Goodbye ATI, I'm coming over boys and girls

ATI???

I thought ATI was dead.


AMD is in charge now. AMD.
 
Ati really hasn't had it together driver wise since the 9700 and 9800 pro if you ask me, but even those had a few driver issues. But Nvidia certainly isn't exempt from it's issues.
 
drlawyer, I welcome you (6 months late) to the [H]ard Fourm!
Dunno if you have been lurking several years before or not.
Youre reply was well thought out, intellectual, and productive.
I was afraid you might just rail on me as a troll or AMD fanboy as certain other members sometimes like to do.
Anyways moving on.


I don't find any particular fault with tomshardware. They are a good "first stop" for reviews relating to benchmarking, equipment breakdowns and market comparisons. They are hardly the last stop. Let's call it a "beginner's guide". Rely exclusively on tomshardware at your peril, but that is true of any information source.
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Haha its ok that was more of a joke. I do agree its a somewhat decent beginners guide. Yet as youre next point states, I have much fear of those that rely exclusively on Toms.


I entirely agree with your second point. However, the reality is that a lot of people in the market do exactly that. Right or wrong, they rely on certain presumptions about series configurations to make "book by the cover" judgments about hardware. They should do their research before plopping down a large hunk of cash. With that being said, the companies know that. Are they obligated to educate their consumers? Only marginally, if at all. Is it illegal for them to rely on a consumer's likelihood to draw uninformed assumptions? No. Does that make them less slimy for manipulating that ignorance? No. I will grant you that AMD was more upfront about the numbering shift than it appears nVidia was. After the fact. They offered a passable excuse for doing it the way they did, but the reality is they could have preserved the existing numbering scheme and accomplished the same goal. But they're in business to push product, so I guess I can say I am not surprised by this move. I don't like it any better.
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We both agree that the 68x0 should have been the 67x0, sometimes reality doesnt work out that well though and we get what we get. As I said before (and you agree with) I have little if any pitty for the consumer that spends such a high amount of money on a product without doing any reasearch into its performance.
I also agree that marketing names should be more consistent and honest.
The AMD 68x0 situation has its complications that make it apparent that AMD did not change its lineup purely to profit of the tiny market that is people who buy GPUs in the 200-300 dollar range without study. They were marking a shift to a new naming scheme setup with the x9x0 series of cards being the new high end naming nomenclature.
Sometimes change is a difficult pill to swallow.
I do have to say that the Nvidia rebranding with the 8x00 series of GPUs was faaar worse. Being recycled and thrown into use for a seemingly neverending period of time. The difference being that Nvidia was rebranding the old generation GPU into a totaly new generation of GPU which it did not belong in.


Clearly he figured out what he was doing wrong and is now moving to correct it, by getting the 580.
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Something in his system was wrong. Thats not me saying it was just some user error. It could have been a issue in the registry, a faulty piece of hardware, an incompatible set of hardware, or some quirky conflicts that are extremely rare. He did solve his problem but to blame the GPU maker without isolating the problem is a rush to judgement.

Good luck Insano, enjoy the 'vaseline screen' look of Nvidia
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What are you even talking about...
Personally I find both AMD and Nvidia provide equal image, with the biggest factor not being the GPU but the monitor itself. This AMD has better 2D stuff to me is just nonsense. They are both equal in the image displayed natively. The only differences are in 3D rendering and whatever algorithim is applied (FXAA/MLAA) afterwards. That is the only area in which they compete for image quality (AA/AF)


Of course you will find less issues with Nvidia drivers since Nvidia has better drivers in my opinion.
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The evidence you provide is "opinion"...Thats just not enough I'm sorry.
They both have equal drivers (sGPU) from what I have seen year after year, after year.
The one time I remember the drivers actually getting compared was during Vistas first year. That test reported that Nvidia drivers crashed with more regularity than AMD drivers by an astonishing amount.
I believe Nvidia drivers were to blame for 60 or so % of serious crashes reported to Microsoft.

