YA Why do you prefer AMD or NV Thread

[Puffnstuff]

Having owned both brands the one thing that I can say about them is that nvidia drivers have been less problematic for me over the years.

 

[T2k]

This is a useless poll, there's no meaningful option for people like me, who simply hates the dishonest, manupulative-corruptive business practices of Nvidia, the constant deception of consumers they are engaged in.

 

[MentalIlness]

I prefer AMD/ATI. But have bought NV in the past.

Riva TNT2
Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Radeon 9800 Pro
Radeon X800 Pro
Radeon X1800XL PCI-e
Radeon X1900GT PCI-e
BFG 7900 GTX OC
EVGA 8800GTS 640
Radeon HD3870
EVGA 9800GTX

Two Radeon cards on the way however

I also think the poll is skewed. Alot of posters failing to admit their fanboyism. So they vote "I buy based on price/performance not manufacturer"

I prefer AMD/ATI...but will buy NV if I have to. But I voted AMD/ATI.

 

[Genx87]

I prefer Nvidia but have bought ATI in the past. The card before my GTX 470 was a 4850. I have also had a 9600 AIW Pro.

I am not against purchasing an AMD\ATI card in the future. But I have a had such a good run with Nvidia cards it makes it a tougher sell to switch. I got a 4850 because of the price\performance. Once I got past the god awful issues with CCC the card was actually very stable. But it still had flickering issues in FlightSimX and sometimes other graphical issues or lack of graphics in some games. These annoying issues never seem to come up on the Nvidia side for me. But in 18-24 months when I purchase another graphics card I will again look at the AMD\ATI camp and see what they have to offer in the 300-400 dollar range.

/shrug

Here are my graphics card purchases since I got a Voodoo2 that blew me away.

Voodoo2
Matrox G400
Nvidia Geforce 2 MX(also blew me away)
Geforce 3 250
FX 5900
9600 AIW Pro
Geforce 6800 GT
8800GTS 640(awesome card)
ATI 4850
GTX 470

 

[Idontcare]

This is a useless poll, there's no meaningful option for people like me, who simply hates the dishonest, manupulative-corruptive business practices of Nvidia, the constant deception of consumers they are engaged in.

I would consider that to mean you fall into this category:

I buy based on vendor specific features.

Based on a vendor specific feature, Nvidia's business practices, you form your purchasing decisions.

 

[T2k]

I would consider that to mean you fall into this category:


Based on a vendor specific feature, Nvidia's business practices, you form your purchasing decisions.

"Vendor-specific feature" - AWESOME!!!

Very good one, Idontcare!

 

[nemesismk2]

I am not a fanboy and buy based on price/performance not manufacturer so dont care if its AMD or Nvidia

 

[Paratus]

"Vendor-specific feature" - AWESOME!!!

Very good one, Idontcare!

Bah that's what I was going to say!

 

[brandonb]

I buy basically on price/performance and performance/watt. Over the last few upgrades, I've went Nvidia GF3, ATI 9700, Nvidia 7800, Nvidia 8800, ATI 4850, ATI 5850.

Also as a programmer, and writing DX apps as a hobby, I've noticed ATI/AMD has followed typical behavior with programming more exactly. So, I choose to develop on that platform. Nvidia atleast in the 7800 days did alot of assumptions, and when I coded for it (and it worked) it did not work right on ATI hardware. I then discovered, it was me, not the card, that was assuming stuff, and Nvidia just defaults differently than ATI does.

IE: If you write a pixel shader for a video card, it wants the pixel wants 4 colors, R, G, B, and A for alpha. If the developer forgets to specify an alpha (like I did once), ATI will default to whatever happens to be in memory (which is how C/C++ works), while the nvidia will default to 255 (completely opaque)... So ATI handled it more exactly to how I'm used to, and I never noticed the issue while developing on Nvidia hardware.

 

[bamacre]

The poll results tell me you all are a lot smarter than I thought. The minority has just been very loud.

I've never understood fanboys.

 

[JimmiG]

Been using almost only ATI cards since the 9700 Pro, but this time I decided I wanted a Nvidia card.

