ATI Drivers Still Archaic

Dan_D said:
I have always had problems with the ATI drivers causing issues with certain monitors. That is a long and drawn out story, but basically after installing the ATI drivers, from the Radeon X800XT-PE to the Radeon 4870X2, the system won't output any video signal over DVI to certain monitors. One monitor is my Viewsonic VP201s which is an old monitor at this point, but you get the idea. I've seen this even with more modern displays, but I've never had the problem with my Dell 3007WFP though.

As for game issues, I had issues with the 4870 X2 in Crysis on multiple systems. So it wasn't just isolated to my Skulltrail setup. The best ATI cards for me were the X1950XTX and the X1950Pro. I had those in a couple of different systems and even with Crossfire enabled on both of them, everything always worked very well for me. So I'm not saying I've always had problems with ATI drivers in all scenarios. Not at all. However there are certain irritating problems that I've never seen a resolution to such as the DVI issues. Then again, I've heard NVIDIA cards have that problem in some cases too. I've never seen it though.

I won't normally hesitate to put ATI cards in my systems provided that they are providing the best performance possible for my money. The last time that was the case was when the 4870 X2's came out and I ended up returning one and selling the other one off because I couldn't make them work.
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The monitor issue might be an issue for you but I also had a problem with the way nVidia driver handles the EDID info especially when I disconnect my monitor and connect it back again. I never had this issue with my ATI driver. This is the main reason why I switched from nVidia to ATI. I need to disconnect and reconnect my monitor often because my PC is sharing the same monitor with my PS3.

What kind of problem did you encounter with your X2 and Crysis? Is it a performance issue or something trivial such as crashing? If it was just a performance issue, God knows how many performance issues that I encountered when I had my 7950GTs and 6800 Ultras in SLI but I won't make a general statement saying that ATI driver is better than nVidia driver just because I had some problems with the nVidia driver. To be fair, I also had a fair amount of BSODs caused by nv4disp.dll but I still don't think that a driver from a company is better than the other.

Btw what other issue did you have with your ATI driver other than what you have mentioned before? What other ATI cards did you use before this? Did you use any HD 3800 card? Your X1950 cards didn't give you any problem right?
 
You know it doesn't matter if Nvidia's driver are perfect or terrible, it doesn't change the fact that ATI drivers will always have issues or sometimes have poor driver releases.
 
because my PC is sharing the same monitor with my PS3
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That's another reason I love my 3008WFP. I have my PS3 connected HDMI and two comps DVI for gaming/folding. I had to go DVI/VGA on my 2407WFP for running the two comps for the other cards folding. :p
 
alg7_munif said:
The monitor issue might be an issue for you but I also had a problem with the way nVidia driver handles the EDID info especially when I disconnect my monitor and connect it back again. I never had this issue with my ATI driver. This is the main reason why I switched from nVidia to ATI. I need to disconnect and reconnect my monitor often because my PC is sharing the same monitor with my PS3.

What kind of problem did you encounter with your X2 and Crysis? Is it a performance issue or something trivial such as crashing? If it was just a performance issue, God knows how many performance issues that I encountered when I had my 7950GTs and 6800 Ultras in SLI but I won't make a general statement saying that ATI driver is better than nVidia driver just because I had some problems with the nVidia driver. To be fair, I also had a fair amount of BSODs caused by nv4disp.dll but I still don't think that a driver from a company is better than the other.

Btw what other issue did you have with your ATI driver other than what you have mentioned before? What other ATI cards did you use before this? Did you use any HD 3800 card? Your X1950 cards didn't give you any problem right?
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I never used a 3800 series Radeon. My problems with Crysis were performance related. I got only 1/4 or less of the performance I should have had. I expected the 4870 X2's to be slower in Crysis than the Geforce GTX 280's are, but I didn't expect it to be completely unplayable at 1680x1050 on medium settings. And yes, my X1950Pro and X1950XTX cards were all perfect for me.
 
bfellow said:
You know it doesn't matter if Nvidia's driver are perfect or terrible, it doesn't change the fact that ATI drivers will always have issues or sometimes have poor driver releases.
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Yeah and so will nVidia. So what's your point? Any driver will have issues. Period.

Bottom line is everybody faces issues with one vendor or another. I've been on both sides of the fence before and I've had far more nVidia issues then ATI. Does that make nVidia drivers suck? Nope. Just means they didn't work for me. Does that make ATI's drivers better? Nope. Just means they work for me. And I only care about what works for me.

