Going back to green: a rant

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SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
5,331
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Driver issues are rare, but they do happen on both sides of the fence. Have you considered trying to find out a solution to the problem(either by google, a forum, or asking AMD) rather than complaining about it? Did you format your PC when changing graphics cards? The default Nvidia uninstall leaves a ton of junk behind.

AA is a generic standard feature that goes into pretty much every game. Now all of a sudden Nvidia has to work with Eidos or the game won't have AA at all? What a bunch of nonsense. Nvidia merely paid Eidos to disable AA. I am baffled by why anyone would encounter this problem and then side with Nvidia on it. Yay supporting anti-competitive practices I guess. One day you'll have entire games that you can only play on Nvidia cards if Nvidia keeps going in the direction they are going.

I've never heard of having to rename games to use AA. Never had that problem.

Good luck waiting for Fermi. Every rumor points to it being severely disappointing.

Format your PC when you change graphics cards??....how farkin lame is that?? and the crap about NV paying Eidos to diable AA?..WTF?....never heard such nonsense in my life....PMSL
 

SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
5,331
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If you didn't actually mean "forced" then why use the word "forced"? The way you make it sound, you needed DX11 for some reason. Why?


So in many years of usage, the only time you ever had any issues whatsoever is when you had an ATI card installed? That must be some kind of record! I'm guessing you've never run Vista then:

3-27-08-vista-crash.jpg

Lets just ignore the fact the there are more NV issues with Vista because their was twice as many NV card as ATI cards out there...???

We all know Vista is a POS
 

blanketyblank

Golden Member
Jan 23, 2007
1,149
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Format your PC when you change graphics cards??....how farkin lame is that?? and the crap about NV paying Eidos to diable AA?..WTF?....never heard such nonsense in my life....PMSL

No you don't have to format, but it's good to do if you can even with nvidia cards. There are just so many issues that can be due to prior driver installations it ends up easier to do.
 

Phil1977

Senior member
Dec 8, 2009
228
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I recently upgraded from a 9600GT to 5750 Radeon.

What I like about Nvidia:

- AA support is a issue. Nvidia does usually offer AA for more games than ATI does.
- Performance of non popular games. Games that don't get benchmarked on hardware sites run better on nvidia. E.g. Dead Space runs better on the 9600GT than 5750.
- Driver and Profile manager. Game profiles are amazing and it's just really well done

What I like about my ATI card:

- Super quiet
- Very good IQ especially 16x AF is super sharp.
- SSAA modes for older games. Makes them look fantastic
- Value for money the 5750 was a good buy

Specific bugs:

I found issues on both sides.

Nvidia has a AA issue with BF2142. Screen goes black when something nearby explodes. There is extreme stuttering in bioshock under XP.

ATI had a Vsync bug with deadspace under W7.

All in all I am happy with my 5750. BUT I would have gone with Nvidia if they had a 40nm card with similar performance.

To me its like intel and amd. I only buy amd if intel doesn't have anything competitive to offer (like in the Athlon 64 days). Now is such a time with ATI. 2010 will really be the year for ATI.
 

WelshBloke

Lifer
Jan 12, 2005
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@OP Just out of interest what are you going to use to overclock fermi if you get one?

I'd guess RivaTuner, if you use that for your ATI card instead of CCC you wouldn't have so many problems.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
14,387
480
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@OP Just out of interest what are you going to use to overclock fermi if you get one?

I'd guess RivaTuner, if you use that for your ATI card instead of CCC you wouldn't have so many problems.

Last I checked Riva tuner didn't work with my card.
 

ronnn

Diamond Member
May 22, 2003
3,918
0
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Darn I was hoping we could avoid this type of thread. Happens every time one company gets way behind. All the losing fans can do, is apparently try the other side and than say it made their dick fall off.

Still would make an interesting study to see if switching companies after several years causes every rare driver bug out there.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
14,387
480
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Darn I was hoping we could avoid this type of thread. Happens every time one company gets way behind. All the losing fans can do, is apparently try the other side and than say it made their dick fall off.

Still would make an interesting study to see if switching companies after several years causes every rare driver bug out there.

A true fanboy keeps there Nvidia/ATI card and thinks its the best and argues even when it's not.

What I see is the normal bugs you exspect from a new card that is NOT so new anymore.

Lets be honest, 6 months is plenty of time to iron out some bugs isn't it?

It really has nothing to do with Nvidia.
Just so happens that some Nvidia users are not used to such bugs.

Now I hope this guy trades me his 4870 1gb for my 5750. Bugs be gone!
 

