Drivers- Quality.. the blurred line

[Xarick]

Years ago I had a 9800pro, wonderful card, but terrible support. I dumped it when the 8800gts came out. I really enjoyed that card, drivers worked beautiful. In fact my 8800gts still runs beautifully to this day. Then came my 5850.. which I bought because it was cheaper. Excellent hardware, rock solid, dead silent, very cool, horrible drivers. I had nothing but issues for months. Eventually I got one driver that worked enough that I could hack the games that didn't work to run okay. I finally updated to the 13.3 series and those actually seemed pretty good.

After years of crappy drivers I jumped back to Nvidia. I have had an Nvidia card for a month now and here is what I found. I had to hack tribes ascend to get it to work right, tomb raider has a horrible tessalation bug that is only fixed in the newest betas, BF3 had a bizarre texture bug that I could fix by running ultra (was a smoke issue), and that was fixed in this latest beta. However, Trine 2 is totally broke in this new beta, tribes is still broken, Bioshock froze on me.

Either I have selective memory or AMD has gotten a lot better while Nvidia has gotten a lot worse. My point being that today Nvidia seems to have crappier drivers and AMD seems to have gotten better. Whether they were on par before and I just failed to realize it or One company has stepped up while the other has stepped out, the world has just changed.

I guess what I am really saying is.. I miss 3dfx.

 

[BrightCandle]

Having used both cards I would come down on the side of saying NVidia's drivers are better this round, as they tend to have problems that are specific to individual games not almost all games but all drivers have gotten worse. There are a lot more bugs and problems in games today than there were 10 years ago, I certainly notice them a lot more than I used to.

 

[amenx]

TR and Bioshock Inf all run well with me with latest betas (320.00). TR with earlier WHQL driver I had an odd crash issue which only appeared near the end of the game and was fixed by disabling TressFX. Never had issues with Trine 2, even on much older drivers. BF3, dont have the game. As to what percentage of people have the issues you mentioned vs those who dont, THAT is the question. Overall, and the reason I stuck to Nvidia over last few years is purely due to my nearly flawless user experience with a wide assortment of games. Games with issues that I notice or that bother me are very rare, but that is my personal experience which may differ from others. I have a feeling there are also many satisfied AMD card owners that have no major driver issues as well.

 

[bystander36]

Some games will also just have poor support. Nvidia didn't have but a week to work with Tomb Raider before it was released, which I think they broke something in their scramble to get it to work well. The truth was, if you stepped back to 310 drivers at release, there was no tessellation bug and 314.22 also fixed it, as well as 320 drivers.

I usually avoid beta drivers. They have more bugs, but that is why they are beta drivers.

 

[railven]

Makes me wonder if I'm easy to satisfy or what...

I had a 9800 Pro, don't recall ever having issues, I also had a 9500 I soft modded to a 9700 and didn't have issues.

My 8800 GTS were golden, and every card I've own in my last 20+ years hasn't given me any issues.

Last night I finally installed the new Beta 13.5B2 drivers, I got a BSOD when I uninstalled the previous set, struck me as odd, but I didn't feel the need to post a thread about it or some how figure AMD drivers did in fact suck more. Rebooted PC, continued uninstall, installed new, got a driver installation failure. Struct me as odd, but everything was working. Normally when I get an installation error (on any thing) it stops and cancels not completes. Even the report log said "Installation successful" with a warning on the bottom "installation failed." Made me think it was because they were unsigned betas.

TL;DR: the hell are you people doing you guys have so many issues?

 

[amenx]

I usually avoid beta drivers. They have more bugs, but that is why they are beta drivers.

I dont agree with that. I always have greater faith in latest betas over earlier WHQLS. Reason is that betas are built upon or from last driver release. They may just add a few new fixes or driver strings for new cards and as a whole, more often than not, betas are an improved version of the last WHQL.

 

[Xarick]

Trine 2 in the newest betas

Many people have this issue.

The tess issue is fixed in the betas.
The smoke issue on bf3 was fixed in the betas and frankly running ultra fixes it.
However, in order to play trine 2 I have to roll back.. and to play tomb raider I have to roll foward. How stupid is that.

My point being.. driver quality is about equal at this point..

 

[railven]

Trine 2 in the newest betas

Many people have this issue.

The tess issue is fixed in the betas.
The smoke issue on bf3 was fixed in the betas and frankly running ultra fixes it.
However, in order to play trine 2 I have to roll back.. and to play tomb raider I have to roll foward. How stupid is that.

My point being.. driver quality is about equal at this point..

Just eat some shrooms and chill out man! haha.

Have you tried disabling the in-game AA options? It could be a conflict? However, I get you, and if I ever saw a game trip out like that, I'd really be curious WTF is happening haha.

 

[bystander36]

I dont agree with that. I always have greater faith in latest betas over earlier WHQLS. Reason is that betas are built upon or from last driver release. They may just add a few new fixes or driver strings for new cards and as a whole, more often than not, betas are an improved version of the last WHQL.

I generally don't play the absolute latest games and beta drivers often break things on older games before they get released as WHQL. If the WHQL drivers fail, then I will try the latest beta drivers. I usually wait a couple weeks, unless it was some special case game I've loved in prequals.

Luckily for me, Tomb Raider worked great on the WHQL 310 drivers (forget decimal numbers), it was the latest drivers which failed on it at release.

 

[bystander36]

Trine 2 in the newest betas

Many people have this issue.

The tess issue is fixed in the betas.
The smoke issue on bf3 was fixed in the betas and frankly running ultra fixes it.
However, in order to play trine 2 I have to roll back.. and to play tomb raider I have to roll foward. How stupid is that.

My point being.. driver quality is about equal at this point..