The AMD driver prob is hugely over exagerrated though and most of the issues are with dual cards.
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This I agree with more and even then I have issue with.
I will not speak for 79x0s series Crossfire, I have no experience with it what so ever.
I will speak for 38x0 series CF and 68x0 series CF.
They worked flawless for me. I never had a single issue that made a game unplayable beyond playing a game with too ambitious of settings (very high AA, SSAA, MLAA, etc etc)
 
Acer_Sheep said:
I had several ATi cards and I never had any issues with the drivers at all. If you keep getting artifacts, BSODs and crashes it's likely that it is not caused by drivers. Artifacts I had with ATi card but it was caused by bad VGA Bios. I also don't understand those who were having problems like that, how they were able to tell that it was caused by drivers? If you installed older drivers, the issue persisted and if you installed newest and it worked than it's ok and it's done, if not, than you can't be sure if it is caused by drivers. So I'm really curious about OP how he diagnosed his games were crashing because of ATi drivers.

The issues you posted can have very wide of reasons why they are happening, it can be failure of RAM, motherboard, PSU, graphics card and much more.

About WoW, I had long ago when I played wow also strange problem with crashing and after many months of research I found the issue was caused by bug triggered within AMD chipset, replacing motherboard fixed the issue.
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Indeed this is what i went through with one setup.
Memory & motherboard compatibility issues that can lead to CTD, Blue screen, driver has stopped responding from 3 to 8 times a day while gaming for 3 weeks to nail this one down.

OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 (OCZ3G1333LV4GK) (1333MHz)
Asus M4A79XTD Evo.
Passed memtest 12 hours, Passed Prime-95 8hours passed, Furmark passed, 3Dmark06 passed.
Changed the gfx card.
Drivers 10.4/ 10.5 hotfix/10.6.

Fire up WOW which is the only game the customer plays at the moment & instant multiple driver has stopped responding or sometimes hours or more would pass.

Put in some G.Skill RipJaw 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C8 & not had a single issue.
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This thread is ridiculous. You don't like AMD and are switching to nVidia, that's fantastic, but nobody cares.

Dual 7970's here and I'm having a great time, ZERO issues. Overclocked to 1125/1575 running stable in CFX.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
drlawyer, I welcome you (6 months late) to the [H]ard Fourm!
Dunno if you have been lurking several years before or not.
Youre reply was well thought out, intellectual, and productive.
I was afraid you might just rail on me as a troll or AMD fanboy as certain other members sometimes like to do.
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You are very gracious. I will endeavor to avoid any Ready, Fire, Aim replies in the future as I build out my legacy of forum posts. ;)

{NG}Fidel said:
Haha its ok that was more of a joke. I do agree its a somewhat decent beginners guide. Yet as youre next point states, I have much fear of those that rely exclusively on Toms.
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I gathered, and I agree. Tomshardware is one of those sites that is equal parts information source and industry shill. Fortunately, they take advertising dollars from all the industry players, so their bias is at least consistent. The information that I find there, to clarify, is largely accurate. I would simply categorize it as incomplete rather than inaccurate.




{NG}Fidel said:
We both agree that the 68x0 should have been the 67x0, sometimes reality doesnt work out that well though and we get what we get. As I said before (and you agree with) I have little if any pitty for the consumer that spends such a high amount of money on a product without doing any reasearch into its performance.
I also agree that marketing names should be more consistent and honest.
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"Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders" - Baz Lurhmann - "The Sunscreen Song"



{NG}Fidel said:
The AMD 68x0 situation has its complications that make it apparent that AMD did not change its lineup purely to profit of the tiny market that is people who buy GPUs in the 200-300 dollar range without study. They were marking a shift to a new naming scheme setup with the x9x0 series of cards being the new high end naming nomenclature.
Sometimes change is a difficult pill to swallow.
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That makes sense. I do wish that they had stayed with the original intent of making the x9x0 series exclusively the dual-core cards, reserving the x8x0 series for their top end single-GPU cards. That may not be realistic. And I suppose you are right - it is entirely possible that their intention was not malicious, just that the execution was sloppy. However, I still don't think that gives them a full pass - AMD has enough cash to hire a marketing team. If they intended to make a significant shift, they missed an opportunity to promote their product by really emphasizing what the change was and what it represented. It could have been something as simple as changing the brand from "Radeon HD" to "Radeon HDx" or something. <shrug> Not the first time a tech company missed the obvious.
 
