Which side has better drivers - Nvidia or AMD?

Which side has better drivers?

  • AMD

    Votes: 75 30.6%

  • Nvidia

    Votes: 170 69.4%
  • Total voters
    245
Ualdayan said:
Hmm, problems from people with both ATI and nVidia cards. Clearly the only way to go is Matrox.
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I actually said that a decade ago, back even when 3dfx was still in the game.

Drivers were absolutely horrid (games were unplayable), and then within months of buying it, Matrox completely drops support for the card. Something that was supposed to be coming in the drivers for AV capture was now never going to happen.

I had bought the card for gaming and AV capture, and it was now useless for either.

When people say Nvidia/ATi don't support their products, it's just anger based on some unfortunate experiences. When Matrox says themselves that they don't support their products, it's just black and white fact that the customer can go F themselves.

To this day, Matrox is the only player I'm positive I'll never consider buying again.
 
abeztoz said:
no the only way is to buy a console, NO PROBLEMS AT ALL
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Lol.


I had to vote for nvidia since I've had zero driver issues until I bought my 5970. Had a 7800gt and a 260 after that but the 5970 is causing quite a lot of grief.
 
How many people actually have problems with drivers who are using single card solutions? It seems a lot of the problems revolve around SLI, Crossfire, and the hybrids like the 5970.

I've never run into major driver issues with Nvidia or ATI, but then again I've never used SLI or Crossfire.

Ironically I am viewing this thread using a Matrox Mystique, which Windows 7 does not want to let me out of 800x600 resolution with.
 
Apostrophe said:
I consider myself brand-neutral in the Nvidia VS AMD battle, but recently I've stuck on the Nvidia side of the fence because in the past I had some trouble with the ATi drivers. That was a few years ago, however, and I was wondering if the situation has improved.

I'd like to ask for your opinions on which company has better software for their cards. The benchmarks are all well and good, but something like this is also important when making a decision to buy.
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I've used both. And I have to say I don't want to play favorites. But Nvidia drivers have just 'worked' for me better than AMD's thus far. Nvidia did have their little fiasco where they couldn't get working NV Surround drivers ready for the 400 series release. But when it did come out, it was a pretty good driver. I will give credit to AMD for apparently improving the scaling on crossfirex performance in their 6000 series but I haven't bitten on the 6900 because it really offers marginal to no performance improvements over the 480.

The price on the 6900 series is right but the performance still falls short of Nvidia. They really had a chance to take the crown here and they passed up on it or just couldn't pull it off with their die size constraints.
 
Sgraffite said:
How many people actually have problems with drivers who are using single card solutions? It seems a lot of the problems revolve around SLI, Crossfire, and the hybrids like the 5970.

I've never run into major driver issues with Nvidia or ATI, but then again I've never used SLI or Crossfire.

Ironically I am viewing this thread using a Matrox Mystique, which Windows 7 does not want to let me out of 800x600 resolution with.
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From my reading with my 5970, the single card single gpu solutions have significantly less problems.
 
I've been running ATI cards for a while now and since I've never been affected with any of the reported issues I voted ATI.. but I guess since I haven't ran an nVidia card since my Geforce2 GTS I probably should not have voted lol.
 
I've had multiple computers over the last 3 years with both brands of graphics chips all used very extensively for the same games and it really bothers me to think that people would say Nvidia has worse drivers than ATI.

In the past ATI got a bad reputation for a good reason, but the last 3 years it hasn't got much better.

Seems as though there are groups of people with ATI cards that haven't hit the games/drivers with the problems.
 
vjcsmoke said:
I've used both. And I have to say I don't want to play favorites. But Nvidia drivers have just 'worked' for me better than AMD's thus far. Nvidia did have their little fiasco where they couldn't get working NV Surround drivers ready for the 400 series release. But when it did come out, it was a pretty good driver. I will give credit to AMD for apparently improving the scaling on crossfirex performance in their 6000 series but I haven't bitten on the 6900 because it really offers marginal to no performance improvements over the 480.

The price on the 6900 series is right but the performance still falls short of Nvidia. They really had a chance to take the crown here and they passed up on it or just couldn't pull it off with their die size constraints.
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There is little doubt that AMD will take the crown, with the 6990. NVIDIA can't fit dual 570 or 580 chips on a single board unless heavily downclocked, it'd exceed the 300W envelope.

Most people don't care if it's single vs multi GPU, they only see it as a single card. So most will compare it to the 580, even though it's not a fair comparison at all. Maybe NVIDIA will be able to push out a dual 560 chip but there's no question the 6990 will trample that.
 