Would the fact that nVidia has given me plenty of headaches in the past make me think twice about owning of their cards again? Maybe a little. But in the end Price to Performance wins. If nVidia has the best bang for the buck when it's upgrade time then I go with them. If I have issues I'll go back to ATI. If ATI has the best bang for the buck then I stay with ATI. If I have issues I'll switch to nVidia.

This is why we have multiple choices for brand of video card. People can try one vendor and go to the next if they have issues. It's simple. It's easy.

Why the fanboys still get in pissing contests about driver quality is beyond me.
 
Dan_D said:
I never used a 3800 series Radeon. My problems with Crysis were performance related. I got only 1/4 or less of the performance I should have had. I expected the 4870 X2's to be slower in Crysis than the Geforce GTX 280's are, but I didn't expect it to be completely unplayable at 1680x1050 on medium settings. And yes, my X1950Pro and X1950XTX cards were all perfect for me.
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If the problem is with ATI than why do many others run the game great at 1920x1200 using the 4870x2? The problem is with your hardware/software. You must have some conflict somwhere in your system. Maybe the board doesn't like it, or your CPU is a bottleneck, who knows. But if it was the drivers it would not work well on anyones system not just urs.
 
mikecoscia said:
If the problem is with ATI than why do many others run the game great at 1920x1200 using the 4870x2? The problem is with your hardware/software. You must have some conflict somwhere in your system. Maybe the board doesn't like it, or your CPU is a bottleneck, who knows. But if it was the drivers it would not work well on anyones system not just urs.
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I'm not going to get into what my problems were. There are multiple threads on it already. My point is that I didn't have problems with NVIDIA drivers and I did have problems with ATI drivers. In general, my experiences point to that on more than one occasion. I'm just sharing my experiences that's all. I've had plenty of problems with both ATI and NVIDIA and plenty of good experiences as well. There are things i do like and don't like about each camp's drivers.
 
I was plagued with blue screens when I first got my 8800gt. Drivers are always going to have their problems.
 
I've used both NVIDIA and ATI and both of them have their issues, but in my opinion I prefer NVIDIA's drivers, as some of you mentioned, they are less problematic. And yes, I think ATI's CCC really does suck, wish they never replaced it with the classic Control Centre which was almost perfect. Right now I'm using this third party tool called ATI Tray Tool which works perfectly, no need for that annoying CCC to be installed - which is bloated and increases your boot time which is more annoying.
 
Open CCC, click preference and enable System Tray Menu. Right click the ATI icon in the system tray and change any setting that you want, I don't know what is less bloated than that. Changing a setting is just two clicks away, one is the right click on the tray icon, the second one is to choose the setting that you want.
 
Very happy 4870X2 owner here
From my experience, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead and COD all run fine and stable.
This is my first dual GPU setup and I like the experience so far. Nevertheless, I would rather have a single GPU setup but I was not satisfied with a GTX 280...
 
RadXge said:
Very happy 4870X2 owner here
From my experience, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead and COD all run fine and stable.
This is my first dual GPU setup and I like the experience so far. Nevertheless, I would rather have a single GPU setup but I was not satisfied with a GTX 280...
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Same here. X2 in cod5 rarely dips below 55fps 1920x1200 maxed out. Never had the gtx280 though. Be interested to try it out and see where it stands but don't plan on downgrading to it any time soon.
 
RadXge said:
Very happy 4870X2 owner here
From my experience, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead and COD all run fine and stable.
This is my first dual GPU setup and I like the experience so far. Nevertheless, I would rather have a single GPU setup but I was not satisfied with a GTX 280...
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The X2 is my first dual GPU card and the experience is very pleasing. I've used CF and SLi before but the X2 really makes a difference.
 
I made the switch form a GTX280 to 4870x2 and had MUCH more problems with the NVidia drivers (BSOD, random reboots...) with Vista 64.

8.8, 8.9, 8.10, 8.11, 8.12. Not a single problem when installing, and also when playing my games. Made the switch to Intel i7 1 month ago, same results. No problems. :)
 
"developing any kind of software is time consuming

develop, test, fix test and release within 1 month is not an easy task :p

so that basically means, each driver update is really a patch for the last update!"

I agree with you on this, completely...but shouldn't they slow down a bit with releasing new hardware..what i mean is..develop the product, test it, make sure that product works then release it, talk to game producers to make sure they follow with the technology, sell it make money...invest money on new technology and so on...

Unfortunately both of them fighting for performance lead...spreading crap drivers around, forcing people to buy expensive technologies in order to get f%^* 30 fps in Crysis..madness....

