Who has the best drivers? A novel (trust me) approach to this question

How do you rate your current graphics card and its drivers?

  • I think my current card's company makes the better drivers

    Votes: 35 38.5%

  • I think the competition makes better drivers

    Votes: 10 11.0%

  • I think it's too close to call

    Votes: 46 50.5%
  • Total voters
    91
spine

spine

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
2,720
Right, so you might have come into this poll expecting a flamewar or the start of one; not so I'm afraid. You can't choose ATI or Nvidia, only your relative feelings.

I created this poll as I found myself wishing I owned an ATI card because I felt that ATI's driver were better. However, the very reason I chose nvidia the last few times was because I didn't like ATI's drivers (specifically lack of fixed AR scaling). So is it just a case of, 'the grass is always greener the other side of the fence' ?

Anyway, I'm just curious to how people feel about their current card and its drivers.


I'm not even adding company names into the poll. Use the thread to discuss specifics.


Ok, well, let's see how this goes....
 
I've found that they tend to go back and forth with having bad drivers. ATI has some crappy ones, Nvidia has some crappy ones. ATI has some good ones, Nvdia has some good ones. The cycle goes on and on. Neither beat out the other. I've jumped back and forth between the two brands since 2006 so I've had a lot of experience with both of them over the last few years and honestly I'd say for a majority of the time they both kinda suck compared to years prior. They suck for different reasons, but I still think most of the time they're just not good.
 
I've had more non-PEBCAK trouble with ATI drivers than Nvidia drivers because I've used more ATI than Nvidia over the years. Both companies driver teams have exchanged employees over the years, sometimes you can tell. I've disliked the interface of Nvidias control panel for many years, but loved ATIs, and then they redesigned it to a compact version of NvCP, however they are giving it a makeover yet again.

It's a close call, both have good and bad.

(What I like for UI design? I prefer Gimp over PhotoShop as an example. Design means a lot to me, nearly everything accessible at the same time is better than clicking page after page after page. It works and I can do my job the way things are now but it's a few milliseconds slower, surely easier for the common man but eh I'll bite the apple and keep rolling.)
 
I don't know the current state of the AMD's drivers and cannot determine whether my NVIDIA drivers are superior or inferior.
 
4870 512 owner

don't think I ever had any issues with drivers since Cat 8.7, and when I did, it was due to an unstable CPU overclock

not going to state which company's drivers are superior because I don't know how the quality of Nvidia's recent driver releases
 
I haven't had any problems with drivers ... EVER.

And yes, I've played on both sides.
 
In terms of Windows drivers - Both go back and forth. Nvidia has been having some issues lately, and the ATI drivers seem to be improving by a bunch. I've had more then a few issues with nvidia drivers lately, I know that much. Of course, this is to be expected on both sides of the fence if you are running a multi-GPU setup. That said, it seems like profiles come out faster for SLI then they do crossfire.

Now, if we are talking a non-windows enviroment like Linux; Nvidia is still the king. ATI linux drivers have been, and are still horrid.
 
I'mma let you finish spine, but 3DFX and Vodoo had the best drivers of all time
 
vengence said:
I'mma let you finish spine, but 3DFX and Vodoo had the best drivers of all time
Click to expand...

That is assuming a few things.

From a Glide and OpenGL perspective - Yes.

From a D3D perspective - Hell no.

Of course, their hardware was really never meant for D3D. Back in the day GLIDE was going to be the next big thing.
 
I've played on both sides of the fence, though more on Nvidia then not. (TNT2 > Geforce 3 Ti200 > GeForce FX 5600 > Radeon 9800 PRO > GeForce 6800 Ultra > GeForce 7800 GTX > GeForce 7950 GX2 > GeForce 8800 GTS 512 > GeForce 280 > Radeon 5870).

Ok so I may have had more play time in Nvidia's playground but with that being said. Nvidia's drivers have been great and offering some nice features right out of the executable (box). ATI has nearly as many options and where they lack in options they are certainly picking up their game to fill in that gap.

Now if your like me and some of the smaller differences in features don't bother you, what it really comes down to is down right raw performance in the latest games.

And my answer is simple. They are both great and neither are what I would call on the road of being sub par. Before my divorce with Nvidia was finalized (3 weeks ago), their beta drivers were performing quite fine for all of my needs and though I noticed many complaints at times on laptopvideo2go I never played the games they tended to be having the issues with.

ATI has yet to present an undesired performance over the past 3 weeks and I am going to say that I am very satisfied.

I'm sure in the past each company has had their ups and downs driver wise, neither are perfect. But at this point I am glad that I didn't let all the doomers and gloomers spreading their utmost distaste for ATI's drivers, otherwise I would have missed out on this well priced upgrade.
 