fps4ever said:
Going from dual cards/chips back to a single video card usually fixes about 95% or more of the issues from either company.
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You would be surprised how many who switch brand and go from multi gpu to single at the same time forget that fact and proclaim that the brand they switched to is better because of less issues and forget that the issues before were mostly multi GPU related.
 
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You would be surprised how many who switch brand and go from multi gpu to single at the same time forget that fact and proclaim that the brand they switched to is better because of less issues and forget that the issues before were mostly multi GPU related.
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So fucking true. Honestly the GTX295 and 6870CF both were great but upon arrival to the next gen sGPU solution it didnt matter what company it was, the product always felt smoother or more predictable. I will say that I did throughly enjoy the mGPU setups, I am in no way trying to say they sucked.
 
-Sarcasim starting- But thats just impossible!!! How can a new piece of technology not simply just work with every other single hardware companies designs!
It just makes no sense! Especially since they do not collaborate on designs, that should just make things easier right!
I figure that all the endless combinations of systems and software and operating system should make things simple! -End sarcasim-

Still would recomend GTX680 SLi to a new pruchaser of GPUs.
 
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firas said:
well it wasn’t called All Trouble Inside for no reason :D welcome to the right side my friend, you’ll notice that this subforum is dead because its impossible to have problems with the green drivers, we just come here to share happy stories and welcome new converts. /maximum flamesuit on
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There are problems with drivers on both sides of the coin. Nvidia has however done a better job overall with their multi-GPU drivers.
 
NukeDukem said:
This thread is ridiculous. You don't like AMD and are switching to nVidia, that's fantastic, but nobody cares.

Dual 7970's here and I'm having a great time, ZERO issues. Overclocked to 1125/1575 running stable in CFX.
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If nobody cared this thread would not be 3 pages in length (as of the time of this posting).

OP: it would be useful to everyone if you could post in a month or so on your experience with the used gtx 580 in comparison to your old AMD card. Either confirming better experiences with the driver situation or not. Folks like me are ready to make the switch back to Nvidia and would like some reassurance that the gaming experience will work better for doing so.
 
sorry but someone with a preconception that ati drivers suck isn't going to offer a non biased opinion on the matter.

matter of fact, that's the last place I would look for advice on a purchase, that's just me though.
 
stealthy123 said:
sorry but someone with a preconception that ati drivers suck isn't going to offer a non biased opinion on the matter.

matter of fact, that's the last place I would look for advice on a purchase, that's just me though.
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Telling your experience with single card "drivers" vs crossfire is comparing apples and oranges as well.
 
Phoenixdancer said:
Lol this thread.

Nvidia has just as much problems with drivers and hardware as amd...
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No, they haven't. Here's a fun sample of older problems that drove me away from the 5870. Here's the owner of this site, Kyle, slamming AMD on opportunities lost with their drivers. nVidia isn't innocent either I'm sure but there seem to be a heck of a lot more satisfied people on the green team.
 
did you miss where Kyle also said he has had more problems with 680 sli than he did with 7970 crossfire?
 
It took AMD over three months to release updated drivers for the 7970 post-release. I'd say while it is crap there are a few bugs related to SLI, bashing nVidia while giving AMD a pass? The GTX 680 is all of two weeks old and in very short supply. I remember having similar RDP issues with my GTX 275 SLI setup and that was fixed on the next update. When my GTX 570 couldn't render certain videos (codec problem?) I reverted back one driver revision for all of two weeks before nVidia released a new driver that fixed that issue and it hasn't come back. With AMD and the 5870 I could count on driver bugs showing up for the next few releases before they were fixed. If they were fixed. When they were fixed they'd probably come back to haunt me when AMD fixed something else and broke the old bug on a driver release a few months later.

