850 I now use Afterburner for fan/OC control.

My fan on the 5850 went a few weeks ago, so I put the 3870s back in and was interested in testing the CF'd cards in Windows 7 with my Gigabyte 790fx board. In 3dmark06 the 5850 stock gave me around 18k, and with an OC I was getting 20,400. The 3870's are getting 17k stock and 18k with an OC. So crossfire has come a long way since first introduced, but I have no recent experience with nVidia's drivers and control panel.
 
The last nvidia card I owned was a 8800GTS 640, and while its drivers were not perfect I found them convenient and easy to use. Game profiles and whatnot are nice. Switching to my 4870 was great for performance but I certainly found myself liking CCC less than the NV Control Panel. I definitely missed the game profiles.

Worse yet, I seem to find myself in a situation where I can neither upgrade nor uninstall my 10.3 cats... The uninstaller fails to do anything, and installing a new version fails also. I'm too lazy to take the time to fix this the hard way.

That said, I'm reluctant to purchase an nvidia product as a replacement. Maybe I've been reading too much SA but I would feel guilty supporting that company with all the crap they've been pulling lately.
 
I'm on an ATi card and I miss the game profiles too; they're nice for old games and new games that don't support AA.
 
Kaldskryke said:
The last nvidia card I owned was a 8800GTS 640, and while its drivers were not perfect I found them convenient and easy to use. Game profiles and whatnot are nice. Switching to my 4870 was great for performance but I certainly found myself liking CCC less than the NV Control Panel. I definitely missed the game profiles.

Worse yet, I seem to find myself in a situation where I can neither upgrade nor uninstall my 10.3 cats... The uninstaller fails to do anything, and installing a new version fails also. I'm too lazy to take the time to fix this the hard way.

That said, I'm reluctant to purchase an nvidia product as a replacement. Maybe I've been reading too much SA but I would feel guilty supporting that company with all the crap they've been pulling lately.
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Wendig0 said:
I'm on an ATi card and I miss the game profiles too; they're nice for old games and new games that don't support AA.
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http://www.radeonpro.info/

something ATi needs to implement... NOW!
 
I LOVED Nvidia's game profiles, they were the shit. I had a few problems with them though, they definitly did not save any new settings after I plugged a 7800GTX in my machine and upgraded the drivers. Was so weird then a driver revision later it worked again.
 
SixtyWattMan said:
Wow I'll be trying this out over the weekend. I too miss game profiles from my 8800GT.
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Works great. The only downside is the the AA and Crossfire profile compatibility tweak doesn't work for Steam games since it renames the .exe when it's first ran.
 
ATI have an updater tool so that crossfire profiles don't have to wait until a driver release, you can download it from their site and run it to get crossfire profiles for games quite quickly.

I've not had any significant problems with my 5970 for crossfire support, what few i've had are not ATIs fault, people like rockstar breaking crossfire by patching their own games.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
ATI have an updater tool so that crossfire profiles don't have to wait until a driver release, you can download it from their site and run it to get crossfire profiles for games quite quickly.
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Do you have a link to this? Because all I've found on their site is the ATI crossfire profiles, which you have to install as it gets updated (usually monthly.)
 
Crossfire has a few problems.
Active DP->HDMI cables are rarely problem-free.
Eyefinity in general has a lot of problems.
Crossfire+Eyefinity have severe problems most of the time.

OTOH... Nvidia doesn't have or appear to have plans for a hardware Eyefinity feature - their stuff only works in software. We already have SoftTH for software-based multimonitor gaming.

The drivers are not bad if you want single-monitor gaming. The Eyefinity stuff, though... there's no sense that the driver team is making progress, each patch breaks as much as it fixes and there are still very important features that havn't been implemented, like 5x1 portrait support..
 
Dan_D said:
I wouldn't say that necessarily. In 2D gaming SLI isn't scaling at all past two GPUs. Scaling beyond two has been horrific with NVIDIA GPUs in the past so that's nothing new. Its been bad for both companies but slightly worse on ATI's side.
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Check the latest 10.7a drivers, which are reported to improve things. Someone's got to have a quadfire setup and enough time to run serious benchmarks... unless gaming sites really do only post when coming out of NDA.
 