SirPauly

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2009
5,187
1
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I recently upgraded from a 9600GT to 5750 Radeon.

What I like about Nvidia:

- AA support is a issue. Nvidia does usually offer AA for more games than ATI does.
- Performance of non popular games. Games that don't get benchmarked on hardware sites run better on nvidia. E.g. Dead Space runs better on the 9600GT than 5750.
- Driver and Profile manager. Game profiles are amazing and it's just really well done

What I like about my ATI card:

- Super quiet
- Very good IQ especially 16x AF is super sharp.
- SSAA modes for older games. Makes them look fantastic
- Value for money the 5750 was a good buy

Specific bugs:

I found issues on both sides.

Nvidia has a AA issue with BF2142. Screen goes black when something nearby explodes. There is extreme stuttering in bioshock under XP.

ATI had a Vsync bug with deadspace under W7.

All in all I am happy with my 5750. BUT I would have gone with Nvidia if they had a 40nm card with similar performance.

To me its like intel and amd. I only buy amd if intel doesn't have anything competitive to offer (like in the Athlon 64 days). Now is such a time with ATI. 2010 will really be the year for ATI.

What a refreshing comparison actually, thanks for taking the time!:)
 

taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
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ATI was always unacceptably bad. When AMD bought them they fixed more then half a dozen CRITICAL installer bugs that would corrupt your OS which were around for years, some I have personally seen as early as 2001.
While AMD is a lot better about it then ATI, it is still not as good as nvidia.
 

taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
6
76
Lets just ignore the fact the there are more NV issues with Vista because their was twice as many NV card as ATI cards out there...???

We all know Vista is a POS

also don't forget that vista was released the same DAY as nvidia released the first DX10 card ever.
It took ATI more than 6 months to release their first DX10 card.

so for the first 6 months of vista you had ATI being DX9 only, while nvidia being DX10 + DX9... and there were more then twice as many nvidia cards around... and yes, there were more then twice as many nvidia related crashes... expected considering they were running more cards and using DX10 which newer and more error prone at the time. (and required some fixes from MS to solve... there was a major issue it took MS 3 months to patch which caused DX10 crashes... it was fixed before ATI released their DX10 card)
 

digitaldurandal

Golden Member
Dec 3, 2009
1,828
0
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5870 works on multi-display with new drivers on default clock/voltage settings. Please correct me if I am wrong.


The key word is overclock. The default OC ui is for laymen, which only does basic stuffs. By basic, i mean 1 display, and stock cooling. Anything above that requires additional work, and researching is just the beginning. From pencil mod to lapping your GPU against sandpaper with water. Warranty is like the wrapping paper of the box as soon as you decided to OC.



First indication of why Fermi isn't for you. A complete redesign from GT200 means a lot of hotfixes after it releases.


What is reasonable level to you?


second indication of why Fermi isn't for you. Unless there is no fan, 2dba/idle isn't possible.


I understand it as "Fermi must beat 5870 by at least 5% on every single performance tests." Fair enough as you already have a 5870.


Clock/voltage adjustment works, but with no guaranty that it will be stable under any configurations. Otherwise, they may as well set a higher default clock to begin with. For users with 1 display, the OC works fine. For multi-display, people will need to work on other variables as well as using the UI. Back then, to overclock something, you need to ...

If I understand you correctly. All you need to do is to disable the power saving feature when OC to stop 2nd display from flickering. As a laymen, disabling all power saving features is the number one thing to do when it comes to OC as the default clock/voltage are set after lots of testing and QA.

You are not being unreasonable, you simply stated out the problems that you have encountered. Unfortunately, I don't think your issue is going to be fixed anytime soon as you have mentioned that some others are experiencing grey screen on default settings. If you are mad due to the technical issues for 5870, then you really should not be thinking about Fermi, as your frustration scales with the amount of money you pay.

If I remember correctly, 280 had a fan speed issue at release too, which causes the card to overheat for some user. Video cards are like that.

Wow take literal the noise level I stated and say something about it not having a fan, speaking of indications....

There is no easy way to disable the power saving feature. So "as you understand" and "layman's terms" means little to me.

Again, are my expectations too high - the CCC made for ATi cards should not have a bunch of bugs with them.

Perhaps the 280 did have some issues when released, I dunno I bought 2 285s and if I bought a 280 and it had issues and they weren't easily remedied I would also have made a rant thread about it.
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
357
126
Every rumor, my God! Not just one rumor, or a handful, but EVERY rumor points to it being disappointing. Wait wait, SEVERELY disappointing, sorry. I was about to wait and see what Fermi actually did, you know, in real life, but in the face of such strident rumerical evidence (is "rumerical" a word? I heard from several sources that it was so it must be), I have bought a $729 5970 instead of waiting.