Mchart said:
That is assuming a few things.

From a Glide and OpenGL perspective - Yes.

From a D3D perspective - Hell no.

Of course, their hardware was really never meant for D3D. Back in the day GLIDE was going to be the next big thing.
Click to expand...

it was just a joke.... :(
 
I'm currently on an ATI card, but had much better luck with Nvidia over the years.
My experience with Nvidia was the major problems were isolated to more obscure set-ups and games. With ATI, it seems like they're cropping up for new releases and common rigs/cards.
That's the difference for me.
 
The last time I have had a problem with Nvidia drivers was 2 years ago a friend's old computer while playing an obscenely old game (Dune or something?) and using an also obscenely old Geforce 4 mx440 on Windows XP with the latest supported drivers. I rolled back to drivers to near when the video card came out, and all was fixed. Somewhere along the line Nvidia changed something in the driver that messed up how the card worked. That being said, I in no way blame Nvidia for that problem. That was clearly a "march of progress" issue.

The last time I had a problem with ATI's driver's was a really weird rendering problem with Battlefield 2 when it released back in 2004-2005. I was using the latest driver on an X800 card. The mountains would suddenly stop rendering while I was flying around, which made it impossible not to crash while flying the planes in that game. Due to the popularity of the game, that was fixed with the next driver release.

For the most part, I will say both Nvidia and ATI have had their shit together on drivers since around 2003-2004, probably even longer for Nvidia. I have used ATI exclusively in my main box since 2004, and have supported Nvidia cards in friend's and families boxes and laptops since then. From 2001 to 2004 I used exclusively Nvidia. I still prefer Nvidia's control panel to ATI's, but I haven't really found a reason to switch back. If I had the money during the 8800 series release, I probably would have gotten Nvidia. But since 2008, the 2 biggest criteria have been about bang for the buck and familiarity, so I stick with ATI for now.

I also cannot stand those people who constantly complain about drivers from either company, using it as a reason NOT to buy the other company's product. The only people who have a right to bitch about the driver's are the one's who actually have used the products recently, NOT those who bought XYZ card back in 2000 and will never buy from them again because they don't make good driver's.
 
I never really had driver issues with either until the win7 / vista era.

Right now with win7 and Vista there have been some issues. Specifically I think CRT users are starting to be left in the dust.

Couldn't get my ATI card (x1950xtx) to run @ 85hz on Vista x64, despite using Ati Tray Tools and locking the refresh rate. Some games the lock worked, others like Civ4, wouldn't. Couldn't force the refresh rate with any software.

Oddly, works fine with win7, no refresh rate issues yet.

Right now Nvidia users are having issues with the FW900 CRT and win7, specifically folks on BNC cables, and some others. I avoided Nvidia for now for that specific reason when I bought a card last month. (Last I heard a specific older revision of the drivers works fine - so it got broken somewhere).

I normally run ATI cards somehow despite no particular fandom. So for now, for me, ATI seems to be making better drivers with regard to CRT support. That said I wish you could define custom resolutions / refresh rates like Nvidia.
 
fact is nvidia has a much more solid driver program. they update drivers frequently and tell you right off what the improvements and known issues are. and i have never had an nvidia driver remove a basic function from a videocard.are they perfect...no, but pretty damned close imo.

ati releases packages which are named incorrectly...a hotfix is a PATCH...holy crap ati learn your terms. time has told the sad sad story of ati and their horrific drivers (which is why way way back in the day i started using nvidia after 3dfx got bought out). there seems to always be problems. the new 10.2 driver seems to be a refreshing change to this trend,at least for me, and i can only hope ati are going to be able to release stable functioning drivers from here on out, and not break basic functions instead of increasing compatibity and performance. cuz i really do not want to regret switching to ati for eyefinity.....
 
I don't know who's better in a blind test but all I know is that I don't have any of the issues reported by either camp.
 
Rogue71 said:
fact is nvidia has a much more solid driver program. they update drivers frequently and tell you right off what the improvements and known issues are. and i have never had an nvidia driver remove a basic function from a videocard.are they perfect...no, but pretty damned close imo.
Click to expand...

Nvidia has broken functionality many a time as well. They certainly aren't innocent of that.

ati releases packages which are named incorrectly...a hotfix is a PATCH...holy crap ati learn your terms.
Click to expand...

ATI has their terms correctly, it is you who is mistaken. Hotfix is perfectly acceptable, patch, actually, isn't. Hotfixes address specific issue(s) and may have regression bugs whereas patches shouldn't. There are subtle differences between the terms to be sure, but ATI *is* using the term correctly and it *is* a valid term.
 
