Going back to green: a rant

[VirtualLarry]

So when you have problems that virtually nobody else has, you somehow come to the conclusion that you can't possibly be at fault and ATI is at fault even though just about everybody else has no problems.

ATI does not have a history of having driver issues, it's a myth. There is a cult or Nvidia users who have never used ATI that perpetuate the myth. They also maintain the myth that Nvidia has fewer problems. Google search results for graphics card problems related to ATI and Nvidia come up with far more results for Nvidia.

LOL. You're so wrong it's not even funny.

ATI perpetually has driver issues. Did you read my thread about trying to get an AGP HD 2600 Pro installed onto a 939dual-VSTA board in Win7 64-bit? Nightmare!!!

The only way I could get their drivers to work, was to disable dual-core support in the BIOS. Some fix.

I'm a long-time ATI user, and I have to say, it does seem that NVidia has far less issues, on the whole.

 

[lopri]

ATI perpetually has driver issues. Did you read my thread about trying to get an AGP HD 2600 Pro installed onto a 939dual-VSTA board in Win7 64-bit? Nightmare!!!

I guess it's hard to dispute that. I predict that you'll have perpetual driver issues with that hardware in Win 8, 9 and so on.

 

[SirPauly]

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?

Believe Mirrors Edge offers in-game AA but believe Mass Effect has to be forced and no in-game, from my understanding. Don't desire to point fingers and point blame really and enjoy to say this: personally appreciate pro-active from IHV's in non-ideal situations to improve one's customer base. However, it's not all positive; sadly, this may be used as a competitive advantage at times and there is some division for many gamers, which some become very vocal.

 

[Qbah]

You switched from 2 GTX285s to a HD5870? Why on earth would you do such a thing? GTX285 SLi leaves a HD5870 in the dust performance wise. There is absolutely nothing that warrants such a downgrade - slower and no PhysX once you went AMD. There's DX11, but the only game that shows that is Dirt2 and it doesn't seem you have that one . At least you had PhysX and some cool eye-candy in a game you owned with the nVidia setup. You should have definitely waited for Fermi imo. Or bought a HD5970 to see any positive performance difference.

As for your driver issues, I'm pretty sure those are leftovers from nVidia. If a driver cleaner won't help, I guess you're stuck with reinstalling your OS. Good thing Win7 installs very fast (25 minutes last time I did it for a friend - from the DVD).

Batman and no AA on ATi? Known issue, you shouldn't be surprised (nVidia blocked it). You should've finished Batman on your old setup, you'd get PhysX and AA out of the box.

/rant
PowerPlay issues with ATi with multiple displays? Welcome to my world. I have a fresh Win7 installation, installed Cat 10.1 and the computer "decided" that it no longer likes to have 2 displays attached and won't boot (black screen). I unplugged the HDTV and it runs fine. But wait... it couldn't be all good, sleep is still broken, sometimes when the computer goes up again it greets me with a black or grey stripped screen. One good thing? At least now the card downclocks fine - with two displays attached it would run max clocks 24/7. I felt that one on my electricity bill last year when I still had my HD4870. Then again now I have an "office" card - HD4350, that should technically run fine as there's nothing state-of-the-art that I'm expecting from it. But it seems two screens and a properly working sleep is science-fiction for the ATi driver team - maybe I've been watching too many movies to expect basic things from a graphics card...

 

[Creig]

LOL. You're so wrong it's not even funny.

ATI perpetually has driver issues. Did you read my thread about trying to get an AGP HD 2600 Pro installed onto a 939dual-VSTA board in Win7 64-bit? Nightmare!!!

The only way I could get their drivers to work, was to disable dual-core support in the BIOS. Some fix.

I'm a long-time ATI user, and I have to say, it does seem that NVidia has far less issues, on the whole.

I've read your efforts to get a 2 1/2 year old AGP video card working on a 3 1/2 year old AGP/PCI-E hybrid motherboard whilst using a 6 month old 64-bit operating system and I have to say that I never would have even considered trying to stitch together such a frankenstein. Heck, I wouldn't have gone beyond 32-bit XP since that board is so old. And I certainly wouldn't have purchased an AGP card to go into it given the fact that it has an available PCI-E slot. I actually would have been astonished if you had gotten it to work without running into major issues.

Please don't attempt to pass all ATi drivers off as poor simply from your extremely unconventional hardware/OS combination attempt.

 

[SunnyD]

4890 here, does everything I want it to. You're obviously just not playing the right games. 🙂

 

[evolucion8]

LOL. You're so wrong it's not even funny.

ATI perpetually has driver issues. Did you read my thread about trying to get an AGP HD 2600 Pro installed onto a 939dual-VSTA board in Win7 64-bit? Nightmare!!!

The only way I could get their drivers to work, was to disable dual-core support in the BIOS. Some fix.