Wait until the unified driver comes out and then we'll see.
 
night_2004 said:
No, they haven't. Here's a fun sample of older problems that drove me away from the 5870. Here's the owner of this site, Kyle, slamming AMD on opportunities lost with their drivers. nVidia isn't innocent either I'm sure but there seem to be a heck of a lot more satisfied people on the green team.
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I'm actually biased towards nvidia, but wasn't that thread mainly in reference to CFX drivers rather than single card solutions?
 
For what it's worth, I've only used single card solutions, I've had Nvidia and ATI/AMD cards in the past.

As old as TNT2 for Nvidia and 9700 Pro with AMD, and as recent as 5870m for AMD and 560ti with Nvidia.

I've never in the past have had any driver issues with either, but at this point of time Nvidia drivers are less stable for me, I've had to roll back to an older driver to avoid issues with the drivers crashing (or the display driver has stopped responding), BSODs, and random magenta coloration. The initial drivers I had with the 560Tis had the display driver crashing at least once a day, but no other issues, then they got better, then worse, then fixed, and now the latest official ones I've tried are the worst. I think I went back 2 or 3 versions where it's stable. In fact the 560ti is the most unstable video card I've ever owned, and it's not due to cooling, overclocking, or anything, it's due to the drivers being unstable. I'm on the 295.73 drivers, the few versions older and newer have their issues with driver crashes and such, but this driver is awesome no crashes ever, if nvidia don't have driver issues, then why am I having to resort to this version and other versions have issues?

The driver not responding is a known issue, I've never had it with any of my ATI/AMD cards or my past Nvidia cards.

So people saying Nvidia has superior drivers, not the case, they both have good and bad. I'm not going to let this stop me from buying another Nvidia card again.
 
I remember when we had several graphic vendors to choose from, i.e., S3, XFX, ST Micro, NV, ATI, Matrox, etc...everybody was to busy trying to help others get their games running on whatever card they had. Now all we get are threads with fan boy red or green craptastic posts, or somebody butt-hurt because they can't play a specific game perfectly due to drivers so they are switching.

I can't wait until the new gen. consoles come out so I can leave all this wonderful conversation behind! :)
 
TroyX said:
its his job to control the color palette in this forum.
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Really?

You must not read the forums or reviews very much.

One thing I will say about this site and all the staff is they are honest about products and the faults found. If your product has issues or sucks they will say so.
 
Cr4ckm0nk3y said:
Really?

You must not read the forums or reviews very much.

One thing I will say about this site and all the staff is they are honest about products and the faults found. If your product has issues or sucks they will say so.
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Yep, that's why I've been coming to H for over a decade for reviews... God, since the 90's! :eek:
 
fps4ever said:
I remember when we had several graphic vendors to choose from, i.e., S3, XFX, ST Micro, NV, ATI, Matrox, etc...everybody was to busy trying to help others get their games running on whatever card they had. Now all we get are threads with fan boy red or green craptastic posts, or somebody butt-hurt because they can't play a specific game perfectly due to drivers so they are switching.

I can't wait until the new gen. consoles come out so I can leave all this wonderful conversation behind! :)
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Don't know about you, but to me, driver issues are important points that should be taken into consideration. The hardware isn't going to work on its own, it relies on the driver to work. If a company cannot provide a satisfactory driver support, then there's no reason for me to get their hardware.
 
Hornet said:
Don't know about you, but to me, driver issues are important points that should be taken into consideration. The hardware isn't going to work on its own, it relies on the driver to work. If a company cannot provide a satisfactory driver support, then there's no reason for me to get their hardware.
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Nobody says drivers shouldn't be important...you just don't have to be a rabid fan boy about it. And what is not "satisfactory" to you may be alright with everyone else.
 
point is both have "satisfactory" driver support. Anyone who favors one over the other because of drivers sucking on one side isn't being particularly rational.
 
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