How are ATi Drivers?

[misle]

I'm thinking about upgrading my GeForce4 Ti4200 and ATi is currently the speed king. I'm looking at the 9600Pro or maybe the 9800Pro. BUT I really don't trust ATi's drivers.

I've owned a few ATi cards and they all were POS due to terrible driver support. So, are ATi drivers solid? And by solid, I don't mean that you have to play with it, then download these special beta drivers, then write a small program in C in order to get it to work correctly.

With nVidia, you install the card and drivers and go. Does ATi actually have nVidia quality drivers? (not trying to start a flame fest, but when I switched from ATi to nVidia, it was night and day...)

 

[Mnementh]

Erm...

/me has owned lots of nVidia cards and their drivers aren't always that wonderful either, always leaving bits lying around after upgrades etc.

Every piece of hardware will have the occasional buggy driver my recommendation would be to get the 9800 I'm sure you'll be happy with it.

Mnementh

 

[Matthias99]

I never owned any early ATI cards, but from what I've heard, if you owned an ATI card that was before the RADEON 9XXX series, they had some issues. Sometimes serious ones. But I can vouch that they're (IMO) just as good as NVIDIA nowadays -- I've had fewer issues with my 9800Pro than I remember having with my GF2 and GF4Ti.

They lack some of the slicker features of the NVIDIA drivers (dual display spanning, digital vibrance), but then again, they also don't seem to be wasting their time doing things like adding a pop-up blocker to the drivers, and lately they've had consistent monthly releases that have all been pretty good. I haven't seen any application issues with my 9800Pro (and I even recently picked up City Of Heroes, which was *supposed* to have issues on ATI hardware!), although I will be fair and say I skipped several driver releases over the last six months (I went something like 3.7->3.9->4.1->4.5), so if some of the ones in between were broken for some games, I might not have found out. I did have some headaches the last time I switched drivers, but I was also updating my motherboard drivers, and I think that's how I screwed it up. A quick pass with Driver Cleaner and a reinstallation fixed it.

 

[gururu]

i've only owned a 9700pro and never had a single issue with Win2000 on a P4 Abit board.

 

[misle]

Thanks for the replies. Yes, the card I owned was pre-Radeon. I understand that nVidia drivers still have problems every once in a while, but that is a wet dream compared to what I went thru with ATi. Hence why I'm a bit GunShy.

But I can kinda worried because my new gaming addiction is City of Heroes...

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: misle
Thanks for the replies. Yes, the card I owned was pre-Radeon. I understand that nVidia drivers still have problems every once in a while, but that is a wet dream compared to what I went thru with ATi. Hence why I'm a bit GunShy.

But I can kinda worried because my new gaming addiction is City of Heroes...

I haven't seen any application issues with my 9800Pro (and I even recently picked up City Of Heroes, which was *supposed* to have issues on ATI hardware!),

I just got it. Awesome game, and flawless so far on my 9800Pro with the Cat 4.5 drivers (didn't try it with earlier ones; they had warnings on the website to update to the latest drivers because of issues with some older ones). If there are still issues, I'm not seeing them.

 

[misle]

I'm also running an nForce2 mobo, is that mobo supposed to have issues with ATi cards as well?

 

[misle]

Here's a question: Are there any differences between 9800Pro cards marked as OEM, Bulk, or Retail? What about manufactures, is Sapphire okay, or should I stick with ATi.

I remember there being some deal with the memory speeds being different with different cards...

 

[azndelite6983]

I recently upgraded my gf4 ti4600, and my choices were a 9800pro or a 5900xt. I went for the 9800pro first.

HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT. Card worked for about 5 min total. crashed 20 seconds into any game I started (far cry, cs, painkiller). Tried asking around, decided it just wasn't worth my time.

Got the 5900xt. Worked like a charm right out of the box. Now have it oc'ed and still running great. Hasn't crashed once. For this reason, until ATi can prove otherwise, I will always buy Nvidia

 

[AristoV300]

I personally have gotten a couple of bad Sapphire cards. Asus makes great cards. The 9800 pro cards out now are probably all R360 chips, same as the XT. Get a 256 Meg and flash the bios...

 

[misle]

Originally posted by: AristoV300
I personally have gotten a couple of bad Sapphire cards. Asus makes great cards. The 9800 pro cards out now are probably all R360 chips, same as the XT. Get a 256 Meg and flash the bios...

I'm not going to spend $200+ on a card just to flash the BIOS and void my warranty, especially with an ATi card (I still have my reservations about ATi but I'm willing to give them a chance).

 

[Mem]

I`m an ex-Nvidia owner, no I tell a lie since I still have one in my backup PC,anyway I find ATI drivers to be very good in general,can`t say I`ve had any problems with stability or any of my games and I`ve upgraded from every driver from CATs 3.4 all the way up to 4.5s,I do use Driver Cleaner to make sure I`ve a clean driver install which I recommend you use(does not take long).I`m using a Sapphire 9700NP btw.




Driver Cleaner link .

 

[gururu]

one thing I guess I should mention, is that my 9700pro was very sensitive to overclocking. I was running off onboard video for about 4 months with a nice overclock and no issues. when I got my 9700pro I had to lower the overclock significantly (2.5 to 2.3) to avoid crashes. Kind of a bummer, because my sys memory was cooking! Now it is just smoking...