I'm a long-time ATI user, and I have to say, it does seem that NVidia has far less issues, on the whole.

AGP support has been discontinued a long time ago, they just release a driver that gives you functionality without extensive testing, arming a frankenbuild like that will give you issues no matter what vendor you use. Specially such hybrid board with Via crappy chipset.

 

[JoshGuru7]

I've been back and forth between ATI and Nvidia quite a few times and never had any major complaints with either company. I do have a different policy towards their drivers though. I only update ATI drivers when they are actively fixing something I find to be broken, but otherwise leave them alone. On the other hand, Nvidia's drivers get updated with each full release, and unlike ATI I've never had a problem with the latest drivers causing new problems for me.

The worst hardware I've had was an overheating 8800GTS but that was more the fault of the aftermarket company's cooling system then the gpu itself. I've never had a GPU outright fail out of warranty from either company.

 

[Rezist]

nVidia just recenty made alot of people go re-purchase laptops thanks to them burning up there GPU's. Some did get a new laptop but some companies refused to acknowledge the issue for over a year.

The driver issue rumours are pre-radeon 8000 series issues. If your still running one I'd suggest an upgrade. The grey bars are a serious issue right now, the AA in batman LTP.

 

[nitromullet]

You switched from 2 GTX285s to a HD5870? Why on earth would you do such a thing? GTX285 SLi leaves a HD5870 in the dust performance wise. There is absolutely nothing that warrants such a downgrade

I can't speak for the OP, but perhaps he was planning on running two 5870s eventually. I've run a number of multi-card setups, and only once did I buy both cards at the same time.

As for your driver issues, I'm pretty sure those are leftovers from nVidia. If a driver cleaner won't help, I guess you're stuck with reinstalling your OS. Good thing Win7 installs very fast (25 minutes last time I did it for a friend - from the DVD).

I keep hearing this, and I have been hearing this for years... Does anyone have any proof of this whatsoever? Contrary to what your random computer muggle will have you believe, PC's don't contain Gremlins. Any issue that you have can be traced back to some error on the part of a piece of software, hardware, or end user.

If NV is leaving bothersome/malicious software on PCs that break ATI cards, why hasn't ATI proven this and sued the hell out of NV? ATI seem to be perfectly capable of finding the cause and blaming NV for Batman AA issues, but they seem to be incapable of finding that malware that NV puts on your computer that breaks basic functionality of their product...?

 

[Dribble]

I can't speak for the OP, but perhaps he was planning on running two 5870s eventually. I've run a number of multi-card setups, and only once did I buy both cards at the same time.



I keep hearing this, and I have been hearing this for years... Does anyone have any proof of this whatsoever? Contrary to what your random computer muggle will have you believe, PC's don't contain Gremlins. Any issue that you have can be traced back to some error on the part of a piece of software, hardware, or end user.

If NV is leaving bothersome/malicious software on PCs that break ATI cards, why hasn't ATI proven this and sued the hell out of NV? ATI seem to be perfectly capable of finding the cause and blaming NV for Batman AA issues, but they seem to be incapable of finding that malware that NV puts on your computer that breaks basic functionality of their product...?

If QBAH had read before posting he would have known the op said it was a clean install:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=29356135&postcount=56

 

[Keysplayr]

The OP has an AGP motherboard?
Or has Virtual Larry's AGP 2600 rig become the preferred focus of the direction in which some wish this thread to take? I like the term Frankenbuild however.
Is this what the OP has? A frankenbuild?

 

[happy medium]

Na he has a 5870 with driver problems and bugs. He's seems (rightly) pissed that he paid 400$ for a product that doesn't do what it advertized.

Edit : some members are calling user error ect. ect. ect.
Seems ATI has a problem and some are in denial. Me for one am not. There is something with a card that pauses the action in Crysis for 20 second then continues playing. Been playing WOlfenstein flawlessly though.

 

[ZimZum]

This thread is comedy gold.

 

[Occ]

Worst driver-related problem I ever heard of was my roommate with a Geforce 7900gt that would blue screen the computer if you were playing far cry 2 and tried to grab a health kit. 😀 It's funny though, CCC used to have a perfectly easy to navigate driver panel (and gpu scaling used to work flawlessly, and the monitor would go to sleep properly...), but apparently they looked at the one NVIDIA was using and realized they needed to make theirs at least as difficult and unintuitive to navigate.

As for the current set of issues, my guess is the driver team got distracted with incorporating "big" stuff like GPU compute, flash support, win 7, and DX11 and mis-stepped on QA and some of the smaller issues. *crosses fingers for february drivers*

 

[happy medium]

Worst driver-related problem I ever heard of was my roommate with a Geforce 7900gt that would blue screen the computer if you were playing far cry 2 and tried to grab a health kit. 😀 It's funny though, CCC used to have a perfectly easy to navigate driver panel (and gpu scaling used to work flawlessly, and the monitor would go to sleep properly...), but apparently they looked at the one NVIDIA was using and realized they needed to make theirs at least as difficult and unintuitive to navigate.