So both companies suck, sometimes ATI suck more, sometimes Nvidia...in the end of the day they are not like those little companies from 80's & 90's who cared about products...

Sorry for moaning..had a bad day :p
 
I've had more annoying driver problems with my Nvidia 8800 Ultra then with my Ati 3850 AGP. One particular recent case was me trying find out my max overclock and then testing out the clocks in demanding games. So lets say for example Crysis fails after 20 min and I have to restart the pc, I boot up, and even if the card is at stock clocks Nvdriver fails right away if I start up any 3D app. Oddly enough the only thing that fixed the problem was the reinstall of the latest nv driver, so go figure. In comparison if my overclock failed with 3850 AGP I'd just have to restart and would have no problem starting up a 3d app / game afterwards.
 
i've been using ati drivers since 1999 (since i started playing counter-strike) and the original radeon. I've yet to encounter some of these errors people speak of, and coincidentally everytime i've upgraded my pc, ATi's video cards were either the best to get, or i got a killer deal on them ( eg 2x 3870's for $300 when each one was for $230ish)
 
Dan_D said:
Well I've had more problems with ATI drivers than that. I'm just generalizing over the totality of my experiences with both video card brands. I've had more game specific problems and issues with ATI drivers than I have from using NVIDIA cards and drivers. Another difference is that when an NVIDIA driver sucks, I usually only have to wait a week or two tops for a newer beta driver which fixes the issues 90% of the time. With ATI I'm guaranteed to wait at least a month for a new driver which only resolves the issue about 40% of the time.
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I remember the many pages to that thread quite clearly, where you, I, and many others were having fits with the drivers and 4870x2.
 
9200, x800XT, X1800XT, HD3870X2
Those are all my ATi cards and not a single issue with any of them.
Some people will get fucked up driver situations and some people wont.
Neither company has better drivers.
Whenever i heard that i just think that particular user simply cannot understand how CCC or the NV control panel works. Thus User error.
 
I haven't had a single issue with either Nivida's or ATi's drivers. I don't fuck around with mine though. If I want AA, I change it in game. If I want vsync, I change it in game. People bitch about lack of profiles from ATI and I wonder what the fuck ancient game they are trying to force AA on.
 
I've never had a problem with either Nvidia or ATI drivers.

Like the poster above, I change game settings in the game and not at desktop about to get into the game.

I remember playing Fear with AA on for both ATI/Nvidia cards, and for roughly a hour or so both were stable and no problems.
 
there really isn't anything good about either company's drivers.

the biggest issue i have with both is opengl problems. just because not many games use opengl anymore, doesn't mean it's ok to make your drivers so that opengl games aren't enjoyable.

as for their customer care program, i don't know why they have it. I don't waste my time contacting them, because they don't fix anything. they shouldn't need one anyway, they should just make drivers that are functional and that don't make pc games look like wii games.

ati's edaa is a great idea, but it rarely works.

neither nvidia nor ati give you any good options in their drivers, neither care about older games. The whole idea about unified shaders is that they're easy and completely programmable, yet they don't take advantage of them.

i don't play that many games because the drivers are so fucked up. It just bothers me to play a game without acceptable aa and traa and it bothers me to play a game, especially a pc one, with filtering optimizations and w/o vsync and w/o triple buffering on.

If I wanted games to look as shitty as nvidia and ati's drivers make them, then I'd just play a wii.

I think the reason larrabee is taking so long, is probably because intel doesn't want to have dysfunctional drivers like nvidia and ati do and because they hopefully want it to be possible to play pc games with higher than wii-image quality. It's been impossible for a true hardcore gamer to do that since 3dfx folded.
 
If ATI drivers are archaic, why do I see a lot of people in this thread with ATI card in their sig saying that they are not having any problem? Most people who say that ATI drivers are problematic in this thread have nVidia card in their sig. I mean, how do they know that the drivers are problematic when they are not using an ATI card? :confused:
 
Is this guy for real?

no2censorship said:
there really isn't anything good about either company's drivers.

the biggest issue i have with both is opengl problems. just because not many games use opengl anymore, doesn't mean it's ok to make your drivers so that opengl games aren't enjoyable.

as for their customer care program, i don't know why they have it. I don't waste my time contacting them, because they don't fix anything. they shouldn't need one anyway, they should just make drivers that are functional and that don't make pc games look like wii games.

ati's edaa is a great idea, but it rarely works.

neither nvidia nor ati give you any good options in their drivers, neither care about older games. The whole idea about unified shaders is that they're easy and completely programmable, yet they don't take advantage of them.

i don't play that many games because the drivers are so fucked up. It just bothers me to play a game without acceptable aa and traa and it bothers me to play a game, especially a pc one, with filtering optimizations and w/o vsync and w/o triple buffering on.

