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Drivers: NVidia vs AMD

Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other for me. They are both equally great/shitty... lol

I've had issues with both. What I notice is that AMD is slower with getting ahead of driver issues that may show in "the latest hot title". But on the other hand, I have to turn off SLI to get rid of crashes in Mass Effect 2 (replaying the trilogy).
 
Right now for a desktop AMDs have been hit or miss lately. They've been improving but they seem to go a few steps back before the take one step foward.

Right now on my HTPC I'm having a few issues with going to nvidia.

In all honesty they both have their issues. When it comes to compatibility especially older titles I think nvidia is slightly better.

Having had both alot of the times the "driver" issues are usually caused by faulty hardware. I had a HIS 5870 that would crash all the time and piss me off. Swore up and down it was the drivers. Comes to find out it was bad hardware cuz if I downclocked the GPU and memory it would work great. Thats the same the nvidia hardware I've had in the past also.
 
I've only ever had minor issues with both camps (or at least what I would consider minor to me). I skipped Vista entirely so that eliminated a lot of Nvidia headache for sure from all the complaining I've read.

AMD wise the issues I've had have been:

With the older drivers (I stress older because I haven't had this issue for say half a year or more now) I would some times get glitches when I would install new ones on top of with out removing the old ones first. Things like Video settings being blank and unchangeable and the Overdrive tab not showing my 4870x2's second GPU etc.

Games wise the only annoying issue I had that got fixed by Blizzard in a subsequent patch was during Classic WoW, they released a patch and Searing Gorge zone (and reports of BWL, although I never encountered it there when I was raiding) would cause my 9800pro to with in seconds or minutes spit out a VPU recovery error, luckily I didn't get stuck in the zone and need a GM to teleport me out but it did happen to others.

Currently the only game issue I really have is that to play Homeworld 2 I have to use V-sync or other wise the game behaves oddly (can't rotate camera etc.) which I hate due to the input lag.

I'd say AMD needs to get more work done for making crossfire profiles available at a games release as that seems to be the #1 complaint by all and it has effected me occasionally, Nvidia seems to be doing okay, as long as they don't release drivers again that cause fans to stop spinning and cause hardware fail. :p
 
I've always appreciated being able to set vsync and pre-rendered frames straight from the Nvidia control panel. That alone is worth commending.
 
AMd drivers are fine, Nvidia drivers are fine. AMD are a bit slower to get crossfire support for games out but in single card games both companies are about the same. A lot of the problem is perception too, some users had bad experiences and will always hold that against whatever company they buy off.

I know car analogies suck, lol, but a lot of the stuff I see about drivers reminds me about my father and his love for any Toyota car. He always waxed on about how reliable they were and all that. But yet he had nothing but trouble with several Toyota cars that he brought, in the garage the whole time, so much so that we finally convinced him to buy a volvo. It broke down once and my Dad said he would never buy volvo again and should have stuck with toyota because they never break down.

I guess what I am trying to say is that if you really like one brand over another, what might be a really annoying issue with the brand you hate isn't an problem at all with brand you like. not saying there is anything wrong with that at all, everybody has there favorites, it's natural.
 
reaper12 said:
AMd drivers are fine, Nvidia drivers are fine. AMD are a bit slower to get crossfire support for games out but in single card games both companies are about the same. A lot of the problem is perception too, some users had bad experiences and will always hold that against whatever company they buy off.

I know car analogies suck, lol, but a lot of the stuff I see about drivers reminds me about my father and his love for any Toyota car. He always waxed on about how reliable they were and all that. But yet he had nothing but trouble with several Toyota cars that he brought, in the garage the whole time, so much so that we finally convinced him to buy a volvo. It broke down once and my Dad said he would never buy volvo again and should have stuck with toyota because they never break down.

I guess what I am trying to say is that if you really like one brand over another, what might be a really annoying issue with the brand you hate isn't an problem at all with brand you like. not saying there is anything wrong with that at all, everybody has there favorites, it's natural.
Click to expand...

That's a good one and likely the case.
 
I used to buy ATI cards all the time (going back to the AIW days) but their drivers are what drove me to NV after having had enough issues.

NV hasn't been flawless (neither one is), but I've had pretty smooth sailing since using NV hardware and drivers and see no reason to go back to AMD atm.

I do prefer the NV driver config over the current AMD one, but it's not something I mess with a lot after initial setup either usually.
 
I've had issues with both, but it would really only be fair to compare my last two GPU generations. With my 4870 (single GPU then crossfire) I had zero issues. CF didn't scale as well as it should have, but nothing game breaking. With my GTX 460's i've had BSOD's, mysteriously uninstalling drivers, and too many CTD's to count in BF3. I guess I can never really tell if they're down to the drivers all the time, but I can say that switching driver versions has mitigated some problems and caused others.. so the drivers have some effect. I'm not giving AMD a pass since its clear that they've got lots of problems and they seem slower to fix issues in general, but I've been extremely disappointed with nvidia's vaunted drivers. Bottom line for me is: software is software and can be patched.. buy the best hardware, which is why i'll probably be returning to nV when they get the 680 in stock
 
In single card/gpu configs, I have never had more than minor niggles here and there from either camp. Oh well, listening to some, I would think neither company can make a card that has working drivers.
 