As for the current set of issues, my guess is the driver team got distracted with incorporating "big" stuff like GPU compute, flash support, win 7, and DX11 and mis-stepped on QA and some of the smaller issues. *crosses fingers for february drivers*[/QUOTE]

Me too, I really want some 5830 crossfire action.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I keep hearing this, and I have been hearing this for years... Does anyone have any proof of this whatsoever? Contrary to what your random computer muggle will have you believe, PC's don't contain Gremlins. Any issue that you have can be traced back to some error on the part of a piece of software, hardware, or end user.

If NV is leaving bothersome/malicious software on PCs that break ATI cards, why hasn't ATI proven this and sued the hell out of NV? ATI seem to be perfectly capable of finding the cause and blaming NV for Batman AA issues, but they seem to be incapable of finding that malware that NV puts on your computer that breaks basic functionality of their product...?

A few years ago in a old build I had, I had to replace the 7600GT (AGP) that I was using and I had to reslap a Ti4200.

The drivers weren't compatible, so I had to uninstall the 7600 GT drivers and then install the Ti4200 drivers. Still wouldn't go.

Apparently and accordingly to the driver clenear I was using (don't remember which one I used) there was some files that were pertinent to some functions the newer drivers used, the nvidia panel changes that happened at some point (don't know when it is but everyone that used nvidia remember it was changed).

Once those files were removed from the system all went fine.

So, I don't know if it is common or not, but it seems certainly possible that there are some conflicts - for some reason these driver cleaner tools appeared.

And it doesn't have to be deliberated - in my case it was between 2 Nvidia cards - and I had no trouble to just uninstall the Ti4200 using the NVIDIA regular uninstall and then re-install the 7600GT. Was only from 7600GT to ti4200.

 

[Apocalypse23]

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.

I think thats going a bit far when saying ATI is still not as good as Nvidia. Plenty of customers are still buying and have bought ATI cards over Nvidia. As a general user I don't think many have had any driver issues when playing games, sure there may be a game or two that might not support the card, but over time ATI does manage to fix those issues. Personally, having bought about 4 ATI cards in my lifetime, I haven't had an issue, the latest drivers always did the trick for me. But then again I have just used the cards for hard core gaming, my OS installations have always been near perfect with no software issues, and I've usually ensured cleaning out my old drivers when installing something new. I've just found that some software works better with Nvidia and others better with ATI, but the difference is still negligible.

I've mostly owned Nvidia cards such as the FX5900>7800GT>8800GTS640>8800GTS512>9800GX2 (of all these cards the 8800gts512 was the best purchase, ran silent and cool) and haven't had issues with them either. As for ATi, yes the AMD takeover greatly influenced my faith and decision to buy ATI for sure, because I knew they would improve on the overall quality. So far so good, no issues. I've sold my Nvidia gear (7800GT,8800GTS640,8800GTS512,9800GX2) and have upgraded to ATI lately including the 4350 and 5870 and have had no issues, I could not have been happier with their performance, pricing, noise and overall build. Most of the complainers need to just sit tight and wait if they have major issues with something, chances are the problem is a fraction of what you are experiencing when 90% of the other customers are doing great.

Just read up some customer reviews and 90% of them turn out fully positive. I agree ATI sucked before the AMD takeover, but now things have really improved and they are slowly becoming a PC user favourite.

 

[Enigmatic]

Yawn. Anecdote mean nothing. I could find a similar rant about virtually any product just by scanning Newegg customer reviews.

There are tons of people happy with there 5870s. Just like I could find some people who had problems with there 285s. Just the way PC hardware works.

 

[nitromullet]

A few years ago in a old build I had, I had to replace the 7600GT (AGP) that I was using and I had to reslap a Ti4200.

The drivers weren't compatible, so I had to uninstall the 7600 GT drivers and then install the Ti4200 drivers. Still wouldn't go.

Apparently and accordingly to the driver clenear I was using (don't remember which one I used) there was some files that were pertinent to some functions the newer drivers used, the nvidia panel changes that happened at some point (don't know when it is but everyone that used nvidia remember it was changed).

Once those files were removed from the system all went fine.

So, I don't know if it is common or not, but it seems certainly possible that there are some conflicts - for some reason these driver cleaner tools appeared.

And it doesn't have to be deliberated - in my case it was between 2 Nvidia cards - and I had no trouble to just uninstall the Ti4200 using the NVIDIA regular uninstall and then re-install the 7600GT. Was only from 7600GT to ti4200.

I've had similar issues going from NV to NV card, but that isn't what we're talking about. What you are describing is what I would consider to be a NV driver problem, and not a case where one manufacturer's drivers are interfering with another.