Nvidia's drivers work better with Flight Simulator X (higher performance, better image quality and more options for anti-aliasing trees and other objects).

Same with X-Plane - the game was completely unplayable from spring 2009 to early 2010 because of several bugs in ATI's OpenGL drivers that caused display corruption with VBO's, memory leaks and crashes to the desktop after 30 - 60 minutes of playing, I actually had to dual-boot my system in order to have an installation with an older Catalyst version for this game.

 

[Petey!]

I'm usually a bang-for-buck kind of guy, but given 2 reasonably identical cards, I'd pick nvidia because of my confidence in their drivers.

 

[RobertR1]

I look at the games I will be playing at 2560x1600 and see which card is a better fit for me. When I look at the graphs, I look at minimum frames as much as average frames. I'll take stable FPS vs peaks and valleys everytime.

If both cards are close, I'll go with Ati due to nvidia policies but for me, performance comes first. I don't care one bit for "future proofing." By the time the "future" arrives, I'm ready for a new card anyway.

Having said that, I've shifted over to the 360 for gaming in the past few years due to a more consistant/stable experience but looking to get back into PC gaming with Portal 2/Diablo 3/BF3. Those are the only game benchmarks which will matter to me.

 

[Rhezuss]

Been on the green and red side since my first computer.
Here how it's been:
- Diamond Monster II 3dfx (on my very first computer)
- GeForce 256
- GeForce 2 Ti
- GeForce 3 Ti200
- GeForce 4 Ti4200
- ATI Radeon 9800Pro
- GeForce 6600GT
- GeForce 6800GT
- GeForce 7600GT
- GeForce 9600GT
- ATI Radeon HD 4850
- ATI Radeon HD 5770
- ATI Radeon HD 6850 (now)

 

[Douglar]

I prefer ATI cards because they've all worked at 1680x1050 with my 5m DVI cable (4670, 4850, 5850). I've tried 2 nvidia cards (7600, 9600) and they failed to drive a signal when the resolution went over 1024x768. Maybe the Fermi cards can drive a signal on the long cable, but twice burned makes me shy away from the RMA hassles. Why do I use a 16 foot dvi cable? Because I keep my PC in the basement. It's absolutely quiet that way.

 

[Martimus]

Poll is flawed... Either you are a fanboy or unbiased?

Im neither, I lean towards AMD but I wont pass up an Nvidia card if it has better price/performance

In fact, its not that I lean towards AMD, its that like many here on the forum, I am agaisnt what Nvidia has been doing... So it doesnt really have to be AMD, its just that there is no other competitor anyway, but I would pick anyone over Nvidia if offered the same conditions

I agree. The current poll says either you are so biased that you will never buy the competition, or you have no bias at all. I know that I prefer AMD to nVidia, mostly due to the unappealing marketing and other business practices that nVidia does. While these are rather successful, they are offputting to some, and I happen to be in that category of people who was put off by the practices.

That said, I would definitely still buy an nVidia card (and have a few times) it just would have to be a good enough value to overcome my prejudiced bias toward AMD. So none of the options actually applies to me, in my opinion.

 

[Arkadrel]

I'm usually a bang-for-buck kind of guy, but given 2 reasonably identical cards, I'd pick nvidia because of my confidence in their drivers.

except they had laptops get to hot after driver updates and die on them.
except starcraft II killed a few cards until drivers fixed it.
except SINCE 4xx there still isnt working driver fixes to help people that play dx8-9 games like ffxi where they are getting 5-10 fps on 480 cards. Nvidia has been promising drivers to fix it for like 6months or something silly like that.

I think nvidia has more serious driver issues than amd/ati has had... but somehow people always say the drivers are nvidias strength. I just find it odd.... I dont think ATI ever had drivers that distroyed cards (nvidia has).

I prefer ATI cards because they've all worked at 1680x1050 with my 5m DVI cable (4670, 4850, 5850). I've tried 2 nvidia cards (7600, 9600) and they failed to drive a signal when the resolution went over 1024x768. Maybe the Fermi cards can drive a signal on the long cable, but twice burned makes me shy away from the RMA hassles. Why do I use a 16 foot dvi cable? Because I keep my PC in the basement. It's absolutely quiet that way.