If I wanted games to look as shitty as nvidia and ati's drivers make them, then I'd just play a wii.

I think the reason larrabee is taking so long, is probably because intel doesn't want to have dysfunctional drivers like nvidia and ati do and because they hopefully want it to be possible to play pc games with higher than wii-image quality. It's been impossible for a true hardcore gamer to do that since 3dfx folded.
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First, NVIDIA's OpenGL driver's are generally considered superior to ATi's (only in performance). So, if you're having many problems with OpenGL apps they probably aren't games so perhaps you should be looking into a Quadro or FireGL card instead.

Second, how do games not take advantage of modern unified shading architectures? It's all done in hardware and in drivers. The only thing I see not being utilized more is DirectX 10, but that is the fault of developers and not hardware. You fail for not doing your research about how a unified architecture works.

Third, I agree that sometimes drivers from both sides can be problematic at times (I've found ATi to be more so in the past than NV) but that doesn't mean that they're "shit." As long as a game works and is rendered correctly and efficiently than that's all that matters. If you need that much IQ then go buy a GTX 295 or a 4870X2. Most are usually content with less.

As for Larrabee, I think the reason why it's taking so long is that they're probably still figuring out how to make it work and work well. Best to leave it in the oven until it's done anyways, the savvy market will shun it if it's a flop.

And finally, if PCs still had image quality like the Wii we would still be using GeForce 2 GTS cards, so you might want to revise that statement.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Is this guy for real?



First, NVIDIA's OpenGL driver's are generally considered superior to ATi's (only in performance). So, if you're having many problems with OpenGL apps they probably aren't games so perhaps you should be looking into a Quadro or FireGL card instead.

Um, they are games.

Second, how do games not take advantage of modern unified shading architectures? It's all done in hardware and in drivers. The only thing I see not being utilized more is DirectX 10, but that is the fault of developers and not hardware. You fail for not doing your research about how a unified architecture works.

EDAA is done thru shaders. Also, they don't make use of the shaders to emulate features (dithering, w-buffer, palletted textures among other things) dropped from hardware necessary for older games, and if they do, then not that well.

Third, I agree that sometimes drivers from both sides can be problematic at times (I've found ATi to be more so in the past than NV) but that doesn't mean that they're "shit." As long as a game works and is rendered correctly and efficiently than that's all that matters. If you need that much IQ then go buy a GTX 295 or a 4870X2. Most are usually content with less.
The drivers give the same image quality for my 8800gt as they would for a gtx295. Not sure what your point is there.
As for Larrabee, I think the reason why it's taking so long is that they're probably still figuring out how to make it work and work well. Best to leave it in the oven until it's done anyways, the savvy market will shun it if it's a flop.

And finally, if PCs still had image quality like the Wii we would still be using GeForce 2 GTS cards, so you might want to revise that statement.
I was speaking figuratively.
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Thanks=]
 
I have never liked ATI drivers. I've used several cards from the 9800Pro up to the HD4850 and have always liked Nvidia's better.

I almost always go with performance though. I've never let a driver issue keep me from buying a better price/performance card. I'm debating the 4850/9800GTX+/4870 decision right now.
 
alg7_munif said:
If ATI drivers are archaic, why do I see a lot of people in this thread with ATI card in their sig saying that they are not having any problem? Most people who say that ATI drivers are problematic in this thread have nVidia card in their sig. I mean, how do they know that the drivers are problematic when they are not using an ATI card? :confused:
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Probably because they spent $300 on something and don't want to admit that it has any faults, as it would reflect poorly on their decision making skills.
 
i've only encountered significant issues with 7.x catalyst drivers. as a user who owns video cards from both camps, i must admit that i like the frequency by which nvidia releases their drivers. the fact that catalyst didn't allow easy fan speed manipulation until very recently is absolutely deplorable, although recently nvidia's on-again-off-again fan speed control is fucking irritating.
 
I own both brand of Card..

and actually I am having more problem with nVidia's driver...

not so sure what cause the problem, but that stupid nv**.dll keep giving me BSOD and some random reboot, sometime I have to reboot to make GFX work normal again...

and it seem I am not the only one who having this trouble, but with a lot of other users.....

after I got my new rig with 4870CF, I seriously haven't got into any crash problem at all...

the only part that I hate is when L4D's CF support was complete useless back in 8.10, but fixed in 8.11.. due to new game release, I dont really have much problem with it since they fix it right away..

