###POLL###Whats your opinion of ATI Drivers now?

[BoomAM]

Hi,
Now that the hype of Catalyst 3.4 has almost gone, what are peoples opinions of ATI last couple of revisions of drivers.

 

[BoomAM]

I personally think that they are as good as nVidia at the moment. Ive owned several nVidia cards, and my 9700pro is the first ATI card that ive owned, and the drivers seem about the same.
Stable, occasional bug, fast.
Off the top of my head, i`d say that i probably had more bugs and graphic glitches with nVidia drivers.

 

[Viper96720]

I like the fact they list the fixes and improvements. Nvidia doesn't seem to do that anymore

 

[Dulanic]

I have to say they are getting there... my g/f's 8500 has alot less problems then it used to. But there is still an occasional game that has a minor glitch here or there. One or 2 games that still have some issues with the ATI Drivers. So Id have to say their good... but not quite there yet. On the other hand I've never ran into a game that had any problems with any Nvidia drivers I've used with my GF4 4400.

 

[touchmyichi]

They are almost there. They are turning out to be really nice drivers. If it wasn't for a few incompatiblities it would be just as good as nvidia.

 

[sandorski]

[broken record] Aspiring to equal Nvidia in the driver dept is shooting for the lowend of good. Nvidia and ATI should aspire to make drivers as good as 3dfx made drivers. 3dfx didn't release a lot of drivers simply because they didn't have to, their drivers worked as advertised.

 

[nutxo]

Im not really impressed, I think drivers should ensure backward compatibility not things that arent even here. My 440mx that I got today ( i dumped my pos 9500 pro and left the rest on store credit for a real card, 5900 ) plays older games better than the newest ati cards, its really sad.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Nvidia and ATI should aspire to make drivers as good as 3dfx made drivers.

If they did, I would never install them. 3dfx actually had horribly bad drivers, they just had the good fortune of Glide to cover up their weakness. Load up any 3D viz app from the era 3dfx was still around and try getting it to run properly on 3dfx hardware. I'm not talking about speed as obviously they were horrible, I'm talking about working without crashing(the app, they were better then ATi on the stability front) or major image corruption. I'd say with the very notable exception of stability even ATi has been better then 3dfx for some time now.

If you want to talk about when games were Glide based, it would be pretty hard for 3dfx to have a 'bug' in an API they controlled.

 

[Eagle17]

I would agree I had a voodoo banshee and it was as bad as the riva128, now this was when ati did not even do 3d. At this time the two 3d cards I really liked were the verte 1000 and the voodoo 2. They were the best of breed for what they did and worked as promised.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: sandorski
[broken record] Aspiring to equal Nvidia in the driver dept is shooting for the lowend of good. Nvidia and ATI should aspire to make drivers as good as 3dfx made drivers. 3dfx didn't release a lot of drivers simply because they didn't have to, their drivers worked as advertised.

agreed

btw, this has the potential to be a good flame fest

 

[McMadman]

Not having used nvidia drivers I can't easily compare, the support is getting better, the one feature I really hate is the new overlay gamma support, it sometimes works for boosting the overlay gamma, but not 100%

 

[ultimatebob]

Sorry guys, but ATI's drivers still need work. My old Radeon VE finally running stable with the latest drivers, but I'm having various image quality issues with the drivers on my 8500 LE.

 

[BoomAM]

I dont quite understand myself, why everyone hypes on about nVidia`s drivers. Its not like they are the holy grail of drivers is it?
I`ve can remember having far more problems and compatibilty errors with nVidia drivers than ive had with my ATI driver upto now.
The fact that nVidia release drivers quite often doesnt make them have the best drivers out.

 

[WHipLAsh13]

As an ex Nvidia and current ATI 9700pro AIW owner I would have to say getting there but not quite there. The 3.4's seem pretty solid but I can honestly say i never had an issue with the nvidia drivers but have had issues with the previous catalyst drivers. I will say thought that I am not sorry that I purchused the 9700.

 

[1ManArmY]

Getting there, still having trouble pleasing everyone.

 

[BoomAM]

Slightly off my original topic,
but i think that the best drivers released to date, for any video card are the first drivers that were available for the Savage4, i didnt have any problems whatsoever with them, and the image quality in UT was unbeliveable, especially with S3TC switched on.

 

[LuDaCriS66]

They're stable but there are it's few game imcompatibilities. I'd buy a 9500Pro but then again, the only games I play are GTA3 and CS..
the Radeon 32mb DDR card in my other system always has an incompatibility with at least 1 game/program with every driver release

 

[Glitchny]

Originally posted by: nutxo
Im not really impressed, I think drivers should ensure backward compatibility not things that arent even here. My 440mx that I got today ( i dumped my pos 9500 pro and left the rest on store credit for a real card, 5900 ) plays older games better than the newest ati cards, its really sad.

/sarcasim/ smart trade /sarcasim/