Why Do GPU drivers suck? (In General) no flames!

I purchased a 5970 at day one. I had no driver related issues with my video card. No GSOD or graphical artifacting issue. The only issue I had was mass effect 2 AA and slow loading time in Battlefield Badcompany 2. But those issues were resolved with "preview" drivers.

I also upgraded from a Q9650 to a i7 980X. Again, no issues.

I have owned many Nvidia cards over the years and I still haven't encountered a game breaking driver. I always used their beta drivers to begin with.

The people who have driver related issues, are usually people who don't properly uninstall/drive clean their system. Or they are very aggressive on their overclocks. Some of these driver related issues do have some fault with ATI and Nvidia. But, majority of these issues are user related.
 
Mr Mean said:
The people who have driver related issues, are usually people who don't properly uninstall/drive clean their system. Or they are very aggressive on their overclocks. Some of these driver related issues do have some fault with ATI and Nvidia. But, majority of these issues are user related.
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Then why does Nvidia have an unresolved issues section in their release notes? Why is it that most of the resolved issues are never mentioned in the previous drivers release notes?

Just because you don't notice any issues with the handfull of games that you play doesn't mean that the drivers that you are using right now don't have any issues.

BravO))) said:
I guess you missed the general rule of thumb part. As a technician, most problems I have encountered were from user error. You would be surprised of the stupidity of some people such as when people ask, "where is the any key?" Most problems that people have are from system compatibility, third party software, viruses, malware, spyware, out of date drivers, missing dll files, etc... These are just a few examples of user error.
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That is very true, you make a good point.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Then why does Nvidia have an unresolved issues section in their release notes? Why is it that most of the resolved issues are never mentioned in the previous drivers release notes?

Just because you don't notice any issues with the handfull of games that you play doesn't mean that the drivers that you are using right now don't have any issues.
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What you need to think about when it comes to many games, is that some of them don't work without bugs with ANY drivers after release. If the drivers were faulty of breaking the game, then it should work with at least one driver set without bugs.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
On steam, Nvidia's marketshare is primarily the 8XXX and 9XXX series. AMD have earned a lot of money on the 4XXX and 5XXX series. Infact, their GPU division is going great and its their CPU division that drags down the results. (I don't care about Nvidia and ATI's marketshare and earnings, but I thought I'd clarify this for you).
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Buying trend seems to be going towards ATI cards, if to use steam as example.
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What your saying is pretty much on the money and I'm not denying that but the numbers are the numbers. ATI division matters not when AMD as a whole can't be profitable. They aren't on their own anymore and haven't been for years sucks for them honestly. ATI as a company could have and did stand on their own 2 feet they didn't need amd weighing them down but such is life. they made that bed a long time ago.

All that said, the 5800 series is cool and all and they sold quite a bit but still not enough to take away any meaningful market share from nvidia. Keep in mind nvidia just launched their flagship 400 series parts and over the next few months will trickly out their mid and entry level fermis. When that happens nvidia will go right back to business as usual. Buying trends? You are looking at skewed dx11 video card sales. of course they look good in amd's favor since nvidia had none until 2 weeks ago. heh
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
What you need to think about when it comes to many games, is that some of them don't work without bugs with ANY drivers after release. If the drivers were faulty of breaking the game, then it should work with at least one driver set without bugs.
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Exactly, look at Fallout 3 that game didn't work without stuttering for months with Nvidia's drivers, worked fine on older drivers. Look at the release notes and see that Gothic 1 and 2 don't work in Windows 7 but work fine on Vista and in 7 with ATI. There were two straight WHQL drivers that wouldn't allow anyone afaik to force AA. What about the entire 185.xx line that caused one game or another to crash to desktop for most people?

I haven't used ATI in a while so I can't speak for their issues which I'm sure that they also have.
 
My own personal experience has been good with both companies. I have a 4000 series GPU and an 8800GTS GPU. The only problems that I've had is on the Nvidia card. I kept getting the Nvidia display adapter has stopped working. This was before Vista SP1 which then fixed the problem for me. I encountered a lot of other people having the same issue as well. I know ATI has issues as well, but I've just always wondered why all these minor bugs keep happening.