It is my theory that this happens with NV drivers because what we download as a "unified driver" that works for all NV graphics cards is probably actually a driver bundle that contains different drivers for multiple cards. However, when the driver is installed, it is always named the same thing. So when you change the hardware Windows loads what it thinks is the correct driver, but isn't. This is all speculation on my part, but this issue is easily fixed with driver cleaner and does not require an OS wipe.

I actually think this might have been fixed in Win 7 because I've installed a GTX 275, 7900GS, and 9800GT on this machine without an OS wipe, and Windows recognizes that you've changed hardware and requires you to re-install the driver. I have also not had any issues with any of the cards. IIRC, Vista and XP just recognized that you were installing NV on top of NV didn't bother to have you re-install the driver.

 

[sandorski]

I've had similar issues going from NV to NV card, but that isn't what we're talking about. What you are describing is what I would consider to be a NV driver problem, and not a case where one manufacturer's drivers are interfering with another.

It is my theory that this happens with NV drivers because what we download as a "unified driver" that works for all NV graphics cards is probably actually a driver bundle that contains different drivers for multiple cards. However, when the driver is installed, it is always named the same thing. So when you change the hardware Windows loads what it thinks is the correct driver, but isn't. This is all speculation on my part, but this issue is easily fixed with driver cleaner and does not require an OS wipe.

I actually think this might have been fixed in Win 7 because I've installed a GTX 275, 7900GS, and 9800GT on this machine without an OS wipe, and Windows recognizes that you've changed hardware and requires you to re-install the driver. I have also not had any issues with any of the cards.

Similar issue for me, but with ATI cards. Upgraded from a 8500LE to a 9600Pro. 3d would Error out, couldn't change Resolution. I was pissed off, then discovered that I made an Error and forgot to remove the 8500 Hardware from Windows. So Windows(98SE) was expecting to see a 8500, which wasn't there.

ATI issue? No
Windows issue? Sorta
PEBCAK issue? Yes

 

[ZipSpeed]

The 4870 was my first ATI card since the 9800 Pro and I have yet to experience any issues with it. Solid hardware and drivers.

The 5670 I picked up for my HTPC is another story. When I bought the card, I went online to get the latest drivers. Pathetically, the 10.1 Catalyst drivers AMD pointed me towards actually doesn't support the 5670. Gee, thanks for linking incompatible drivers AMD. Currently running some press drivers that keeps causing my mouse icon to completely disappear on random requiring a system reboot. Catalyst 10.2 better step it up.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I've had similar issues going from NV to NV card, but that isn't what we're talking about. What you are describing is what I would consider to be a NV driver problem, and not a case where one manufacturer's drivers are interfering with another.

It is my theory that this happens with NV drivers because what we download as a "unified driver" that works for all NV graphics cards is probably actually a driver bundle that contains different drivers for multiple cards. However, when the driver is installed, it is always named the same thing. So when you change the hardware Windows loads what it thinks is the correct driver, but isn't. This is all speculation on my part, but this issue is easily fixed with driver cleaner and does not require an OS wipe.

I actually think this might have been fixed in Win 7 because I've installed a GTX 275, 7900GS, and 9800GT on this machine without an OS wipe, and Windows recognizes that you've changed hardware and requires you to re-install the driver. I have also not had any issues with any of the cards. IIRC, Vista and XP just recognized that you were installing NV on top of NV didn't bother to have you re-install the driver.

I'm not sure if it is like that - those were files that the Ti4200 driver didn't use as they were related to the command panel or whatever they were called. The windows xp wouldn't recognize the Ti4200 with the 7600 GT drivers and vice-versa.

I would just make sure to uninstall everything as we never know what windows do.

Again it doesn't have to be malicious - it is just files that stay there.

Another thing I've noticed is the physx driver files - on my machine with an ATI 4850 where I play Dragon Age that install physx it already happened 2 or 3 times DA not start giving a physx error and I've to reinstall the physx drivers from the game dvd.

So I wouldn't dismiss problems by using both nvidia and ati drivers, even if its only some old files that stayed behind.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Another thing I've noticed is the physx driver files - on my machine with an ATI 4850 where I play Dragon Age that install physx it already happened 2 or 3 times DA not start giving a physx error and I've to reinstall the physx drivers from the game dvd.

So I wouldn't dismiss problems by using both nvidia and ati drivers, even if its only some old files that stayed behind.

I didn't think that you could use PhysX, with an ATI card as the primary?

 

[GaiaHunter]

I didn't think that you could use PhysX, with an ATI card as the primary?

It is only the software library.

There is two versions of physx so to speak - the one that only use the library effects and the one that uses the hardware to accelerate them.

Dragon Age uses the software but it isn't accelerated by the GPU not even in NVIDIA cards and it requires the physx driver. 🙂