But with nVidia.... If you want to talk how bad the driver is, you will be staring with BSOD/Random Reboot all the time...
 
i get nv4dsp.dll errors when the cards overheat, are running unstable overclocks, or are not being adequately powered i.e the psu is insufficient. i've never had an nv4dsp.dll error that i didn't have a fix for. i was wrong about the 7.x catalyst drivers causing problems, it was the 8.3 xp catalyst that constantly ran into the 'internal failure' macrovision problem that spanned 3 different ati builds. and when i say i own cards from both camps, i mean at the same time.

Picture069.jpg
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My ATI CCC settings just don't stick.

I set 4x aa, I get 0x aa.
I set 16x AF, I sometimes get it, I sometimes get 0x AF.

I switched to ATT, and things have been peachy ever since.

Never had a problem with an nVidia driver... I've always felt their drivers were more solid.
 
rennyf77 said:
i get nv4dsp.dll errors when the cards overheat, are running unstable overclocks, or are not being adequately powered i.e the psu is insufficient. i've never had an nv4dsp.dll error that i didn't have a fix for. i was wrong about the 7.x catalyst drivers causing problems, it was the 8.3 xp catalyst that constantly ran into the 'internal failure' macrovision problem that spanned 3 different ati builds. and when i say i own cards from both camps, i mean at the same time.

Picture069.jpg
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My god man, nice setups. very clean. If I am not mistaken are those both Core I7 setups ?
 
i hate graphics drivers, from both camps. good example: i had been running 177.xx for nvidia without issue. was playing the witcher and notice some texture issues, so i thought i would update the driver as a possible solution (that wasn't it). however, when i went to the newest driver (181.2 or 182.x, something like that) suddenly my video wouldn't wake up properly from sleep mode. i had to reset to get video. went back to the new driver, good as new.

ati can be just as bad. old 3870x2 had seriously messed up texture issues in certain areas of crysis. my 4850's in xfire would scale well in about 50% of games.....
 
And I've had more issues with NV drivers than ATi. I bought an 8800GT and had more issues with the drivers than any of my previous ATi products. When the 4850 came out I was more than happy to dump the 8800GT to my secondary box.

Neither have been perfect, but I'll take ATi drivers over NV drivers.

My only complaint about game profiles is that they don't work for STEAM apps, and I have a lot of them. All STEAM apps point to the steam.exe, and then use a numbered command line switch to determine which game to launch. Adding this numbered parameter to command line with the steam.exe doesn't work, and there is no area to set optional startup parameters.
 
Simmonz said:
My god man, nice setups. very clean. If I am not mistaken are those both Core I7 setups ?
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you are correct sir. right now nvidia needs to fix their drivers to remedy the fallout 3 crashing in vista, and ati needs to get official drivers released that support cf in mirror's edge.
 
lloose said:
I haven't had a single issue with either Nivida's or ATi's drivers. I don't fuck around with mine though. If I want AA, I change it in game. If I want vsync, I change it in game. People bitch about lack of profiles from ATI and I wonder what the fuck ancient game they are trying to force AA on.
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Tons of games require CP AA forcing, and many others need it if you want to use AA modes not available in-game

Also, some games don't let you set v-sync in game either

So please back off your high horse, many of the best games are slightly older
 
chronicles of riddick is a great older game and it requires you to force aa from the drivers. can't wait to play dark athena.
 
Mikerocks2112 said:
No gaming profiles.

No way to force Triple Buffering in D3D.

If you enable AA in the drivers and AA in the game, AA will not work.

Adaptive AA gives graphical anomalies in some games.


I was a firm ATI believer through the 9800 to X850XT PE series until I upgraded to a 8800GTS G92. All those issues above were then finally resolved when I made the switch. So recently I decided to upgrade to a 4870 1gb. I thought for sure that the ATI drivers must be up to par with Nvidia by now....nope. Same old song and dance. I had to install 3rd party programs just to match the options given to me in the default nvidia drivers.

Morale of the story.... if you are on the green team thinking about making a switch....don't. You will just be disappointed with ATI's archaic and craptastic drivers. Until ATI includes/resolves some of the points I mentioned above, I will not buy their graphics cards.
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Amen. It makes me so mad too, because ATI cards are very badass. I just wish they'd get their shit together and make a good driver for once, or at least hire new/more people that could. I mean Nvidia isn't perfect, but damn.
 
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