Originally posted by: hooflung
nRollo I will back you up on Vista's stupid error reporting not being 'kind' to Nvidia. Last night I had my ram out of spec, yeah I put 2 where a 5 should have been in my timings and Vista 64 kept blowing up in games with a BSOD blaming the Nvidia driver IRQ and it was easily resolved by just letting my motherboard pick the timings ( which it did properly ) and viola no crashes, memtest86 3.4 ran non stop for 45 minutes without a single hiccup just to make sure.
Ok so I can you and Nvidia some slack here. Microsoft released numbers and let people interpret them negatively to reduce flaq of Vista being somewhat of the abortion it, as nice as it looks and as good as some features actually ARE, is.
Thank you, I wish more people realized this.
Originally posted by: hooflung
However
People who believe you and think this is evidence of inferior drivers could probably buy an ATi card and get inferior hardware instead.
That is just is plain fainboi crap. Utter crap. The design of the ATI cards is actually far more impressive than the Nvidia 8 series. The Nvidia has their tried and true brute force method that still works for them but elegant it is not. Better 'cards' they are not. From a technology stand point AMD is a cut above and Nvidia is at the end of this generation with a marketing disaster because they can't seem to really improve past year long standards their past cards set. Not unlike the FX series from Nvidia years ago, and the Xenon Xbox 360 gpu, the R6 based cores are VLIW and that means 1) compiler tuning means everything 2) drivers mean everything and 3) developers need to account for them.
AMD has 1 and 2 down and slowly they are getting 3. Nvidia had neither 1, 2 or 3 when they released the FX. The Xbox 360 is a major console and console games that shine on the 360 that that eventually make their way to Gaming on Windows might shift the lime light to AMD and force Nvidia to turn their unified shaders into a VLIW arch, which might be very well what they are doing for the 200. If you want to make blatent statements about inferiority then do so with reason in your mouth instead of fanboi sword. Say, "Games are developed currently rely on old school brute force and more elegant solutions still run inefficient today." You might run the risk of games in 2009-2010 running fine on Todays AMD hardware while Nvidia suffer because the development shifted. PS3 games are less likely to hit the PC than Xbox 360. And the way gaming on the PC is going for AAA titles, we might see more 'console' friendly development close the gap and overtake the speed the Nvidia arch has over AMD
Today
The problem with all this is that it never really matters a whole lot what the "games of tomorrow" run better on because by the time the "games of tomorrow" get here, the "cards of today" are the last thing you'd want to run them.
Whether the design of the R6XX line is more "forward thinking" remains to be seen, but it seems totally unlikely to me that games in 2009 and 2010 are going to kick ass on today's $175 mid range AMD card because they predicted a future where all games will be written to not have dependent instructions to increase parallelism for R600/cards like it, and games will no longer need TMUs so that deficiency won't matter either.
There's a lot of "ifs" in your suppositions, and people really shouldn't buy products based on "ifs" and what the console market is up to. PS3 is a decent size player in that market as well, and will likely become more so as it's the cheapest way to get a Blue Ray player and console by far.
There was no "fanboi sword" in my post, it's just more than fair if you're replying to a post that states "NVIDIA has inferior drivers" to note that drivers are in a constant state of developnment, and if the products using "inferior" driver are already the industry leaders by far at almost every price point, the "inferior" drivers become somewhat of a moot point.
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