Squalish said:
Check the latest 10.7a drivers, which are reported to improve things. Someone's got to have a quadfire setup and enough time to run serious benchmarks... unless gaming sites really do only post when coming out of NDA.
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I've got a Quadfire setup and an Eyefinity setup, any particular benchmarks you're looking for?
 
UG_PL said:
Jesus Christ , how much did you pay for that rig? :eek:
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He must have a few of these rolling around in his pocket:

100_wad.jpg
 
Ulysses 31 said:
I've got a Quadfire setup and an Eyefinity setup, any particular benchmarks you're looking for?
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We are looking to see if the latest drivers actually propel 5970 CrossfireX scaling to something beyond a laughable and useless state.
 
I'm in the group that says single card drivers are fine from both camps but when your tlaking about Multi GPU then nVidia wins every time. It's bad when 460 SLI can beat/keep up with 5870's in crossfire.
 
I have run the 1900 and 4000 series cards and have had trouble with only 1 ati driver and it was the 10.7 driver.
 
I'm not a driver guru but why would CFX be having issues with the 10.6, 10.7 and 10.7a drivers. This just blows my mind and makes AMD look like amateurs. Why does adding new stuff break things that were already working?
 
Cat 10.8 is scheduled for mid next week

- Posted by catalystmaker on twitter
9:26 AM Aug 16th
 
Short response to TQ:
No.

Long response:
Not really, as long as you plan sticking with single-gpu configurations. This is where ATI really puts the effort in. Their CFX drivers go from great to crap all over the place, and are a lot worse than Nvidia in this regard. I think this is because Nvidia tends to market to the enthusiast, and multi-GPU is very much an enthusiast option. ATI sticks more towards the budget and price/performance gamers, who typically won't be running multiple GPUs. In the long run, it benefits Nvidia to spend money making their SLI drivers scale incredibly.... and not so much on ATIs end, so they don't.

Additionally, Nvidia really focuses on the workstation environment.... and now that those cards support SLI, we should see some changes based on things they learn from that segment.
 
next-Jin said:
I'm in the group that says single card drivers are fine from both camps but when your tlaking about Multi GPU then nVidia wins every time. It's bad when 460 SLI can beat/keep up with 5870's in crossfire.
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Not EVERY time. 5770 crossfire scales very well, for instance. It's the 58xx cards that don't scale well with current drivers.

Due to microstutter, power/noise/heat issues, I am not a big fan of multi-GPU... the microstutter in particular. But I understand crossfire users' frustrations!
 
blastingcap said:
Due to microstutter, power/noise/heat issues, I am not a big fan of multi-GPU... the microstutter in particular. But I understand crossfire users' frustrations!
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Microstutter is nearly impossible to achieve with modern cards/drivers/chipsets.

I've run 3 SLI setups (260s, 470s, 480s), on the x58, and only seen microstutter in 1 game: Half-Life 2. Even then, it was only at 1 spot on 1 map.
 
blastingcap said:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...stuttering-on-the-Radeon-HD-4870-X2/Practice/
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PCGH said:
It is a Beta state piece of software... Catalyst 8.7.

The frametimes below are taken from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, which we upgraded with the Fakefactory Cinematic Mod 8. In order to receive low framerates, we activated 24x CFAA (8x MSAA plus CFAA and Edge Detection) and 16:1 AF

... we convinced ourselves that the stuttering was there,...

But not everyone notices the problem. A lot of people don't even recognize the micro stuttering and therefore don't see any differences to normal situations

To be fair, we have to admit, it takes such demanding settings to bring the HD 4870 X2 to her knees
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Just saying. Basically only settings that will smash framerates to begin with, would cause problems. ON ANCIENT DRIVERS.

EDIT: I know it's a German-->English translator working the job, but you still get the point. If this was Google Translate doing the work, then I would be worried. However, it's one of the editors.
 
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