Well I cannot comment on any of the Nvidia drivers lately, but the last card I owned from Nvidia was the 8800GTX and I couldn't play Witcher for almost 6 mo because of poor drivers. I ended up switching to a 2900XT and have been purchasing AMD since then. I have had pretty much zero issues with AMD's drivers. I have had a few wierd things happen but nothing consistant enough to complain about.
 
I never had 'problems' with any of their drivers.

But just from a personal preference perspective, I prefer ATI's drivers. I rarely use CCC, but the new CCC is much more appealing than the Nvidia panel. Not that it really matters though, they both serve the same purpose.

ATI has Overdrive built into the panel, from what I see Nvidia has nothing. I can't even see temps or clocks without using a 3rd party tool. Overdrive isn't great, but at least the data is there.

Nvidia has more desktop tuning features, video playback control, scaling stuff, etc.
It's difficult to say which I prefer, but I guess Overdrive is a deal breaker. :p
 
I've had mostly good experiences with both, and despite all the hate for ATI drivers, I've never had any serious issues. Once I had extreme slowdowns with KOTOR on my 9700pro and had to downgrade a couple driver versions to fix it, but nothing major. Actually, the worst driver issue I've had has been recently with nvidia. For some reason the 260.xx's cause my computer to BSOD randomly and quite frequently. uninstalling didn't go smoothly and I was forced to reformat and drop back to the 258.96's
 
I have to say that I do not like ati drivers. Nvidia seems to address issues faster and release more "stable" drivers quicker.
 
100inch said:
I've had multiple computers over the last 3 years with both brands of graphics chips all used very extensively for the same games and it really bothers me to think that people would say Nvidia has worse drivers than ATI.

In the past ATI got a bad reputation for a good reason, but the last 3 years it hasn't got much better.

Seems as though there are groups of people with ATI cards that haven't hit the games/drivers with the problems.
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I could say the same about Nvidia's drivers. In fact, Nvidia deserves the title of "horrible drivers" far more than ATI over the past 3 years. You've got the absolutely *terrible* Vista drivers the first year Vista was out (Nvidia was one of the leading causes of BSODs the entire year after Vista launched or some crap like that) and then you've got the drivers killing cards. I had a 7900GT during those earlier Vista days, my god were the drivers complete shit for waaaay too long. Of course, the 7900GT also turned out to have insufficient cooling, and a ton of them died after like a year (mine included - fortunately it was a BFG and the RMA was painless). The only problem I've had with ATI was the flash video hardware acceleration. A minor annoyance at worst with an easy workaround.

ATI deserved it's reputation way back in the earlier Radeon days. By about the 8500 they were getting it under control, and the 9700 Pro wasn't plagued by driver issues. Ever since then it's been nothing but FUD. Yes, some people still have problems with ATI's drivers. Some people also have problems with Nvidia's drivers. In both cases, they are the small minority.

Then again, I find it funny how many n00bie's are claiming Nvidia is superior in this thread. There are like a dozen people who haven't been here longer than 2 months singing Nvidia's praises whereas it seems most people who have been here over a year are basically saying neither....
 
Both have flaws. I think nvidia is alittle better then ati with the drivers but not by much
 
They both have their ups and downs so i'm going on personal experience with video card drivers and putting nVidia having the better drivers.
 
kllrnohj said:
ATI deserved it's reputation way back in the earlier Radeon days. By about the 8500 they were getting it under control, and the 9700 Pro wasn't plagued by driver issues. Ever since then it's been nothing but FUD. Yes, some people still have problems with ATI's drivers. Some people also have problems with Nvidia's drivers. In both cases, they are the small minority.
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You're kidding right? Those early 9500/9700 Radeon drivers are some of the shittiest drivers ATI has ever put out. Remember the VPU crash? It took them months to finally fix that driver stream. Those are the only drivers that required me to swap releases to play specific games. I've owned other ATI cards since and I've never had problems like that.
 
Both sets of drivers have greatly improved. Most of the complaints today game related are performance issues and not rendering issues. I remember with my ATI 8500 about 6 months of drivers I couldn't use for BF1942 because they wouldn't bother rendering 1/2 the triangles on the ground. Hell, even the old [H] review of the Nvidia FX 5800 shows several games with major rendering artifacts.
 
I cant remember the last time I had a 3d game driver related issue, all my issues with drivers have been on 2d stuff or scaling.

single card, never used sli.
 