If you ask me ATI hit the vista stride of drivers at full steam, when Vista first released they had small problems in terms of buggy'ness and incomplete installs.

Now if you tried to get any type of driver to work from Nvidia I'd say forget it, infact I was hooking up my friends with a ton of work arounds that had been posted to keep their games from crashing.

Now I don't see a difference, although I like(d) the older CCC panel from ATI and am not currently a huge fan of the one they have now.
 
These are the worst poll options ever. Options should have been...

ATI
nvidia
too close
 
I had an X800XL AGP and X800XT PE on Win XP. They ran fine. No driver issues.

Then I got a new computer. 8800GT with Windows Vista. Quite a few crashes from that "nv driver has stopped responding" error message. Not sure if this was an OS issue or a nvidia driver issue. I am now on Win 7 with the same PC and don't have that error anymore. Sometimes I get lockups when playing TF2 but if you wait a minute it comes back.

I think both companies have equal drivers now. I don't really get all of the negative driver feedback people post about ATI.
 
Tough call. Depending on the generation I've experienced either company having better drivers than the other. Generally speaking I'd have to give the nod to NVIDIA more often than not but AMD has really stepped up recently. My experiences with the Radeon HD 4870 X2's were horrid but I've had a flawless experience with my 5970 thus far. I cam from Geforce GTX 280 OC's in 3-Way SLI and oddly enough, I've had very few problems with them and even when I did, it was only when they first came out. The last 16+ months have been virtually flawless.

So agian its a tough call at this point.
 
kllrnohj said:
Nvidia has broken functionality many a time as well. They certainly aren't innocent of that.

didn't say they were. yes it has happend, but name me the last time..... ive been using nvidia cards for a dozen years and have never encountered any issues like this.

ATI has their terms correctly, it is you who is mistaken. Hotfix is perfectly acceptable, patch, actually, isn't. Hotfixes address specific issue(s) and may have regression bugs whereas patches shouldn't. There are subtle differences between the terms to be sure, but ATI *is* using the term correctly and it *is* a valid term.
Click to expand...

um no. the term hotfix implies that it is a patch. even microsoft issued "hotfixes" to address windows issues. a "fix" is a term used when something is BROKEN, hence the fact that it should be a patch. thats what patches are supposed to do. ati SHOULD be releasing driver kits with different version numbers, not making it seem like the whole kit is a patch. a quick search in just about any forum (including this one) will tell you that anyone not familiar with ati's drivers have no idea if the hotfix is a patch or a driver.
im on the ati bandwagon for now, but its cart has a few square wheels....
 
I've had issues with both NVIDIA and ATI, I could go on about it but that doesn't really matter does it. Both have good sides and negative sides.
 
Rogue71 said:
um no. the term hotfix implies that it is a patch. even microsoft issued "hotfixes" to address windows issues. a "fix" is a term used when something is BROKEN, hence the fact that it should be a patch. thats what patches are supposed to do. ati SHOULD be releasing driver kits with different version numbers, not making it seem like the whole kit is a patch. a quick search in just about any forum (including this one) will tell you that anyone not familiar with ati's drivers have no idea if the hotfix is a patch or a driver.
im on the ati bandwagon for now, but its cart has a few square wheels....
Click to expand...

Not the best of sources, but here, read up a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotfix

Then again, your solution of calling it a "patch" would just make things worse because it is even further from the truth. ATI's hotfix drivers aren't patches, they are an entire driver set. ATI does release different version numbers. Again, the *only* people who should install a hotfix are those who experience the *exact* problem the hotfix fixes (this is true in general of hotfixes and it is true for ATI's hotfix releases). The hotfix is not a general patch, it is a quick fix.
 
ATI's hotfix drivers are absolutely NOT patches by definition. They are completely independent driver suites that require the previous set to be uninstalled first. No 'patching' is done on the user's PC. ATI *may* have created the hotfix driver by simply 'patching in' a code fix, but that's irrelevant to the user.


Anyway....


Seems people aren't actually too bothered about their current card and drivers. It's funny, I see so many threads with people moaning about drivers and desperately needing a fix for X/Y/Z yet here I'm seeing mostly satisfied reports.


I guess I should have asked the more relevant question; 'Are the drivers for your current card so bad that you'll switch 'sides' for your next graphics card?'


Driver's are only a secondary consideration for me. I'll focus on hardware performance/price first and assume that I'll be able to fix or work around any driver problems eventually.
 
Nvidia drivers have had some rough spots for a few games I've played a lot the past few years (Oblivion, Fallout 3), but all in all they've had a lower p.i.t.a. factor than ATI drivers (owned three cards). While I'm sure Catalyst is much, much better than back then those left such a bad taste in my mouth I'm not eager to go Red again.
 
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