Remember every rumor said the 5870 was faster than the GTX295 by a very large margin. Those were lies. So I don't pay attention to any crap people push across the internet about new products.
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
357
126
How to build a finicky, un-stable PC...

Asus motherboard? Check
OCZ Memory? Check
Antec PSU? Check
ATI Video Card? Check
Creative Labs Sound Card? Check

I've used all together and no problem. User to keyboard error.
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
357
126
No you don't have to format, but it's good to do if you can even with nvidia cards. There are just so many issues that can be due to prior driver installations it ends up easier to do.

No, Ive never once formatted and started over with a video card install/upgrade. Switching brands and all. No need.

In fact, in my MCSE class we learned that you can just about always fix any software problem without formatting and starting over.
 

Ben90

Platinum Member
Jun 14, 2009
2,866
3
0
Take a look at the following article

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/43383-amd-eats-into-nvidia-intel-graphics-market-share

So if you combine information from your graph and from tgdaily article it looks like ATI actually caused twice as many issues as nVidia on per card basis...
I absolutely concur with everything pro-green on this thread. I swear that some people on this site are paid to come here and say AMD is the best. Granted I can see ATI has a lot of pros to it recently (basically price/raw performance), but to me it just doesn't outweigh them mostly sucking dick for my uses.

If I had to buy a card right now, it would be an GTX 285. Even if i could get a 5870 for 50$, it would never touch my PCI-e lanes.
 

thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,848
2,051
126
also don't forget that vista was released the same DAY as nvidia released the first DX10 card ever.
It took ATI more than 6 months to release their first DX10 card.

so for the first 6 months of vista you had ATI being DX9 only, while nvidia being DX10 + DX9... and there were more then twice as many nvidia cards around... and yes, there were more then twice as many nvidia related crashes... expected considering they were running more cards and using DX10 which newer and more error prone at the time. (and required some fixes from MS to solve... there was a major issue it took MS 3 months to patch which caused DX10 crashes... it was fixed before ATI released their DX10 card)

So you can say the same thing about 5XXX cards since its a new DX11 card so you should expect issues. I sympathize with those that have issues because I went through the same thing when I bought my nV 8800GTS 640 on launch day. I will no longer be a beta tester for ATI or nVidia (unless they pay me or give me free cards :) ) and so I avoid the brand new cards for a while (avoids issues and I save money).
 

sandorski

No Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
70,085
5,618
126
hehe, freakin fanboys.

Why Rant when you could be trying to find a solution? It seems blatantly obvious that something unique is happening here as others do not have the issue. Narrow down what makes your situation different from theirs.
 

nemesismk2

Diamond Member
Sep 29, 2001
4,810
5
76
www.ultimatehardware.net
@OP Just out of interest what are you going to use to overclock fermi if you get one?

I'd guess RivaTuner, if you use that for your ATI card instead of CCC you wouldn't have so many problems.

Unless I am mistaken isn't Fermi going to be hot enough already without overclocking it? ;)

I have always used Driver Cleaner when changing video cards and so far (touch wood) ive not had any problems with ATI or Nvidia.
 
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Kuzi

Senior member
Sep 16, 2007
572
0
0
As someone who bought a lot of Nv cards in the past, i have recently changed to a 4890 and had no issues at all in all of the games i play.

Geforce 256
Geforce 2 GTS
Geforce 3 Ti500
Geforce 4 Ti4200
Geforce FX5600
Geforce 6800GT
Geforce 8800GT
Geforce 9600GT
ATi Radeon 4890 1GB

The only thing that I could possibly complain about is CCC being hard to navigate.

Same here. I had:

NV1, TNT2, GF2, GF4, GF6, GF7, that's 12 years of Nvidia cards, then bought an ATI Radeon 4870 in 2008, still using it now, no issues at all. Ran it on both XP and Vista. Although CCC could be better.
 

Ares202

Senior member
Jun 3, 2007
331
0
71
Ive had

Nv
Geforce 2mx, ti4200, fx5200, 7800gt, NV 8800gt

ATI
x1950 pro
9200 pro
4870
5850

So ive had about equal amount of cards on each side of the fence, low to high end and there are issues on both sides, "every ATI driver is trash" is just plain fanboyism, i cant say ive had any more issue's than with Nvidia, its just a rumor that has been built up over years of such threads being circulated

Kinda sad really
 
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evolucion8

Platinum Member
Jun 17, 2005
2,867
3
81
It's not a generic standard feature when it comes to the Unreal Engine and was always the point. Two amazing titles like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock 2 don't offer in-game AA.

