nVidia vs. ATI - Driver Quality?

[Genx87]

Looking to buy a new video card to go with Ivy Bridge. I've used nVidia for years, and generally trust their drivers. Used an ATI 1st generation Radeon (maybe ~10 years ago), and felt the drivers weren't... quite as polished as nVidia. Obviously that was a long time ago, though.

How are the ATI drivers now compared to nvidia? Is it similar in quality?

Also, what about linux - if you actually plan to do some gaming on linux, without looking at benchmarks of individual cards, would you lean toward nVidia or ATI as a brand?

Running two game boxes in my house. One with a 470, the other 5870 2GB. Both have been rock solid for drivers.

As for linux. My understanding is Nvidia is the way to go for that OS.

 

[brandonb]

I have 7 computers total in my household. 1 is intel (sandy bridge), 1 is Nvidia 460m (laptop), and the rest are ATI from the 4350 up to the 7970.

I have had only 2 problems with all the computers.

1) My HTPC that is using the AMD 4350 will sometimes give me the green screen when using hardware acceleration. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This only happened after upgrading drivers. The last stable version was 11.8 on this video card and in that situation.

2) My AMD 7970 that I have in my main computer using eyefinity has at times, shown the infamous ATI mouse driver corruption. At times the house cursor gets all squiggly and corrupted. If I move the mouse cursor off the monitor to another eyefinity monitor and back it goes back to normal.

Those are the only problems I've had with my drivers/hardware in the last 5+ years. My Nvidia I cannot comment on because its my business laptop and I don't use it for anything outside of development.

 

[QuantumPion]

I've always used nvidia cards, except for one generation when I had a watercooled 5870. The card was fast and worked fine but the drivers were such garbage. Constantly had mouse cursor corrupting, youtube videos crashing, display driver crashing, the grey-plaid-death crash, on and on. There were 200+ page threads on the amd forums about driver problems that were never fixed or even acknowledged by AMD. So after that experience I won't be going back to them any time soon.

 

[Smartazz]

Having owned both brands, I can honestly say i've had less issues with nvidia's drivers, but Amd's aren't bad, I'm just not updating drivers regularly anymore because the latest drivers causes flickering.

 

[Anarchist420]

Nvidia's drivers have so many things wrong with them it's really kind of ridiculous.

AMD's HW sucks. I'm sure their drivers suck too, but I have no idea as to whether they suck as bad as those from nvidia.

3dfx and Matrox made good drivers and good hardware, but 3dfx isn't around anymore and Matrox doesn't make GPUs for gamers anymore. 3dfx made damn good drivers.

 

[chimaxi83]

Nvidia's drivers have so many things wrong with them it's really kind of ridiculous.

AMD's HW sucks. I'm sure their drivers suck too, but I have no idea as to whether they suck as bad as those from nvidia.

3dfx and Matrox made good drivers and good hardware, but 3dfx isn't around anymore and Matrox doesn't make GPUs for gamers anymore. 3dfx made damn good drivers.

Thoughtful contribution! Thanks for your excellent and knowledgeable insight. Bravo! :thumbsup:

 

[Sable]

Drivers were a bit sketch with my ATI Rage Pro (XPERT@PLAY) but eventually got a proper gl driver for Quake.
Drivers for my TNT2 M64 were fine.
Drivers for my Geforce 3 Ti200 were fine.
Drivers for my 9500 Pro were fine.
Drivers for my 7800GT were fine.
Drivers for my 4870 were fine.
Drivers for my GTX680 are fine. Unless of course I wanted to use 120hz at 1080p over displayport. Which I FUCKING DO.

 

[Lepton87]

I can say that QuadFire gives me a lot of problems. Sometimes when I launch a game only 1GPU works and I have to disable CF a then re-enable it before it works properly. Unfortunately QuadSLI is probably as far from perfect as Quad CF is.

 

[Jaydip]

Don't u have to restart ur PC after u enable CF?

 

[corfe83]

Thanks guys. I think I've got plenty of opinions now, and am forming a rough opinion in my mind.

I'm probably going to go with nvidia since their linux drivers are noticeably better by seemingly everyone's account. However, I *might* get ATI if they have the right card at the right price.

 

[Gunbuster]

I have had driver issues with ATI in the past so when I step up from my GTX 260 216 it will be Nvidia again.

 

[Phynaz]

3dfx made damn good drivers.

Weren't you like five years old in the 3dfx days?

 

[Lepton87]

Don't u have to restart ur PC after u enable CF?

No

 

[Aikouka]

I use Splashtop Remote Desktop on my phone to access my PC. There's an issue with AMD's drivers, which causes Windows to complain about low resources, and drop to its basic skin while you're connected to the PC. It's not difficult to fix, but it's rather annoying. It hasn't happened since I upgraded from the Radeon 6950 to the GeForce GTX 680.

It's kind of a small annoyance, but it is certainly nice not to have to deal with it every time!