Drivers are the main reason I decided to go with a GTX570 over 6970.

Posted in a different thread:

Rafal said:
I am on 5850 for quite a long time and after reading all reviews and thinking it through I decided to get GTX 570. The reason is the number of problems I had with ATi drivers. I mostly play DDO which is one of the games popping out when you install ATi drivers so you would think the support is perfect (especially when the game is not at the top of visual splendor like Crysis) but it's not. With DX11support enabled game crashes from time to time so a lot of people turn it off. Even when it does not crash there are some glitches in user interface. And for some reason the DX9 image quality on my old 8800GTS is better for my eyes then 5850. At this point I would go 6970 only if GTX570 would be a total flop in comparison but they look quite even to be honest and from my experience over many years I still trust more Nvidia drivers then ATi. And a 3D support on Nvidia gives a little extra bonus for me.
I guess if I would decide to get a card to use on my 52'' LCD I would go 6970 but for my game PC GTX 570 is a better choice.
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dcds1 said:
Well I cannot comment on any of the Nvidia drivers lately, but the last card I owned from Nvidia was the 8800GTX and I couldn't play Witcher for almost 6 mo because of poor drivers.
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Hmmm, interesting. At the time I Witcher came out I had Nvidia card and the only problem with the game were long load times which were not card related and fixed. I finished this game more then once on Nvidia card with no problems at all.
 
Voted nvidia, but the concept of this poll is a bit flawed. Both of them are pretty mediocre. AMD's are far worse though, I will concede. They weren't too bad for a while, but they're not even testing them now. No more is this evident to someone using quad crossfire. [That said, it's been a long while since I've seen any bugs/problems that affect quad crossfire and not two-card crossfire].

For me, the considerably better hardware [ignoring the performance standpoint, just speaking from a reliability and build quality standpoint] is enough to almost make up for the bad drivers. I do honestly wish it were possible for a company to come along and clean up the horrible mess AMD have made though. Catalyst is pretty dreadful. Has anyone ever been to the AMD Game forums to complain too? Hideous, hideous forum.
 
I've had good experiences and bad from both companies with both their hardware and drivers. With that said, some of the issues I've had on the ATI / AMD side have been worse than anything I've experienced with NVIDIA cards and their drivers.
 
I recently swapped from a 5870 to a GTX570 (not too much of a performance change) strictly because I got sick of AMD's drivers. Even the rough 570 drivers have been spot on for me and have made me happy with my decision.
 
I support about 200 computers with ATI video cards, and have ATI in my own. You put on the drivers, and they work, no problems at all.

Nvidia, I dont want anything to do with. Have owned them previously, and they are just good for physx in Batman. Thats the only time I have been impressed with Nvidia. Otherwise, I will take ATI.
 
Call me a fanboi or whatever you like. I had such a bad experience with the original Radeon I will to this day still not touch a Radeon card. We had a ton of machines at work that had ATI cards in them. I had constant issues with them where ATI's driver would freak out or stop working etc.

That said, Nvidia's drivers have almost always just worked for me.
 
What a range of user experiences. No wonder why consoles have made such huge inroads, when paying as much or more for a video card alone compared to console. This is ridiculous. What the hell does the average user do when these issues come up? Probably pissed of that they spent money on crap that they can't get to work, return item, walk over and buy console. Hey it works! Graphics will not be as good but, hey, atleast they can play the fuckin game!
 
Funny I haven't had any issues with ATi drivers but have had more BSODs courtesy of Nvidia's drivers so I'll take ATi thank you very much.
 
Well, I fix computers and there is one thing that I notice about supporters of Nvidia or AMD, is that people who buy nvidia cards tend to be more tolerant of the errors they get. Sorry not saying this is true of every person who has a nividia card but just some of the ones I come into contact with.

They tend to have very short term memories when it comes to faults with Nvidia drivers and remember forever every little fault they ever had when they had ATI cards. Like Killrnohj said about all the troubles Nvidia had when Vista first came out. For about a year Nvidia's drivers were really bad, yet it's not an issue, yet people remember when ATI drivers were bad, which was way before this and still hold that against ATI.

You go to the Nvidia forum and there is pages and pages of people having problems. In my own experience there are as many problems from the Nvidia side as the AMD side of things.

I don't know what it is, or why it is, but people are much more forgiving towards Nvidia in regards to drivers. And it all stems back to that time when ATI's drivers were actually bad, they were terrible for a while and they haven't been able to get over that. Their reputation as a company that produces bad drivers is still with them today.

