ATI or NVIDIA

DirtRider said:

I would rather pay double the price and know when I get behind my monitor and play a game I don't have to spend 90% of that time tuning the card in just for that game or never getting that game to run correctly at all as I had with the ATI card

That's why I have three different installations of Seven with a different driverset for each installation

cloud8521 said:

Im just not sure why people seem to be having so much trouble with ATI drivers.

That's because they keep bloody fixing issues and then bloody well go and break them again in subsequent releases... It tends to wear thin after a while.

So too does the promise of 'it will be fixed in the next release' response - sometimes it actually is, but more often than not it's several releases later that some issues are addressed.


My last nvidia card was a 7600GS so admittedly, my personal experience with current forceware drivers is outdated - but from memory there was a lot less flapping about overall.


Aside from game breaking bugs, it's also the little niggling things that also add up to an irritating experience overall.

For example, I have several manually created profiles depending on need.

ie A desktop profile with 3 monitors in extended mode, a single screen games/movie profile and an Eyefinity profile.

Going from Eyefinity back to my 3 monitor profile, 50% of the time I have to activate the desktop profile twice because it gets the monitor placement wrong.

I can't select portrait mode with 3 monitors, vsync is still 120FPS for Eyefinity and not 60 for 60hz monitors and so on and so forth etc.

So it's actually quite easy to understand the problems people have when you personally and consistently experience them. Particularly for the 5xxx series.


Conversely however, my other machine which is no longer a gaming rig which has a single 4850 has no problems. A lot of that has to do with the fact that it's not exposed to the areas which expose the driver flaws.



When I purchased my 5970, the 470/480 had literally just been released and I was disappointed with nvidias new offerings. That's why I stayed with ATI and tbh, it's a decision I regret.

Just my two cents:

I didn't participate in the poll as I don't have any reference between the cards. I have stuck with ATI, however, because I have never had any problems with their products.

Kudos to all who have never had a problem with either camp.

smarteyeball said:

Kudos to all who have never had a problem with either camp.

Agreed. And that seems to be rare.

I like both. At home, we use ATI, but at work it's Nvidia. Both work well for me, and if I have to replace anything, I look at both brands of chipset. I usually buy ATI because they are a little cheaper overall.

The whole "You must use an ATI card on an AMD platform" is total BS, but I do have a personal rule of thumb. I use the brand of card that matches the motherboard's chipset, and the only reason I do that is that so I have no stupid little problems with drivers - both GPU and mobo drivers. But that's a personal choice of mine, it is not a system requirement.