Try drivers 310.90 whql. They may work for both.

 

[Xarick]

Its no AA it is high and very high settings so I believe it to be a direct X issue.
Here is the problem.. graphics cards should simply output what they are asked to output. Instead card makers want to push out stuff as fast as they can and try to out optimize the other graphics card.
If they would stop doing that and just render what the designer wanted them to render then we would all have the same crappy bugs and the designers would have to fix them. Instead we have to hope drivers will undo or do whatever optimizations are needed to fix crap.

 

[blackened23]

Surprisingly, I have few issues with drivers from either side. A little over a year ago I used 7970s- I'm using 680s now with no issues.

Actually, let me backtrack a bit. I did have an issue with zerocore on my secondary card in crossfire. And then with the nvidia release drivers, there was a period of about 2 months where vsync introduced a stutter bug based on kepler downclocking. It was fixed, though after many complaints on their driver forum. But, in the grand scheme both of these issues were fixed pretty quickly so overall I haven't had major issues with either side. Going on, I do appreciate that nvidia has a few more options in their control panel, although I rarely use a lot of those options. Nvidia inspector is a third party download but I absolutely love it - I can really tweak to my content with older titles using it. I've gotten so accustomed to it, that I can't imagine switching (away from nvidia).

I guess what i'm saying is, I think AMD drivers are pretty good. Nvidia as well. But if AMD fix the obvious stuff (crossfire issues?) and also add some of the more versatile features, that would be a great thing. I don't think CCC has been updated overall in some time. As stated though, never had major issues with either side.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Most of the issues I seem to notice are related to the game and not drivers. The only exception is the tessellation bug in Tomb raider that I had. I worked around it and finished the game before the official fix (if it's fixed anyway as I haven't tested).

 

[MrK6]

Games, software in general, and hardware are all getting exponentially more advanced. The more complicated something is, the more ways it can screw up. However, unless any one issue seriously affects their bottom line, no company is going to put more resources into it until they must.

Overall I've had very few driver issues over the years. I think a big portion of the issue is user-related, but good luck getting people to admit to it.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

My history with both manufacturers and drivers has been overwhelmingly positive from both.

Geforce 4 ti4200 (no problems - go me through cod and UO)
7800gt (cod2 card - again no problems with drivers card eventually died)
8600gt (no problems)
8800GTS 512mb (no problems)
gtx 260 core 216 (no problems)
hd 5870 (no problems and lasted me FOREVER, such an amazing GPU)
hd 7970 (no problems, even with the lower performance on release it was still the fastest game in town until the gtx 680 came out and lit a fire under AMD's driver team.)

So, as others have alluded too, most reports of poor driver quality from both sides are user error, or FUD spread by fanboys who are attached to their preferred vendor.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I very recently switched from a 670 to a 7950. I hadn't had any major problems with the 670 (aside from the aforementioned vsync bug), but I did find that--to my surprise--Starcraft 2 actually runs smoother on the 7950 and doesn't seem to stutter like it had for me ever since the HoTS engine was rolled out.

It does irritate me, however, that Catalyst still won't let you turn on GPU scaling and maintain aspect ratio without any fuss.

 

[hawtdawg]

here's my take on what I've owned since my first ATI card

8500: awful drivers. Was my first ATI card and it left a sour taste in my mouth.
6800GT: no problems
9800 pro: no problems
x1950 Pro: no problems
SLI 285m's: more problems than I've ever had with any other setup combined. They came in my AW M17x R1 and had such bad issues that Nvidia could never get straightened out, that AW's solution was to trade them out for 4870m's. The laptop even had an Nvidia chipset.
CF 4870m's: Had a few issues, mostly with BFBC2 and only related to crossfire. ATI would release a driver that would fix an issue, and then break something else, and never really fixed everything. Crossfire microstutter was also pretty irritating. I figured it was just a dual card thing, but I see now that there have been fundamental issues with their crossfire drivers from the beginning.
CF 6950's: no serious issues, but made me decide that crossfire's tradeoff's are too irritating for me to deal with.
Titan: Haven't had it long, but so far, no serious issues. One thing I have noticed though, is that if you're OCing, and your game crashes because it's too high, GPU Boost goes haywire, and ignores any settings you give it. It will do things like run the highest available voltage and boost speed, even if you don't have overvolting on. I have to restart my computer to get it to behave properly again, even if a game just crashed to the desktop with no error relating to drivers.

In all I'd say that they're pretty close. Other than the 8500 I had over a decade ago, I've had no problems on single card setups from either brand. The 285m's are the only SLI setup I've had, and I realize that it was a bit of an isolated incident, so it's hard for me to compare SLI with Crossfire. Crossfire isn't terrible, but there's room for improvement. I am definitely enjoying having a single GPU setup again. It's hard to justify spending 1k on a GPU, but I think i'm happier than I would have been spending 1k on 2 GPU's.

 

[Silverforce11]

My history with both manufacturers and drivers has been overwhelmingly positive from both.

Geforce 4 ti4200 (no problems - go me through cod and UO)
7800gt (cod2 card - again no problems with drivers card eventually died)
8600gt (no problems)
8800GTS 512mb (no problems)
gtx 260 core 216 (no problems)
hd 5870 (no problems and lasted me FOREVER, such an amazing GPU)
hd 7970 (no problems, even with the lower performance on release it was still the fastest game in town until the gtx 680 came out and lit a fire under AMD's driver team.)

So, as others have alluded too, most reports of poor driver quality from both sides are user error, or FUD spread by fanboys who are attached to their preferred vendor.

Ive used both sides with many cards now as well and have very few problems, actually none that i can think of on top of my head.

But it all depends on the games you play. FC3 and TR was buggy for sure.