Driver issues, be ware when you buy an ATI

[ICMAN]

 

[santaclaus]

Yeah, I was unhappy with my stupid ATI 9700 pro. What is the deal with their drivers? I mean, they fix something in one release, then something else breaks, what's the deal?

I am willing to sacrafice some performance for stability and reliablity by sticking with rock solid Nvidia.

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

I have to say this, but most of u have no troubles what so ever!

ICMAN - are your sure you weren't sold a stuffed card?

 

[Tab]

Heh your still using 98? Shame on you. I've got no problem's with ATI's Drivers at all.

 

[asadovsky]

yeah the drivers seem to be working fine for me too

 

[tenoc]

Interesting rant, not.

Put my 9700np into an ME system previously populated by an 8500, no probs.

The same system has seen Radeon le and GF2 Ti, no probs.

Now have the 9700 (now Pro) in an XP system, latest Cat drivers, no probs.

Of course, when I switch drivers or cards, I do a proper un-install and reg-scrub.

 

[FearoftheNight]

Your negative posts are totally unwarranted. Remind me of rage3d. Whenever someone has a driver problem w/ Ati there is always someone who hops in to say "Oh I have that card and I do not have problems with it whatsoever." How in any way shape or form does it help the person who does? Personally my 9700Pro is working nice but that does not reflect the general trend of all users with that card. If you have any doubts just read this thread over here....
Rage3d Forum Thread

Drivers however are a huge step up from 8500 era.

Edit: Sorry to hear about the card. Everything seemed great for you a day or two ago when you first got it. -_-

 

[DaveSimmons]

Your negative posts are totally unwarranted. ..

well in his rant ICMAN does go a step beyond saying the drivers are bad, to saying the hardware designers are lazy incompetents who care nothing for the quality of their work.

ICMAN: have you designed an ATI video card before? Are you sure the designers are lazy incompetents and not just working under cost constraints, for example using $0.10 commercial parts instead of $1.50 milspec parts that would survive an EMP?

And given that the drivers are an API rather than a complete shipping application, is it at least conceivable that the problem is either with the game developers msusing the API, or an ambiguity in API behavior (such as side effects) that was resolved differently by nvidia, and which the game developers neglected to test fully with ATI drivers?

 

[Pete]

Yes, ATi is teh devil.

I'm sure problematic configurations are monstrously annoying, particularly at $300, but did you ever wonder why people fled Win98 for Win2K and XP? And why MS doesn't even grant WHQL status for Win98SE drivers anymore?

 

[ICMAN]

 

[ICMAN]

 

[ICMAN]

 

[Tab]

Great response, good job changing the topic

 

[BoberFett]

Uh, you do realize that Macs use ATI or Nvidia graphics cards, right?

 

[Mem]

So, I wanted to play my favorite game, Colin Mcrae Rall 2.0. Installed it and start playing. I set EVERYTHING to their max. I couldn't believe and still don't believe the very high quality of the image till my entire system was lockout.

As a long term Nvidia user(over 3 years now) decided to buy my first ATi card(9700NP) and installed and played CM.RALLY 2.0,guess what ?No problems even with max detail and long term game playing(using a KT266A VIA board as well).

So far all the games I`ve tried which include,CS,NS,TFC,UT,DoD,Q3A,Q3TA,Morrowind,Gothic2,Might & Magic 8 ,BG2,Sega rally 2, Colin Mcrae rally 2,Diablo 2 ,Alpha Centuri to name a few all work fine with my new 9700NP which is just over 5 weeks old now.

I will not say Nvidia and ATi are peferct because I can find you people that do have problems and also find you people that don`t(like me) however in the end if you`re not happy with your card you can change it for a different brand/model.
I will say ATi drivers are a lot better then what I thought,in my case 100% so far just like my other Nvidia card.

 

[lopri]

I kind of understand ICMAN's feeling, because although I'm more than happy with my 9800pro's performance, the driver wasn't just up to there yet. Before I purchased 9800pro I tried AIW 9700, I couldn't even boot the system to OS (Win XP) therefore I RMA'ed it. (Never buy AIW cards if your system configuration is more than just CPU-Memory-Hard) Of course all the standard stuff applied. (clean install of OS, latest Catalyst driver, etc.) I was waiting for 5800Ultra but as we all know that card is a POS. and I couldn't wait longer so picked up 9800 pro like 2 months ago.

Now that I am pretty happy with my 9800pro's perfomance (even when compared to 5900Ultra) but I still see some artifacts in my game, and most aggravating thing is, if I set my memory at "best performance for system cache" (not "program") whenever I reboot my machine I see my desktop at 600x480..

Honestly I don't see a difference between "I have a driver prob with ATI, so ATI driver sucks" and "I have been using ATI and haven't had a prob, so you're ***." Sure your experience is important but generlization based on it is false at most. However, I see more of posts complaining about ATI drivers than those about nVidia drivers. (Especially from Linux users )

 

[Regs]

I had a few problems that got fixed by restarting a game. Not by reformatting. I think it was caused by heat in the case. Other than that ATI has been rock solid and stable for me.

 

[Bateluer]

The only problems I have with my Radeon 9600 Pro, XP Pro, and cat 3.6 is that Morrowind fails to run for more than a few minutes.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: ICMAN
I bought GIGA BYTE 9700pro from ebay.

Okay, hands up who can spot the no0blAr's mistake here.

- M4H

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: ICMAN
I bought GIGA BYTE 9700pro from ebay.

Okay, hands up who can spot the no0blAr's mistake here.

- M4H

It raised my eye brow too. Could of used Anandtech's own For sale/trade forum.

 

[Quixfire]

I have no problems running ATI cards on a Win98se machine. What type of motherbaord does it have? Did you update it's divers lately? How about the bios? Theses are other factors that can affect the performance of a system and video card.

 

[ICMAN]

 

[Mem]

would you please tell me what version of the game you are running? What ATi driver are you using? Did you install any patches? Do you anyone who is running the game in WIN2K using 9700pro?

I`m using WinXP,as for the game mine is the "Sold out" label of Colin Mcrae rally 2.0,no patches installed,just using latest CATs 3.6 drivers.

 

[Noid]

I have to side on the other side of the fence ICMAN.

I'd look at Gigabyte,,, not ATI.

I owned a 7500 on W98 that ran flawlessly.
(that I just sold to a friend,,, still works great,,, even better on XP)

And now I have a 9700pro OEM.
The only issue was with heat. The shim that stablizes the HSF on the GPU was at fault.
Improperly installed, I removed the stock unit for a crystal orb.

Both cards are built by ATI.

 

[ICMAN]

Originally posted by: Noid
I'd look at Gigabyte,,, not ATI.

What freedom Gigabyte has? The PCB is identical for almost all of them, there is almost no variation in the design except for the heatsink. AFAIK, The BIOS has little effect once the system started, the driver is the main thing that matter afterwords. Don't you think?

When I crash in CMRally2.0 I can't recover from it. Do you think it is hardware related?

I run windows 2000, maybe that is the problem.

Also, do you think if I uninstalled the game, restarted, installed, restarted, and then played would help anything?