Goodbye ATI, I'm coming over boys and girls

stealthy123 said:
or the people who don't have problems with their drivers aren't nearly as vocal as those that do?

The issue I have with this whole thing, is if you don't think Nvidia has better drivers you are a fan boy, even if you think they are equal, you are still an AMD fanboy.

That a vocal minority is assumed representative of everyone is beyond silly. You know how many people that don't ever use AMD vidcards voted in that poll? How many of them had a Rage Fury MaXX 15 years ago and are still holding a grudge? A poll on a forum isn't reality, no matter how hard the green side needs to push it.

I don't get emotional over my videocards, I don't prefer one side or the other, but I gotta tell you, Nvidia people annoy me way more than ATI people.
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PRIME1 said:
Like I said, nearly 7 to 1. Also just because you disagree with their vote, does not make them wrong. Either way you don't have to just take the OPs word for it, that poll backs up why he made the switch. All the people trying to do damage control are only making the situation worse.
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I am one of those. I never post.. OMG my card worked great!

Hell I owned at 4870 x2 and never had any issues. I own a 7970 now and still no issues. No lockups. No BSOD's. No artifacts. But I don't post.. "hey! My card is working ok this week". That is silly. Now If I were doing a long term review like Motortrend does with there long term test mules (CTS-V station wagon which cracks me up). Then I would be like... Month #6, 1580 hours of useage.. card has been running on new drivers. No issues. Upgraded yada yada yada...

Perhaps that is what the [H] should do (though new cards come out all the time but a long term review would be sweet :) )
 
RamonGTP said:
If you're going to compare driver stability you need to at least be fair about it. You can't have used AMD drivers in xfire then use nVidia drivers on a single card and say the nVidia driver is so much more stable. The inherant nature of dual GPU's alone would make a single GPU setup less buggy and more stable.
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My thoughts exactly.

Capt. Insano said:
...
On WoW, I deleted my WTF folder so it would reset all my UI to default. Fired it up and no shimmering or artifacting. Mind you I was getting artifacts in WoW with the Xfire 6850's and also with just a single 6850 so it was the AMD driver and not just because they were in Xfire.

Started up SWTOR and for the first time, I was able to play without Microstutter. I know that was caused by Xfire.

Bottom line is that AMD Xfire is such a pain in the ass and such a coin flip on getting it to work right that I will never miss it. I love my new card and I am happy that I have no more driver issues. I can finally play my games and enjoy them rather than pulling my hair out.
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I upgraded from 2 5850 to 2 560ti 448 and I had even more microstutter with the nvidia cards in swtor.

I never had any issues with artifacts or shimmering on wow with the 5850s. I have less tearing now on the nvidia cards.

Any multi-card setup is going to have it's quirks, not just AMD/ATI's crossfire. I think what it really comes down to is every one has a different hardware setup and it's up to the driver developers to compensate for everyone's unique setup.
 
2k3eblade said:
My thoughts exactly.



I upgraded from 2 5850 to 2 560ti 448 and I had even more microstutter with the nvidia cards in swtor.

I never had any issues with artifacts or shimmering on wow with the 5850s. I have less tearing now on the nvidia cards.

Any multi-card setup is going to have it's quirks, not just AMD/ATI's crossfire. I think what it really comes down to is every one has a different hardware setup and it's up to the driver developers to compensate for everyone's unique setup.
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According to a tomshardware study, microstuttering is worse on crossfire than sli setups:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995-15.html
 
Lets see, GTX680 is about a month old now and still no driver update that addresses GTX680? Thats with vsync a fundamental feature being broken for quite a few people. Thats with bi-polar performance in some titles. For example the sub-par performance in Stalker Clear Sky or Just Cause 2 in 3d or Fallout 3 in 3d.

This is just after a four month dry spout between WHQL drivers. Yeah, there were some shady betas inbetween. Then there are things like the only official driver for GTX460 being a single beta for months after launch.