 

[Jacky60]

Actually AMD/ATI really annoy me the way they don't seem to bother testing whether drivers work with their high end cards. Just installed 12.4 and whaddyaknow crossfire on my 6990's no longer works in Skyrim so I only have 2 of my 4 gpu's working-it's a f**king pain in the ass to regularly discover that really obvious stuff has been overlooked by their driver team which appears to consist of one man and his dog these days. If you spend a lot of money on AMD hardware you'll get very annoyed that you may wait months for profiles etc to be updated and new drivers bork games you were happily enjoying with previous versions. They don't seem able to keep up with the revision schedule they've set themselves. Ahh the joy of yet another driver rollback. I've tried every set this year and something has been missing from all of them which is telling given that I only play Arma 2 and Skyrim and spent £1100 on their hardware. EDIT Just remembered Skyrim never worked on 4 gPu's but with the high res texture pack I have to do some tweaking -my gpus both run 97% in Skyrim at 100 fps but I'd prefer all 4 working together.

 

[ArizonaSteve]

Not been impressed with the driver support for Skyrim from AMD (very late with crossfire profiles, screen freezes when playing). Looking to nVidia for my next card.

 

[videogames101]

Both brands work fine.

Radeon 7000 worked fine
Radeon 9800 Pro worked fine
7800gt worked fine
8800GTS worked fine
4870 worked fine
6870 worked fine

 

[skipsneeky2]

Every time i put a amd card in my system,i tend to run into a bunch of unique issues that make me fall pray almost like a bad omen,either if it was crossfire 6770,a single 6750 a 6790 or the last card being a 7970,i always had issues.

Got a 4 1/2 year old 8800gts g92 that simply never gave me or a friend of mine a lick of issues and it still works like new,so when i looked for a new gpu last night at a nearby Fry's and the gtx680 was no where in sight as expected and i had my choice of a $299 Evga gtx570hd sc or i could press my luck with a overstocked $270 Diamond 7850,i went right for the gtx570 based off the crap i had to go through with my 7970.

Not gonna tell anyone that amd drivers are crap or not to buy a amd card but they never work fine for me,i guess its the luck of the draw for some people.

 

[jacktesterson]

Its not 2001 anymore.

 

[peonyu]

Its a ongoing myth that AMD/ATI drivers still suck. They USED to suck ass but that was back in the ATI Rage days [10+ years ago], they got better over time until the 9700 Pro came out. Once the 9700 Pro was out ATI had a dedicated driver team assigned to publish drivers [they did not have a dedicated team prior to that], and the 9700 Pro came out atleast 7 or 8 years ago...So yea they have had good drivers for a while now.

In my experience both Nvidia and AMD drivers are largely equivalent nowadays on Windows, the exception is Linux where Nvidia does hold a advantage. On the other hand, for TV-Out ATI has always been superior to Nvidia imo - for me I have always had almost no hassle getting it to work on a Radeon card whereas Nvidia cards can be picky if you dont have a TV it likes.

I would go with whichever card gives you the best bang for the buck and dont worry about the drivers, only fanboys will say Nvidia or AMD drivers are horrific today [both are good].

 

[Jacky60]

It's not an ongoing myth imho they have got worse probs due to cost cutting/shortage of money. I've owned pretty much all of their top cards and most of Nvidia's and I honestly think ( despite being a passionate ATI/AMD supporter-check my posting history) that they've just not been able or willing to make sure it all works. Having said that this is my first quad gpu setup and I've only owned 4890 crossfire and 5970 trifire multi gpu setups before (apart from Voodoo 2 12md SLI) so I can't comment with a lot of multi gpu experience Both teams lack proper support if you're dumb enough to spend stupid amounts of money on their cards (trifire/Tri-SLI/Quad/quadfire) but when you have done that and they haven't bothered to code it (because you represent 0.5% of their market) it's still really annoying. Nvidia are better resourced and they clearly have a bigger team and can test more options. It's particularly annoying when you realise the hardware design is really good but the software team don't get anything like the best out of it any more unlike in 4870 days. With single card setups I'm sure both green and red teams are consistently pretty good.

 

[Jacky60]

Nvidia's drivers have so many things wrong with them it's really kind of ridiculous.

AMD's HW sucks. I'm sure their drivers suck too, but I have no idea as to whether they suck as bad as those from nvidia.

3dfx and Matrox made good drivers and good hardware, but 3dfx isn't around anymore and Matrox doesn't make GPUs for gamers anymore. 3dfx made damn good drivers.

Making good drivers is easy when you have a product range of 1,2 or 3 cards-that's a willfully moronic comparison. Matrox were cretins when it came to the GPU market despite my lovely G400 Max. Nvidia were kings of spin from the outset. When you have a product range of 20-40 cards including old stuff the variables increase at least exponentially (very quickly indeed) and both manufacturers have made rods for their own backs. AMD hardware has always been good and especially good value for money vs Nvidia.

 

[Yuriman]

My opinion:

Minor very issues with both, I can't say that one is better than the other. I've run crossfire and was pleased, but when I upgraded I switched to a single GPU for heat/noise/simplicity reasons.

What I read on forums suggests that NV typically has better support for cards that are just released, AMD has their hardware out first but the software *typically* lags a bit.

 

[sandorski]

Samish

 

[Dark Shroud]

Well now that AMD isn't going to release updates for anything past the HD 5000 series they'll be able to focus on getting drivers & profiles out on a regular basis again.