Question--how did ATI get this rap for bad drivers?

[taylor34]

Hello-

I've been wondering this for quite a while. For some reason, ATI has long been linked to having bad drivers, but are they really worse then anybody else? I've used 3dfx, nvidia, and ati products, and for stability, nobody beats 3dfx. Actually though, ATI's aren't that much worse though--haven't had hardly any problems. Nvidia's drivers, on the other hand, have been nightmarish. They do offer the best performance increases when they come out--however, they are plagued with lockup and other problems. A lot of the times when nvidia releases a new driver revision, it is actually worse than the set before--that just doesn't happen at most companies. So basically after all this, why is ATI scrutinized more than nvidia for poor drivers (aside from windows 2000--I'm just talking 98)? Thanks

Aaron Taylor
"Taylor34"

 

[BenSkywalker]

nVidia's official drivers almost never have problems(as long as they are installed properly), 3dfx's latest and greatest still do(just not for the average user), ATi's have been absolutely horrible in pretty much every aspect for a long time(though they are getting much better).

For nVidia drivers, they Det3s are used in high end(read, $10K plus) workstations, they are overall the best. For the user who cares about proper official drivers, nVidia is the best, hands down.

Next up is 3dfx. They do exceedingly well in everything except high end 3D. Stability again is very high as long as you install them properly, which includes formatting your HD when you switch between a 3dfx board and one from another company(this should be done when switching between any two different company's boards).

ATi has had severe problems with every single one of their chips dating back to at least the RageIIc(though the Radeon is much better then prior offerings). The RagePro was incredibly picky about displaying anything properly and to this day still hasn't had a driver release anywhere near as good as the average Detonator or 3dfx release(still not very stable, NT drivers still wouldn't run Quake2 right last time I checked, the first game that a card of that era should have been worried about). Rage128 wasn't much better. After a year or so they seem to have most of the issues fixed, but they still have lingering problems(particularly with newer games).

For the Radeon, look over at GH the thread that's locked at the top for right now. The Radeon users are all wondering about drivers, and when they will be fixed. If they were solid, then people wouldn't gripe. System stability should be a given, that should never be something that you consider a plus. Issues with a game here and there and performance issues, along with a set of drivers that enable all of the features that the board supports(HyperZ for instance) are things people want. nVidia and 3dfx pull features they never even claimed to support out of their hardware, let alone failing to get the ones that they do have right.

 

[Workin']

Here's an example:

I bought a Rage Fury Pro 32MB Vivo board just before Christmas. This is a product at the end of its active life, as it is now surpassed by the Radeon. So you would assume the drivers would be squared away and trouble-free.

Well, the drivers shipped with the card would not work correctly with ANY OpenGL game, no matter what. At least DVD playback and video in/out worked OK. Installed the latest (at the time) drivers, now OpenGL worked but video in did not and DVD playback was screwed. Eventually a newer driver set (the current one) was released that got video in, OpenGL, and DVD working. But DVD playback was all blocky and poor visual quality. After much head-pounding and web-searching and forum posting, someone figured out that if you used the latest driver set but replaced the DVD and Direct3D modules with those from a certain earlier driver set, everything would work perfectly.

The question is, why didn't ATi take care of that to begin with? That's how you get the reputation for shoddy drivers.....

But anyway, after getting all the problems ironed out, the capabilities and performance of that card in my system has been awesome, especially considering it was only $90.

 

[Ajay]

Lot of problems with the RagePro and earlier chips. I can't upgrade the drivers for the RagePro on my NT machine at work or I get random BSODs.

My Radeon at home (W2K) works great. The driver on the CD would crash in Tribes, but I switched to the 3073 drivers and I have almost no problems (occasional texture corruption, but even my GF2 w/6.34 drives had that problem).

Basically ATI themselves said in an interview that they used to rush the hardware and try to fix any hardware faults in the drivers, they found out the hard way that that doesn't work too well. Starting with the Radeon, they are more careful about design and validation - so they have an easier time writting drivers since the hardware interface is more robust.