Ive long dreamed of doing the same! (never gotten around to it).... pc in differnt room = no noise = brillant.

 

[Daedalus685]

For historical reasons I usually chose ATI when given a relatively even choice based on the company's location to my home. Since the merger that no longer sways my decision and I chose price/performance. I was certainly biased towards ATI while they were a canadian company, but don't particularly care these days beyond being used to them.

Currently I have a couple 4890s which will be replaced by something around Christmas time. We will see what makes the wallet happiest then. Optimus tech is nearly the most required feature for a laptop IMO these days (at least for what I want one for) though.

Card history:
ATI Rage furry pro
ATI Radeon 8500
ATI Radeon 9800
ATI 2600pro as a stopgap
ATI x1600m in first laptop
Nvidia GTX8800
4870 512mb Crossfire (Given to brother quite soon after purchase)
4890 Crossfire currently in desktop
Nvidia G310M in current u33 laptop

 

[JSt0rm]

I'm still pissed nvidia planted people in these forums to alter my buying decisions without my knowledge. I thought about this last week even and I'm still not ok with what they did. I wont be giving them any more of my money, ever.

 

[Daedalus685]

I'm still pissed nvidia planted people in these forums to alter my buying decisions without my knowledge. I thought about this last week even and I'm still not ok with what they did. I wont be giving them any more of my money, ever.

Unfortunately, I would be dumbfounded if there were not 'plants' from every company we regularly purchase from (be it AMD, Nvidia, Intel, or Pepsi) on some social site from time to time.

 

[Throckmorton]

I'm still pissed nvidia planted people in these forums to alter my buying decisions without my knowledge. I thought about this last week even and I'm still not ok with what they did. I wont be giving them any more of my money, ever.

I keep hearing about nVidia doing these immoral things, like sending out sample cards with extra pipelines, detecting benchmarks and cheating with the drivers, now astroturfing...

What has AMD done?

 

[Genx87]

I keep hearing about nVidia doing these shady things, like sending out sample cards with extra pipelines, detecting benchmarks and cheating with the drivers...

What has AMD done?

How about covering up filtering issues for an entire year, claiming they are fixed with the next iteration and they are still there. They did send out 6850's with more SP's than reference design and apparently some sites benchmarked them without knowing or checking. And AMD does shader replacement with the best of them.

Both sides do shady things.

 

[Lonyo]

How about covering up filtering issues for an entire year, claiming they are fixed with the next iteration and they are still there. They did send out 6850's with more SP's than reference design and apparently some sites benchmarked them without knowing or checking. And AMD does shader replacement with the best of them.

Both sides do shady things.

To be fair on the cards with incorrect number of SPs, that's happened twice before as well, and it's been less SPs enabled than should have been in the past, so that can be chalked up to a (repeated) idiotic mistake more than shady practice.

 

[Throckmorton]

How about covering up filtering issues for an entire year, claiming they are fixed with the next iteration and they are still there. They did send out 6850's with more SP's than reference design and apparently some sites benchmarked them without knowing or checking. And AMD does shader replacement with the best of them.

Both sides do shady things.

Not a joke or making a point. I just haven't been keeping up with video cards for about 2 years.

The filtering thing I just learned about from the thread here but I thought they came clean and fixed it within the bounds of their technology.

 

[Genx87]

Not a joke or making a point. I just haven't been keeping up with video cards for about 2 years.

The filtering thing I just learned about from the thread here but I thought they came clean and fixed it within the bounds of their technology.

I know, I removed that from my reply. The filtering issue is interesting to me because it seems like only one site run by a poster on here noticed it. And it is like the second the 6800 series showed up AMD admitted the issue and claimed it was a hardware issue with the 5000 series. Basically sweeping it under the rug as an issure on outdated hardware. But it doesnt appear the 6800 series is that far off the 5000 series from a hardware perspective. So when they claimed it was fixed I was a bit surprised. And it appears through the work of a few posters on here they can show it hasnt been completely fixed.