Problems with switching from nvidia to ATI cards?

[fwacct4]

I am thinking about going from an Nvidia card to a Radeon 3xxx series. For the 3650 I read reviews on Newegg saying that there were problems even though the old Nvidia drivers were uninstalled and that only a clean Vista install fixed the problem.

I am not willing to do a clean install just for a video card upgrade.

Does anybody know whether the recent Catalyst drivers have addressed this issue or not?

 

[DaveSimmons]

This has been true for a long time switching either way.

"Driver cleaner" programs have been written by other people (not nv & ATI) to try to remove the leftover bits of the old video drivers, but I don't know what the good ones are these days. Google might find them for you if no one else replies.

 

[Sylvanas]

When switching cards fully uninstall any previous drivers (in this case it's Nvidia, I am not sure if they have an uninstaller if not just do it via the Control panel). Once that is done you will be prompted to reboot, do so and then once you re-enter windows you should be greeted with a horrible 640x480 screen or the like which means it is running on the generic windows drivers, this is good. Now run Guru3d Driversweeper to clean any contents of Nvidia's drivers from you're system then reboot (just to be safe). Now once you re enter windows install the latest driver package from ATI's site and you are done.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
When switching cards fully uninstall any previous drivers (in this case it's Nvidia, I am not sure if they have an uninstaller if not just do it via the Control panel). Once that is done you will be prompted to reboot, do so and then once you re-enter windows you should be greeted with a horrible 640x480 screen or the like which means it is running on the generic windows drivers, this is good. Now run Guru3d Driversweeper to clean any contents of Nvidia's drivers from you're system then reboot (just to be safe). Now once you re enter windows install the latest driver package from ATI's site and you are done.

Bookmarked for next week

 

[bryanW1995]

or you could just be like me and do the following:

upgrade mom from athlon classic 1.2 system to athlon xp 2.5+ system. don't uninstall any drivers. use same hd. stick with msi for both mobos and pray that system works.

rejoice when system works mostly ok. mom can still use it for email/web surfing, plus you now get almost 300 ppd for seti so everyone is happy.

get bored with xp 2.5+ system. buy ip35e and q6600 so that mom can, um, you know, surf her email 4x as fast. or something. still don't uninstall any drivers. pray that mobo still works with old msi drivers. end up buying new hd and donating old raptor to mom b/c system could only handle so much abuse/upgrades.



I recommedn using sylvanas' strategy instead in case you were wondering

 

[Sylvanas]

Well it looks like you're Mum got the sweet end of the deal- now we need to benchmark how much faster her emails are received

 

[fwacct4]

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
When switching cards fully uninstall any previous drivers (in this case it's Nvidia, I am not sure if they have an uninstaller if not just do it via the Control panel). Once that is done you will be prompted to reboot, do so and then once you re-enter windows you should be greeted with a horrible 640x480 screen or the like which means it is running on the generic windows drivers, this is good. Now run Guru3d Driversweeper to clean any contents of Nvidia's drivers from you're system then reboot (just to be safe). Now once you re enter windows install the latest driver package from ATI's site and you are done.

I used the Driversweeper, and I haven't had problems yet after over a week of usage. I don't know whether it would have had problems without Driversweeper, but at the least I didn't have to take a chance with the extra stuff Driversweeper cleaned up.