After reading all these posts I'd have to agree that the people actually having issues is really small. Then half of those are user errors. The problems then rely on the coding of the game itself, windows, and the actual driver software.

I agree that games are rush really fast and probably a lot of software is and that's why we don't see the scaling we would like to see in some games and why there are so many little bugs out there for games. I do like how both Nvidia and ATI try to fix the big things as fast as they can and I know it has to be hard and very frustrating that shit just keeps breaking.

Hopefully we'll get to a time where coding might get easier and then programmers won't "suck" as bad :)

Thanks for all the replies and stop fighting!
 
Savoy said:
What your saying is pretty much on the money and I'm not denying that but the numbers are the numbers. ATI division matters not when AMD as a whole can't be profitable. They aren't on their own anymore and haven't been for years sucks for them honestly. ATI as a company could have and did stand on their own 2 feet they didn't need amd weighing them down but such is life. they made that bed a long time ago.

All that said, the 5800 series is cool and all and they sold quite a bit but still not enough to take away any meaningful market share from nvidia. Keep in mind nvidia just launched their flagship 400 series parts and over the next few months will trickly out their mid and entry level fermis. When that happens nvidia will go right back to business as usual. Buying trends? You are looking at skewed dx11 video card sales. of course they look good in amd's favor since nvidia had none until 2 weeks ago. heh
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AMD itself is no longer showing numbers in the red.

I'm not looking at DX11 cards alone, but the 4XXX/5XXX series vs. the 2XX/3XX/4XX regarding the buying trends using Steam survey. Steam survey is not something I would personally use as statistics, but they are in favor of AMD.

I don't think that the 400 series will have much impact on the market share of Nvidia. Its predicted that before the 400 series are out with its mainstream and lowend parts, AMD's southern Island will appear. AMD's CEO said there will be a full refresh of the entire 5000 line this year.

In any case, the only thing that matters for me, is that there is alternatives on the market and competition that brings prices down. What the companies earn is something I don't care about as long as they don't screw me as consumer doing so. :p

BababooeyHTJ said:
Exactly, look at Fallout 3 that game didn't work without stuttering for months with Nvidia's drivers, worked fine on older drivers. Look at the release notes and see that Gothic 1 and 2 don't work in Windows 7 but work fine on Vista and in 7 with ATI. There were two straight WHQL drivers that wouldn't allow anyone afaik to force AA. What about the entire 185.xx line that caused one game or another to crash to desktop for most people?

I haven't used ATI in a while so I can't speak for their issues which I'm sure that they also have.
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With new games, ATI also have issues. Much of them due to poor developers.

Take a look at Battlefield Bad Company 2. Much issues for both ATI and Nvidia. ATI released prerelease drivers and profile updates to fix this and now its fixed. Nvidia cards still struggles, but its not due to Nvidia drivers, but rather a lack of GFX card support ingame. I blame the developers, not ATI/Nvidia.
 
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BababooeyHTJ said:
Then why does Nvidia have an unresolved issues section in their release notes? Why is it that most of the resolved issues are never mentioned in the previous drivers release notes?
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I was speaking in general terms. I am aware of Nvidia PDFs for their driver releases. But there are still issues with some really old game(s) that Nvidia doesn't want to fix or don't have the resouces to allocate for very old games.

Actually, there was a Nvidia driver PDF section when I last read them (years ago), showed an issue resolved section and an issue not resolved section with their driver release.
 
computer games makers should work around the drivers, and not have drivers working around games...
each time we have a new game, nvidia/ati drivers have to be modified for that specific game. that shouldn't happen... that way imo we wouldn't have as much problems that we have now.
 
Sick of seeing: "wait until ATi's drivers mature.." ATi's Crossfire drivers have been "maturing" for seven years now...:p
 
ar09 said:
computer games makers should work around the drivers, and not have drivers working around games...
each time we have a new game, nvidia/ati drivers have to be modified for that specific game. that shouldn't happen... that way imo we wouldn't have as much problems that we have now.
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Exactly! We pay for games to work and its not the GFX card makers we pay, but those that develop the game. They should fix it before they release the game, so it works on major hardware at least with a disclaimer that its not tested on other hardware.

When I buy a game where it says that minimum ATI/Nvidia card, recommended ATI/Nvidia card, I expect the game to work with those cards.
 