Hopefully the Radeon will establish a trend (ATI realizes it needs to change, or go out of business). If the coming 'Unified' drivers indicates that ATI will be taking the same approach as NVidia (some basic elements of the hardware interface remain the same from chip to chip), then the drivers should get better and better with each generation (and the latest release will likely benefit earlier chips as well).

-AJ

 

[Eug]

Interesting. Every time I've installed a Rage Pro Turbo card it worked flawlessly. Granted, it's only been a few times on a few different computers (Win 98), but I've never had a problem. Rock solid, including playing Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 (albeit VERY slowly). I also have a Rage Pro in my NT box with zero problems, but I didn't install the OS myself.

Actually at the time bought the card, my vendor recommended the card hands down because in his experience the card was the absolute easiest to install (on an Intel BX system) for a business PC, without much issue of compatibility problems, etc. But on a business PC you ain't using OpenGL, Direct3D, etc. This perhaps illustrates ATI's priorities at the time. But I guess the bad rep from the gaming crowd is catching up to them.

 

[Taz4158]

<< For the Radeon, look over at GH the thread that's locked at the top for right now. The Radeon users are all wondering about drivers, and when they will be fixed. If they were solid, then people wouldn't gripe. >>


Ben, overall your assessment was rather fair but the people complaining are a VERY tiny majority. Sure everyone wants to wring the last ounce of performance out of their cards but the drivers for Radeon are very stable and fast. One cannot compare to the &quot;old&quot; days of ATI. You know as well as I that a small percentage of people will always gripe, just look at any nVidia board to see driver complaints as well.

 

[Vegito]

When they said we cant support w2k for the maxx because we don't know how to write drivers.

 

[rickn]

ATI releases drivers, they fix one thing and mess up another. I used the 3062 drivers and they were ok, upgraded to the beta 3072 or 3078 and it totally hosed Rayman 2, corrupted the loading for Tomb Raider the last revelation, and has some issues when Vsync is turned off

 

[BFG10K]

As BenSkywalker says, it's all about how poorly ATi's drivers were in the past. To see a great example of this, try using a Rage Fury MAXX card for a while. The drivers for this card have to be the worst I have ever seen and they are still loaded with bugs, even today.

The Radeon's drivers are much better but they still have issues in certain games. Hopefully ATi will greatly improve their driver support so they can compete with nVidia.

 

[hans007]

i dont think 3dfx ever really had a problem with their drivers. ATI's for the rage128 type cards were just horrible, took forever to get even decent. They are doing a much better job with the radeon though.

 

[macssuck]

all the above

 

[Mday]

<< Question--how did ATI get this rap for bad drivers? >>



because we tried them.

 

[Eug]

<< ATI's for the rage128 type cards were just horrible, took forever to get even decent. >>

Heheh. Maybe I just don't play enough picky games, or else I get my ATI hardware after the bugs have been worked out... but again, my Rage 128 works gorgeously in my laptop, including with Unreal Tournament and Quake 3. And DVD is awesome.

However, I use a 3dfx Voodoo 3 card in my desktop, simply because it's fast enough for me in 3D and cheap. But despite everyone's glorious reviews of its 2D, I think it's nothing to write home about at 1600x1200 (or else my monitor sucks), and 2D at any resolution is damn annoying because with my monitor (Samsung 950p) the brightness of the background changes depending on what else is on the screen in the foreground. It could be a monitor incompatibility, but this is independent of cards - doesn't happen with other brands. I'm happy with it overall, but I think its 2D is overrated.

As for nVidia, I know it's just probably a 3rd party thing, but I refuse to buy one until I KNOW that I'm going to get good 2D, since 95% of my time is spent in 2D. I've heard that certain brands are good, but need more confirmation, because there too may stories about crapola 2D with nVidia cards. I don't have the time or patience to buy 2 or 3 brands to test 2D and then return 2 of them.

And Matrox just doesn't seem to have enough overall support. Drivers even worse than the reported problems with ATI.

So, everyone has their problems.

 

[Ajay]

Well, based on a look at my brother's v3 3500, my Radeon looks much better. But I don't run higher than 1280x960 (17&quot; Sony). I had an Elsa Gladiac, couldn't run that over 1024x768 for long without getting eye strain. Supposedly Elsa/Visiontek have the best 2D, if that's so, then the GF2s just don't cut it in 2D yet (though they are a step above the GF1s). I've heard that GF2 fair a bit better on shadow mask monitors than trinitrons.