Final8ty said:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038591690&postcount=28
Click to expand...

interesting to see it's not just AMD. Most of the crashes i had with my 7970's are a thing of the past now (at least afaik). I have my fingers crossed that it will remain like that and, preferably, improve with coming driver releases.

There still are a couple of small, yet very annoying things that remain unsolved.

- youtube (and any other site that uses flash player for that matter) has a chance to let my display driver crash. I can still play any game i wish, use any graphical application i want (at least the ones i tested). yet trying to play one thing with flash player will result in a BSOD. Luckily this is very rare (only happened 3 times or so since i got the cards).

- playing alot of vids with flash player in one run will inevitably result in at least one white background with an exclamation mark

- allowing my monitor to go into standby mode is dangerous and can result in something that i can't call anything else but corrupted.

- when i go check my audio devices i have about 18-ish audio devices from amd which occasionaly cause my audio drivers to fail and force my computer to switch to another sound output. The only solution i found so far is to reboot...

There are more issues like that, these are just the ones that come to mind.

I can't really speak for nvidia though, i have only ever owned 2 pcs that are noteworthy of which only one i build myself.
Both those systems had AMD cards in them (the first one having an x1300 and the latter cf HD4890's and now CF 7970's).

The reason that i was so surprised about theses issues is because my crossfired 4890's never gave me any trouble up to the moment they started dieing.

I guess i'll just have to hang on to these for a bit longer and hope that AMD get their ass in gear to give us some proper drivers.
 
JOSHSKORN said:
I'd like to know from user experience, which card has the better drivers and why. That is, less prone to crashes.

In my current PC (purchased 2007), which has an NVIDIA card, seems to have more issues than my previous build (2003), which at the time had an ATI (now AMD) card. Both PCs, at one point in time, I had upgraded the video card, but went from ATI to ATI in my first build, and from NVIDIA to NVIDIA in my second build.
Click to expand...

There is not a single videocard manufacture that has given me an error free driver to this date (well maybe matrox). I am actually perplexed how I can switch from AMD to Nvidia to Nvidia to AMD and have little to no issues in transition. Most of the reported issues are more than likely user error. One thing I like about the new Nvidia drivers they give you the option to clean install the drivers. That is one option which I feel AMD should also incorporate in their driver package. I am not a big fan of driver cleaners and such. But for the sake of stability, nuking any videocard driver related to a previous install, is a must when issues arise from a bad uninstall.

Don't forget about hardware other than your videocards giving your issue. That includes overclocking your videocard,memory,cpu and voltage regulation above specifications. Bad overclocks can crash your drivers. For your issues with your old Nvidia build, you should try a clean reformat and see if that fixes the instability (with the latest motherboard BIOS and at default settings).

So if you're looking for which one is better? Neither! Pick the latest and greatest videocard(s) and pray to zultan that you will have a stable videocard/powersupply to handle this.
 
No controlled tests has ever established that one is better than others combined with tendency of ppl liking to hype what they own and bag what they don't I'd feel comfortable with any vendor.

Actually, I don't think there's a better testament to the stability of nV/AMD video cards than the fact that professional reviewers use both in their personal systems just depending what's faster that week. They get cards by the tray load, free, and can run whatever they want and run both without issue.

Most regular people are idiots and think they know more than they do when their whole computer is probably messed up so I don't trust them. I trust the pros who recommend and use both.
 
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Final8ty said:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038591690&postcount=28
Click to expand...

I've been running 2x SLI 680 since March 23rd and 3x SLI since March 31st with an overclock of 132 power/100 GPU/200 memory on both configurations and have yet to experience a BSOD running the latest games in both 2D and 3D which I know you don't care for on this aging x58 platform with a Windows 7 install date of December 19, 2009.

WP_000205%20(2).jpg
 
ZoNe said:
No controlled tests has ever established that one is better than others combined with tendency of ppl liking to hype what they own and bag what they don't I'd feel comfortable with any vendor.

Actually, I don't think there's a better testament to the stability of nV/AMD video cards than the fact that professional reviewers use both in their personal systems just depending what's faster that week. They get cards by the tray load, free, and can run whatever they want and run both without issue.

Most regular people are idiots and think they know more than they do when their whole computer is probably messed up so I don't trust them. I trust the pros who recommend and use both.
Click to expand...

What about the poll in this forum? Do 100+ people not know which is better?
 
biggles said:
What about the poll in this forum? Do 100+ people not know which is better?
Click to expand...
Uh, no. A poll is not a statistical study of which produces more issues... What it will tell you is what the people voting THINK is the case, whether or not its actually true.
 
Both are equal, both can have problems, both are not perfect, both will crash certain systems. Both will confuse idiot first time users depending on the level of idiot involved. Both will have features that idiot users dont understand yet check off in the control panel which will make certain games unplayable and for both comapnies the idiot user will blame the software instead of his lack of understanding regarding which features he/she chooses to apply.
 
never had any kind of problems with Amd drivers and i was on both sides.
 
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