Yeah, Nvidia's driver support is amazing.

Oh, they have also been non-existent in the GTX600 series section on their forums.
 
biggles said:
According to a tomshardware study, microstuttering is worse on crossfire than sli setups:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995-15.html
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http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/11

"In fact, in a bit of a shocking revelation, Petersen told us Nvidia has "lots of hardware" in its GPUs aimed at trying to fix multi-GPU stuttering. The basic technology, known as frame metering, dynamically tracks the average interval between frames. Those frames that show up "early" are delayed slightly—in other words, the GPU doesn't flip to a new buffer immediately—in order to ensure a more even pace of frames presented for display. The lengths of those delays are adapted depending on the frame rate at any particular time. Petersen told us this frame-metering capability has been present in Nvidia's GPUs since at least the G80 generation, if not earlier."
 
PRIME1 said:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/11

"In fact, in a bit of a shocking revelation, Petersen told us Nvidia has "lots of hardware" in its GPUs aimed at trying to fix multi-GPU stuttering. The basic technology, known as frame metering, dynamically tracks the average interval between frames. Those frames that show up "early" are delayed slightly—in other words, the GPU doesn't flip to a new buffer immediately—in order to ensure a more even pace of frames presented for display. The lengths of those delays are adapted depending on the frame rate at any particular time. Petersen told us this frame-metering capability has been present in Nvidia's GPUs since at least the G80 generation, if not earlier."
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Yes but in you look through the actual article it seems its more talk than fact and its swings and roundabouts depending on the game between AMD and NV.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1

And for Single GPU
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22573/5
 
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Final8ty said:
Yes but in you look through the actual article it seems its more talk than fact and its swings and roundabouts depending on the game between AMD and NV.
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From the SLI vs Crossfire H review

http://hardocp.com/article/2012/03/28/nvidia_kepler_geforce_gtx_680_sli_video_card_review/9
The result of SLI feeling smoother than CrossFireX is that in real-world gameplay, we can get away with a bit lower FPS with SLI, whereas with CFX we have to aim a little higher for it to feel smooth. We do know that SLI performs some kind of driver algorithm to help smooth SLI framerates, and this could be why it feels so much better. Whatever the reason, to us, SLI feels smoother than CrossFireX.
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They are describing the exact technology referred to in the TR article. It's why SLI is smoother than Crossfire.
 
been using ATi since the Rage 128 days, never had too many issues that were not addressed over time and they didn't suffer from high resolution fuzzyness like the green team did......
 
PRIME1 said:
From the SLI vs Crossfire H review

http://hardocp.com/article/2012/03/28/nvidia_kepler_geforce_gtx_680_sli_video_card_review/9


They are describing the exact technology referred to in the TR article. It's why SLI is smoother than Crossfire.
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Sorry but you cant generalise CF and SLI across different gen and models as some of the other articles had SLi being far from smooth on particular models..
Which is why different articles say different things because they are testing different cards, also drivers for a particular game can change the smoothness from stuttering to smooth with the newer drivers.

CF scaling used to be worse than SLI, it ain't no more.

The AMD 6 series scaling is better than the 5 series, but the 6 series has more Microstutter than the 5 series.

As for the NV 680 and AMD 7970 its too early to say as they are both still new and have there issues.
 
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Krenum said:
Not anymore.
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The 680 runs pretty hot, Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it. But it runs hotter than my 7970 did.

To keep it from throttling (which starts at 70c, granted its not much throttling) I have to keep the fan at 60-65% with pretty good case cooling in a 60-70F Ambient temp. The fan is pretty loud at those speeds, the noise outpowers all my case fans and CPU fans combined. That is overclocked of course :).

Well worth it for the performance though :D
 
I'm considering buying the big 3 slot ASUS version of the 680 since I heard its both quite and a monster overclocker.

