ATI has the best driver support!!!!

[MrBaseball]

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<< How many companies provide fully functional WinXP drivers for older hardware? >>



NVIDIA does as well. >>


And so does Matrox >>



Thats why I can't use my Matrox rainbow runner capture card in win 2k and XP

 

[StormRider]

Does Matrox actually support their Marvel series of cards for WinXP? By support, I mean all features work (TV etc.).

Because this post I saw on Rage3D seem to indicate that it does not:

<<I have a G400 Marvel and a Radeon 8500. IMHO the Marvel DVDMax wins hands down for DVD and video playback to a TV. The Radeon wins for displaying the desktop to a TV, as the Marvel cannot handle two separate displays, meaning your monitor has to be set to low res and refresh to enable TV desktop. The DVD out to tv on the radeon is good image quality, but stuff like getting it to fill the screen with good geometry is tricky, whereas DVDMax on the G400 does this great automatically. Radeon has provided problems getting an overlay full screen on the TV whilst windowed on the monitor, but G400 does this great. Unfortunately there are no G400 Marvel drivers for XP (BAAAD Matrox), otherwise I might never have upgraded. But now I can play 3d games fully cranked, so probably just as well>>

There's a big difference with providing basic drivers for a card and drivers that support all the features. Previously, the only Rage Pro WinXP drivers available for the AIW Pro did not support the TV, VIVO or OpenGL. These new drivers allow you to use all the abilities of the AIW Pro under WinXP (although video capture performance is really poor).

 

[StormRider]

<< << How many companies provide fully functional WinXP drivers for older hardware? I have a lot of hardware that I can't use because other companies aren't as good as ATI! (Diamond MX300, Savage3d, Savage4, Creative Labs Inlay DVD decoder, Banshee, Voodoo 3500, Voodoo 5500, Best Data and Viking USB modems etc) >>



Yes, I also find that companies still in business tend to outperform companies that are no longer in business when it comes to driver support.

I am very disappointed with 3dfx in their lack of support for Windows XP. I refuse to buy any future product from 3dfx or Diamond, and I'm going to tell all my friends to do the same. That's just no way to do business, even if you're bankrupt.

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lol, what you say is true but a lot of those companies seem to practically give up support a few months after the product was released. Consider Diamond for example. I bought an MX300 from them and they only provided 1 driver update. Meanwhile Aureal kept releasing several new reference driver updates for the Aureal chipset. I had to use those drivers. Why couldn't Diamond just use the same reference drivers and changed a few text strings to specialize the drivers for the MX300? They did the same thing with their ESS based soundcards. A few months after coming out with new soundcards they practically dropped all support.

I bought a Real3D i740 based graphics card with a built-in Zoran hardware DVD decoder. It never worked right -- kept locking up on DVDs. They never released 1 driver update for this DVD module.

S3 seemed to drop all support for the Savage3D when the Savage4 came out. Then they stopped supporting the Savage4 when the Savage2000 came out.

Best Data and Viking are still in business. I just think it's crappy that they only provide Win98 drivers for their USB modems. I bought USB modems because I thought they would have a longer life-cycle than ISA modems. After all, USB is the new interface with support in Win2K/WinXP. But they never provided any drivers for those operating systems.

By contrast, look at ATI. They just release new WinXP drivers that allow a person to use all the abilities of the old AIW Pro in WinXP. That's what I call supporting your products!

 

[Eug]

Well, while things in the desktop vid card driver dept aren't always so rosy, I still say that ATI has the best laptop drivers. I haven't been so impressed with nVidia's laptop solutions (except for 3D speed).