 

[Mem]

I personally have gotten a couple of bad Sapphire cards. Asus makes great cards

It happens with any brand,my friend got a bad Asus card,I won`t meantion somebody I know that got 3 bad Asus boards in a row,does that make them bad?Sapphire are just as good as Asus when it comes to quality for their video cards IMHO.

Sapphire actually make some cards for ATI as well.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: azndelite6983
I recently upgraded my gf4 ti4600, and my choices were a 9800pro or a 5900xt. I went for the 9800pro first.

HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT. Card worked for about 5 min total. crashed 20 seconds into any game I started (far cry, cs, painkiller). Tried asking around, decided it just wasn't worth my time.

Got the 5900xt. Worked like a charm right out of the box. Now have it oc'ed and still running great. Hasn't crashed once. For this reason, until ATi can prove otherwise, I will always buy Nvidia

I hope you used Driver Cleaner when going from NVIDIA to ATI (unless you reinstalled Windows, which is overkill but also works). NVIDIA's drivers don't uninstall cleanly, and will cause lots of issues if you install a different brand of video card without removing them properly. The conspiracy theorist in me says they haven't fixed this so that it's harder to switch away from NVIDIA, but I can't prove it.

It's also possible you got a bad card -- which happens with all computer hardware, not just ATI (it's not necessarily crap QC -- they're often damaged in transit). I'm not doubting you had a problem of some sort, but writing off ATI because you had some driver issues or got a single bad card is not very smart.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: misle
I'm also running an nForce2 mobo, is that mobo supposed to have issues with ATi cards as well?

Absolutely not. Check the "my computer" link in my sig. NF2 and ATI get along nicely.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Megatomic

Originally posted by: misle
I'm also running an nForce2 mobo, is that mobo supposed to have issues with ATi cards as well?

Absolutely not. Check the "my computer" link in my sig. NF2 and ATI get along nicely.

Ditto. I'm also using GEIL RAM -- which 'everyone' knows doesn't work well with NForce2...

 

[McArra]

No problems here with drivers. If you are buying 9800pro be carefull not to buy the 128bits ones... they are crap comparing to the 256bits (original 9800) ones. Just be careful with that and you are done. And make sure you completly remove Nvidia graphic drivers.

 

[Lonyo]

I've had no issues with a 9800 and Abit NF7.

 

[JBT]

I never had any problems with my 9500 pro except when CS had that weird ESC bug but that was fixed.

 

[jagec]

no issues whatsoever with 9800pro and NF7-S. Just install chipset drivers first, and make sure you don't have tidbits of nVidia drivers lying around.

And no, you don't have to play with them, the drivers are stable and work fine right away.

 

[Quixfire]

I have had ATI cards since the first Radeon series, Radeon 32MB SDR, and only had minor issues with their drivers, mostly specific game related. Since my purchase of an ATI 9600 Pro I have had no issues with the card or the drivers.

BTW, I am still using the same motherboard & cpu I got when I had my Radeon 32MB SDR installed.

 

[pukemon]

I don't think its just the video drivers alone. Here's my ordeal.

I used 3 different nvidia cards from Geforce2mx through Geforce3 (a few years back when i was gaming a lot more). They always worked and amazingly, still do.

Upgraded to a "Built by" ATi Radeon 9600. Was using a KT266A. Worked perfectly. Was a happy camper. Upgraded to an nforce2 board. Worked perfectly. (yeah that's right, nvidia and ati co-exist who'da thunk that?). Happy camper again.

Decided to buy a KT600 board. This one was a complete pain in the arse to get working with the Radeon 9600. The only drivers that would work completely at the Catalyst 3.4's that came with the card. I could get up to Catalyst 3.9's to work but they would freeze. I've read up on this forum, as well as viaarena's and google'd for ways to make the stupid thing work, but noone has a clear-cut solution. Trying everything from turning off fast writes and lowering to AGP 4x, turning of VPU recover, etc. It might be VIA's fault, or maybe I just have a crappy Chaintech board (that will run nvidia cards just fine).

So your mileage may vary. Overall ATI's drivers are good if you have the right comination of hardware. If you don't, it can be potentially aggravating.

 

[azndelite6983]

Originally posted by: pukemon
So your mileage may vary. Overall ATI's drivers are good if you have the right comination of hardware. If you don't, it can be potentially aggravating.

Unfortunately, I usually don't have the time to play around with it long anough, and if I wanted to buy new stuff I wouldn't do it just to make my vid card work.

I installed my 9800pro on a clean xp install, so it's not the nvidia driver leftovers that were causing the problem. Have another friend whose 9800pro runs "fine" except that it gets choppy in a lot of games...doesn't sound like performance you can rely on.

I am not saying that a running ATi card is crap, I'm saying that it shouldn't be such a hassle to get it running right in the first place. If it had worked, I'm sure I would have been overjoyed with my 9800pro, but as it is, I'll follow my experience and stay with Nvidia.

 

[joecool]

Originally posted by: gururu
i've only owned a 9700pro and never had a single issue with Win2000 on a P4 Abit board.

ditto, but make that winxp pro. oh, and make that a 9800np.

as far as the card makers go, i've never seen a difference between any of them ... i've had sapphire, hurcules, and ati and they've all been great. i usually go retail so i can ebay it when it's time to upgrade (ebay buyers are really stuck on getting the pretty box!). as far as mem goes, i think with the 9800 series there was some talk that the ati cards had better mem and so overclocked better - but at stock speeds it didn't matter.

go ati. i've been with 'em for years and have always been satisfied!