But Mass Effect 1 and Mirrors Edge both offers them, and both uses the same Unreal 3 engine that power those two games that you stated. Could we call it lazy developers?

How to build a finicky, un-stable PC...

Asus motherboard? Check
OCZ Memory? Check
Antec PSU? Check
ATI Video Card? Check
Creative Labs Sound Card? Check

My Asus mobo is totally stable with my CPU overclocked to 3.8GHz and the FSB pushed to 422MHz. OCZ Memory is okay though it gives stability issues with my gf's PC and it also gave me issues with my previous setup. Antec PSU? MMmm, they're not doing great today compared to the competition, but they're just fine if you are not pushing it to the limits, ATi Video card? LOLLL, considering that most Vista crashes were related to nVidia cards, I wonder where did you pull that one off. Creative cards? Totally true, sometimes you have to switch from audio mode to restore audio because it wouldn't work, the same issue happens with my gf's PC which has an X-Fi XtremeGamer.

The only video cards I've ever had a problem with were a DOA 7600gt AGP and my 7800GT that died after a year of use. My friend's 8800gts also has issues. I currently have about 8 4xxx/5xxx cards and none have issues. However, I know none of this anecdotal evidence is representative of everyone.

ATI put the smackdown on 260/280 price gouging. Nvidia, Eidos, and Rocksteady made a mistake with the AA fiasco. Repeatedly rebranding older cards with the naming conventions of newer generation cards is misleading. Nvidia also made a mistake by disabling using an Nvidia card for PhysX with ATI in XP/7. This blatant attempt to force us to buy Nvidia is just wrong and is not a company I want to do business with.

I know ATI isn't looking out for me either. I have no idea if market shares were reversed if ATI would be doing the things Nvidia is. I wish they scaled back their drivers to quarterly releases among other things, but I view them as the lesser of the two evils. The only power we have as consumers is the ability to choose where we spend our money.

Best post of the thread.

I absolutely concur with everything pro-green on this thread. I swear that some people on this site are paid to come here and say AMD is the best. Granted I can see ATI has a lot of pros to it recently (basically price/raw performance), but to me it just doesn't outweigh them mostly sucking dick for my uses.

If I had to buy a card right now, it would be an GTX 285. Even if i could get a 5870 for 50$, it would never touch my PCI-e lanes.

Now I wonder how much nVidia paid to you to post such non sense. Paying for an outdated card as the GTX 285 when there's faster cards that are cheaper and offers you the best bang of the buck is simply influences of dark sorcery.
 

mm2587

Member
Nov 2, 2006
76
0
0
I will just never understand fanbois. Why does one company always have to be better?

ati has the best stuff out there right now hands down. There's a few small driver bugs, but if you seriously think nvidia hasn't had equally bad bugs in the past or that fermi's drivers will be that much better... well we know what color your koolaid was.

last generation it was kinda a toss up. Nvida had some very powerful cards but ati had great value. If you wanted to fold though nvidia was your only choice.

go back another generation and there's no argument the g80 and g92 were absolutely dominant.

go back another generation and I remember huge numbers of 7900gt and 7900gs cards that were DOA. They would boot up fine but were incredibly unstable. 3dmark deep freeze was "the test" to see if your card was defective.

Each company has had its wins and its losses. I've used cards from both sides and I've had giant headaches and awesome experiences on both sides. I have a 5750 in the computer I'm typing this on and I had a ton of trouble with it crashing, that is until I realized my memory voltage had been incorrectly set. whoops. You really have to wonder how many of the reported problems with cards on both sides are either user error or caused by completely different components
 

fleshconsumed

Diamond Member
Feb 21, 2002
6,483
2,352
136
I'm not sure you are looking at the data correctly. The article you linked to shows a 29% market share for Nvidia and an 18% market share for ATI. The pie chart shows a 29% cause rate for Nvidia and a 9% cause rate for ATI.

Now, there are plenty of other variables that can influence this data (Vista vs Win7 vs WinXP, the 'unknown' portion leaning towards one company over another, a larger percentage of users pushing the card to the limits and causing instability which certainly explains Intel's marketshare versus cause rate, users disabling crash logging, etc) but strictly looking at the data presented here we see:

29% market share for Nvidia and 29% cause rate
18% market share for ATI and a 9% cause rate.

Haha, you're right, I messed it up.