In general both companies are now doing a great job with drivers considering the vast amount of hardware configurations out there, and to say one is better than the other? well I don't think a poll is going to give you the answer.
 
They both have problems, and Nividia's may be slightly better in general, but they are very similar in my opinion. The drivers from both, on the whole, are fine. Pick the hardware you like and go from there.
 
Both companies definitely have their share of driver issues, especially with multi-GPU setups. I don't think I can objectively pick which has the better drivers, so my vote is solely based on my personal experience, which is that Nvidia drivers have been less problematic for me.

I ran an 8800GT in my main rig from April 2008 until this summer, adding a second for SLI in Jan. 2009. The cards are still in that old rig. I also ran a 9600GSO in my Athlon X2 rig from October 2008 until this fall when I dropped my 4870 in that machine when I got my 6870. Its hard to remember since I used those G92's for so long, but I cannot recall any driver problems with any of them; if there was any, it must have been a small issue that was fixed by reverting to an older driver. The one constant issue was that on all 3 cards, the fan would never rise above 30% in auto mode; however I never used the auto fan control so it was a non-issue for me.

I used my 4870 in my new rig from this summer to the 6870 launch, and now have it in my Athlon x2 rig, and its drivers have always been very good. Even the clock and fan control always worked perfectly. My new 6870 has by far been the most problematic. First off, the clockspeed issue with youtube/flash videos is fairly annoying, but it is easy to work around. I also began having the cursor corruption issue lately with the 10.10 drivers, so I upgraded to 10.12. Since then I've had at least 6 or 7 BSODs, and the cursor corruption issue wasn't even fixed for me. I've since reverted to 10.10e and had no BSODs, but the corruption issue is likely still there (haven't had it yet since I reverted but it'll likely happen). So based solely on my limited personal experiences, I'd have to say Nvidia has the better drivers.
 
I guess my view might be not representative but I missed all the issues with Vista drivers as I did not want to downgrade my WindowsXP to Vista. Still, I have couple computers home and two of them use 5850 one and 8800GTS second. 5850 is quicker, true, but I have some glitches and crashes when 8800GT is rock solid and does not sow similar problems. I use Nvidia cards from NV1 and Riva128 times. Went through some Matroxes, Voodoo 3DFX and some more. I was using ATi as well when it was still not 3D but just a simple frame buffer 2d card. So it's not like I have bad memory or I am a noob with my first ATi or Nvidia card. I just guess I got too old to dick around with tweaking drivers to max out my frame rates or eye candy. If ATi would start to put as much attention in drivers as Nvidia did through all this time I'd be glad to buy their cards but after using 5850 for a longer time I am sorry to say I am going back to Nvidia. The biggest problem I had with Nvidia was their lying when they screwed up the fabrication process and Theinquirer.net was the only site at that time pushing to get the truth out. It was very bad and showed the dark side of Nvidia (I would never say they are all candy) but cold calculation made me get GTX 570 and not an 6970.
 
Without a doubt I've had more issues with n-vidia cards over ATI cards. However, I think that has a lot to do with the manufacture of the card over the chipset. For the most part they've both had no issues what so ever. Sadly there was one card that was pretty bad for drivers. It was an Asus GeForce 2 GTS. I never would work for shit with the n-vidia drivers. Then I found out that those didn't like anything but the Asus drivers. After using the latest Asus drivers it worked, but it never worked as well as it was supposed to.

I blame that more on Asus than n-vidia.
 
AMD's D3D drivers are as good or better, OGL and alternative OS's, Nv still gets the nod. Since fewer and fewer games use OGL, and I no longer care about alternative OS's, I picked AMD. Why not? Everyone else is just going with their gut.
At least they have never had a driver update that made their own product stop working just because a Nv product was in the same system.

I love polls like these. They tend to be popularity contests more than anything else.
 
When it comes to hardware and software, both companies have made mistakes. I'll list some of them:

NVIDIA General

  • Bad Vista support for the first six months or more after Vista's release.
  • Bad and confusing rebadging / rebranding of parts to confuse buyers.
  • Often broken and totally useless fan control. This is essential for multi-card systems.
  • Locking out PhysX support when NVIDIA cards are used in ATI systems
  • Locking SLI to inferior NVIDIA motherboard chipsets. Chipsets that couldn't compete with Intel's otherwise.
  • Control panel features are often broken and are unusable.
  • Cheating in games and benchmarks in regard to image quality for publicity purposes.
  • Dreaded NVDSP.DLL errors on BSOD
  • Driver updates which actually killed cards. (First time I think I've ever seen that.)