I'm using a 5970 + 5870 (Tri-Crossfire), both watercooled, since last december, and don't remember having a single BSOD/GSOD/freeze/crash in all the 30 games I've played from beginning to the end in the last 6 months.

My i7 920 and my GPUs are all OCed.

I'm using computers since 26 years (lol!) and have use drivers from ATI, Nvidia, Matrox, 3dFx (and all the others I'm forgetting) since 1984. :) ATI or Nvidia drivers, no difference to me. I don't feel like one is better then the other. Before my 5970+5870, I was using 4870X2+4870, and before this 8800GTX Ultra SLI...

Sadly, 99% of the ''problems'' with drivers are happening between the chair and the keyboard IMHO. :)

My Tri-Crossfire set-up is rock-stable since last december. :)
 
kllrnohj said:
And I'm saying you're wrong. There aren't fewer problems on Nvidia's side of the fence. And it wasn't a bad driver package, it was a horrible driver package. That was less than 2 years ago as well. But if you want a recent example, how about the drivers that fried your card? For what its worth, I've had *zero* problems with my 5870 and I had *zero* problems with the 4850 I had before it. I really only had one problem with the 7900GT before that, but it wasn't a driver problem (card died - as did many 7900GTs).

If you are seeing more posts about "ATI driver this, ATI driver that" then its because you are *trying* to see more posts about ATI driver problems and intentionally ignoring the same number of posts about Nvidia problems.

And for what its worth I do believe Nvidia has the worse record of the two as far as breaking previously working features.
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Do you know why? I had one that was given to me that died and figured it was a isolated event.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
I can't stand that argument. What was Nvidia's market share compared to ATI at the time?
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About double. Nvidia still had more BSODs per 1000 users than ATI did. But that also only includes BSODs, not other problems. Many of the "Vista problems" people bitched about for the year or so after it launch was shoddy driver support. I was running a 7900GT at the time, and damn did the Nvidia drivers suck. Tons of broken features as well.

BababooeyHTJ said:
This is another bullshit argument. Seriously people, read the fucking release notes that come with every driver. You'll see plenty of universal issues that effect every user.
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Not necessarily. Release note issues can still only affect a small number of people, and both ATI and Nvidia regularly fix game bugs.

I was referring to the fact that more crashes were supposedly caused by Nvidia drivers than ATI drivers at the time of Vista's release. If more people are running Nvidia hardware it's kind of obvious that more reported issues are going to involve Nvidia.
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Very true.

On a side note a display driver crash can be caused by things other than the video card or display driver itself.
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Absolutely. I've seen bad RAM cause driver stopped responding issues and what would appear to be graphics driver crashes.

Mangudai said:
Do you know why? I had one that was given to me that died and figured it was a isolated event.
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Oh man, you're testing my memory. I think it was a RAM problem, but I don't remember what exactly. There wasn't any fix for it afaik, I RMA'd mine to BFG.
 
Gun to your head you need a graphics card to just work..... Nvidia for me. True I haven't had an ATI card in awhile, but alot of it had to do with this topic. People can say they both have problems, but c'mon, ATI drivers better than nvidia based on track record, pfffft.....
 
i've had no problems with my GTX280 driver installations, but my 4870x2 has been a slut at times.
 
drivers are software, and software can be changed/updated pretty easily. and i usually go by the rule, if there isnt a specific problem that im having that gets fixed by updating, i dont update.

i never had a problem with drivers, but ive hated the way some are laid out, as if they were designed by an engineer for an engineer. i hate sub menus and submenus. i want every option at most only two menus deep.

and i hate any software that uses multiple processes for very superficial things. i dont change my resolution away from my native resolution, and i have no idea why its always such a prominent option in every graphics driver. dont most people buying these $300 cards have LCDs by now?
 
Ocean pretty much summed life up right there.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
ChristopherB said:
Simple case of perception.

The millions of users that don't experience driver issues don't go around posting their positive experiences. Only the whiners get heard amongst the masses.
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I'd tend to agree with this. Every now and then I run into a game with issues... Fallout 3 *cough* but I mostly run with whatever the latest WHQL drivers are and almost never have issues.
 
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