My Matrox G400 and ATI Radeon 32MB DDR are about equal on a 17&quot; monitor. Don't know how they compare at 1600x1200. As much as I like Matrox (I've been through the MillII, G200 and G400), their drivers actually gave me more problems than my Radeon. Plus the Radeon (obviously) blows it away in performance.

-AJ

 

[WhiteMouse]

There are 3dfx news groups, and you will see people there complain drivers, just the same as ATI users. I've owned Banshee, and 3dfx's released win98 driver won't work in notepad in 32bit desktop. I am also using GeForce 256, but I do not use it much and I have not had any problem w/ it. But I've seen people looking for nVidia's new driver, beta, leaked and whatever, and even BIOS, and there must be some reasons for that. Also, my GeForce 256 seems slower than my Banshee, why?

Now I am a new ATI card owner, had problem from day one. But at least I've solved them all.

 

[CQuinn]

Some reasons for the rep...


* ATI was an &quot;OEM first&quot; company.

Because they made boards available cheaply to many of the brand name PC makers,
ATI made their first concern in providing functional drivers to those companies.
What they failed to do was make a second priority in keeping those drivers up
to date with the competition. This led to a viewpoint among gamers that it
was better to replace the existing ATI card, than to look for better drivers
for it.


* ATI's chips did not live up to the hype
* and sometimes the drivers contributed to the problem

ATI would make their chip releases look good on paper for the Rage 3, Rage 128,
and Rage 128 Pro chips. But when the cards based on those chips actually
go to market, they were ususally overshadowed by the offerings from
other companies. And ATI never seemed to be in any hurry to catch up.

* ATI took longer to provide updates for &quot;limited exposure&quot; problems.

This was an offshoot of the OEM thing, the environment at ATI did not
seem to take problems in specific games as seriously as problems with
the OS. So driver updates to fix display problems in Windows would
come &quot;whenever&quot; ATI got around to fixing X amount of problems, and
if the community was lucky, it would also fix the problems that were
showing up in the popular games.


* ATI was (is) known to abandon viable product lines

When the Rage 128 cards were released, ATI seemed to freeze development for
the older Rage 3-based series of cards. There was a period of almost two
years (or what seemed like that long), before any new drivers for those cards
appeared, even though ATI still sells that chip in laptop and low-end PC designs
to this day.

When the Radeon was announced, certain &quot;fans&quot; made a point to post to ATI that
they would abandon considering ATI products if the same situation was likely
to happen to the Rage 128 cards now.

With the Radeon code being based on the API for the Rage128 chips, it is
very likely that both lines will continue to be updated going forward, but...


* ATI made serious design mistakes in moving from one platform to another.

They have admitted in past interviews, when they switched from the Rage 3 to
the Rage 128 chips; because the Rage 128 was a whole new design, the programmers
basically had to learn everything about the cards over again. This caused
major delays in the original release of new code, and probably contributed to
the later lack of updates.

While many of the previous problems are addressed by the release of the Radeon,
ATI has created a rather hostile environment for themselves in regard to user's
expectations of thier driver quality and availability. It is hoped that they
are finally getting back on track with this, but many are waiting to see more
concrete results before considering ATI's reputation to have improved.

(For the record, I own both an All-in-Wonder Pro (Rage3) and AIW Radeon
cards. And I am hoping to continue seeing support for both going forward).

 

[hans007]

whoever said that the 3dfx cards, make the screen change brightness , its a monitor thing. My kds vs19sn (which broke and has since been upgraded by KDS's customer service) would do this wierd thing where if say you hada black background , it would make the screen a little bit larger if say you bring up a white box. Now my new av-195tf doesnt do that. I've seen the brightness bleeding thing, on lots of monitors and its simply what they call bad color uniformity.

 

[Eug]

My screen doesn't change size. The images in my black background brightness changes intensity when I bring up a box. However, it doesn't happen with other video cards. I've tried two other vid cards now.

It could very well still be an issue with my monitor as well, but I'm just pointing out that it seems to be relatively card specific.