NVIDIA Specific

  • 7900GX2 - Lame duck was OEM only
  • 7950GX2 - Shitty driver support / No dual-GPU Vista support for months. Effectively turned all 7950GX2's into 7800GT's.
  • 9800GX2 - This was a bad card. Insufficient memory. Crippled memory bus. Suffered from poor AA and AF performance at high resolutions. Inferior to SLI setups using the previous generation cards.
  • GTX 280 - No 3-Way SLI support for Skulltrail until around the release of the 4870 X2 / Bad initial Vista support.
  • GTX 480 - Initial Fermi parts had ridiculous power consumption and retarded heat probelms. Late to market.

AMD General

  • Early on, driver releases were slow.
  • Often times cards do not run at advertised clock speeds. Downclocking, is often done incorrectly or is problematic.
  • Poor fan control.
  • Control panel features are often broken and are unusable.
  • Crossfire profiles were not given enough attention. User's couldn't make their own.
  • Poor multi-GPU scaling. Worse than NVIDIA's overall.
  • Poor multi-monitor performance. Image artifacting, odd cursor behavior, etc.
  • FireGL drivers are so bad that the FireGL can't compete effectively with NVIDIA's Quadro cards. Especially where 3D performance, image quality are concerned, especially with multiple monitors in use.
  • Cheating in games and benchmarks in regard to image quality for publicity purposes.
  • Eyefinity features were broken out of the gate or weren't present.
  • Cards often launch with CrossfireX not functional in drivers.
  • GSOD problems.

AMD Specific

  • X800 series - Crossfire was a pathetic hack job. Crap dongles were required. Refresh rates were locked to no more than 60Hz at high resolutions.
  • X800XT-PE - Common as hen's teeth.
  • 2900XT - Late. Typically unavailable for weeks on end.
  • 3800 - Poor multi-GPU scaling.
  • 4800 - Poor multi-GPU scaling.
  • 5800 - Poor multi-GPU scaling.
  • 4870 X2 - Didn't work properly with Skulltrail platform.
  • 4870 X2 - Didn't work properly with Skulltrail platform.
  • 4870 X2 - Cold boot problems. Suffered from Option ROM issues as well.
  • 5970 - Suffered from consistent artifacting and corruption with the cursor.
  • 5970 - Had broken fan control. Often required a BIOS fix to resolve the issue.
  • 5970 - Suffered from problems with image quality due to 2D clock speeds.
  • 5970 - CrossfireX often resulted in negative GPU scaling. Scaling when it does work is limited to a few titles where it is unbeatable, in others, virtually non-existent. Consistency was therefore poor.
I can go on and on about things that are broken with each company's products and drivers. I've had problems with both which resulted in specific games being broken to the point where they weren't playable. The purpose of the above list is to illustrate that both companies have essentially been guilty of the same things albeit often at different times. Both companies have had products that fell well short of expectations. They both have had pitiful drivers and didn't work in various games. Either they suffered from poor image quality or stability issues with games. NVIDIA vs. ATI / AMD arguments are like the Ford vs. Chevrolet arguments. Both companies make great products and both are guilty of making bad products. There are people that have had mostly positive experiences with one or the other and like one or the other for different reasons.

I'm not even sure why this discussion comes up so often. I have to wonder if it's something where people try to validate their choices in their heads or they want others to validate their purchases for them so they feel better in the face of the nagging feeling that they may have made the wrong choice. Typically these threads come about whenever one company hits a home run and makes the other company's products a bit less appealing due to price, performance, or whatever. People put far too much emotional investment in these products and brands. They are just computer parts people. A means to play games, to fold on, or whatever. Nothing more.
 
Is anyone having trouble running old games with NVIDIA cards? Right now running some old games like Age Of Empires will sometimes freeze my computer and I have to restart it.
 
I've had better luck with MGPU using nVidia products. For single card, I've liked them both. I probably would give nVidia an edge there too as long as I keep away from beta drivers.

The cards I like out now from nVidia are; the GTX 570 and the GTX 460 1Gb. On the AMD side I Iike; the HD 6850, HD 6870 and HD 6950.

At close to the same clocks the 6950 and 6970 give like performance. The 580 is simply overpriced IMO. Buying a GTX 570 and overclocking it is a much better price/performance choice if you're an nVidia fan.
 
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Both of them have their share of problems. Saying one is better than the other is just ridiculous as different setups create different problems. Most people run either just fine ;)
 
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