I can't blame the OP , I've had bad experiences with AMD (or ATI if were referring to the past) in the past more than once. With Nvidia and throughout the many years I've used it (since the Geforce 256 days) drivers have always been a step above ATI.

AMD's driver team has in recent years not improved.
 
crawlgsx said:
The 680 runs pretty hot, Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it. But it runs hotter than my 7970 did.

To keep it from throttling (which starts at 70c, granted its not much throttling) I have to keep the fan at 60-65% with pretty good case cooling in a 60-70F Ambient temp. The fan is pretty loud at those speeds, the noise outpowers all my case fans and CPU fans combined. That is overclocked of course :).

Well worth it for the performance though :D
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Where are you getting this info from? I've never heard of a gpu throttle at 70C, that's actually not very hot for a loaded GPU at all.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
They seem pretty even after driver updates.

Sorry you had bad luck with AMD drivers.
Hope you figure out what you are doing wrong in the future.
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Actually I have a 5850 and a 6870 in two different machines with the same CPU setup, the 5850 and 6870 are very close to each other at stock clocks, the 6870 is slightly faster in tesselation heavy games like Metro 2033, but the 5850 is faster in many others and when the 5850 is overclocked just a bit, the 5850 is noticeably quicker in most games other than Metro, the 5870 is even quicker than my 5850 overclocked so the 5870 would still be quicker than the 6870. I do agree that the renaming in the 6xxx series was confusing to anyone that wasn't really paying attention to what was going on. It was uncalled for and I don't like AMD or Nvidia doing it, stick to a common naming scheme for each generation as not to try to confuse the average consumer.

AMD's drivers have had their fair share of issues recently so don't even try to blame the user for that. The drivers can make or break even great hardware and while I'm not on the AMD makes shitty drivers bandwagon, I do think they could stand to improve a lot and Nvidia is much more consistent about quality driver releases and especially day one game release drivers which is a BIG deal to most gamers.
 
2k3eblade said:
My thoughts exactly.



I upgraded from 2 5850 to 2 560ti 448 and I had even more microstutter with the nvidia cards in swtor.

I never had any issues with artifacts or shimmering on wow with the 5850s. I have less tearing now on the nvidia cards.

Any multi-card setup is going to have it's quirks, not just AMD/ATI's crossfire. I think what it really comes down to is every one has a different hardware setup and it's up to the driver developers to compensate for everyone's unique setup.
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Exactly - multi-GPU (both SLI and CrossFire) are persnickety by definition - which is why I had never bothered; instead I have consistently stayed with single-GPU (and AMD, and ATI pre-acquisition) going back to when I migrated to PCI.

In my case, the reason I am looking hard at nVidia has nothing to do with driver issues -but the discounts on Fermi (specifically GTX 550 Ti) make it more attractive than HD7770 (which I had been considering).
 
7950Xfire. only time i had driver issues was when the previous beta broke things in skyrim...

shrugs, enjoy your gpu
 
I just sold my 7850 2GB OC card and picked up a GTX 660 2GB.

The only reason I sold the AMD card is because the drivers were pissing me off and randomly failing to initialize Eyefinity if I rebooted or the PC came out of sleep. It would only happen once or twice a month, but then the retarded CCC would revert into some bullshit "LOL YOU DIDN'T REALLY WANT TO APPLY THOSE SETTINGS DID YOU?" mode where I couldn't get Eyefinity enable again without trying it repeatedly and crossing my fingers.
 
PGHammer said:
Exactly - multi-GPU (both SLI and CrossFire) are persnickety by definition - which is why I had never bothered; instead I have consistently stayed with single-GPU (and AMD, and ATI pre-acquisition) going back to when I migrated to PCI.

In my case, the reason I am looking hard at nVidia has nothing to do with driver issues -but the discounts on Fermi (specifically GTX 550 Ti) make it more attractive than HD7770 (which I had been considering).
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Really ..... resurrecting a thread that is almost a year old?
 
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