Well, I have to say, I give ATI and "A" after years of hating them

I

InorganicMatter

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 19, 2004
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I had a 9600XT in the 9k/FX era. It sucked. It sucked so badly I resented using my computer. Games were sluggish and drivers crashed at least twice a day. Pathetic. I ran a 6800GS during X800 era. I still think the 6800s were better than the X8x0s. :p

My recent upgrade, I decided to go ATI. They had the better Vista drivers, they had HQAF, and the $180 price for an X1950Pro could not be beat. After a few days of gaming, I know I made the right choice. The CCC and drivers ate 1000% better than they were 3 years ago, the image quality is superb, and I get a constant 75 FPS on my 21" Dell. ATI has really pulled their act together, and I must say I am very impressed and happy with this new card, and the new ATI.
 
welcome to the club!!!!

I tried alot of Nvidia cards before my x1900 and I hate to say it but it MADE oblivion for me...
 
unfortunately I cannot say the same. I am having a lot of problems with my video card and vista :(
but in XP, in games, I could not be happier, but ATi drivers, I would rate them a C, not a failing grade because I can still play on vista, just not in 3d mode or with CCC
 
Odd that you had driver problems with ATI drivers in the 9XXX era, they had drivers light years ahead of nVidia's, NV is usually the one stereotyped with bad drivers from that era.
 
md95 said:
Odd that you had driver problems with ATI drivers in the 9XXX era, they had drivers light years ahead of nVidia's, NV is usually the one stereotyped with bad drivers from that era.
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Yea, thats what I was thinking too..
I LOVED my 9600xt. Plus compared to anything on the green end during those days, the 9x series blew them out of the water, no contest. Even Nvidia fan boys will say the same. It was a dark era for Nvidia.
 
lloose said:
I LOVED my 9600xt. Plus compared to anything on the green end during those days, the 9x series blew them out of the water, no contest. Even Nvidia fan boys will say the same. It was a dark era for Nvidia.
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I liked my 9600XT as well. One of the best overclocking cards I ever owned as well. Stock was 500Mhz, and I got the thing up to almost 700Mhz (I think it was in the 685Mhz range) on the core after cooling and volt mods. I still have it running in an HTPC today as well.

I've never had any problems with either ATI OR Nvidia's drivers to be honest. I don't really like the fact that ATI has 3+ processes running for their drivers though...
 
Odd, I Never had any problems with my old 9600 pro, hardware or driver wise. Games always ran great on it..
 
Sorry to hear your bad past with ATI, i've had nothing but good things to say about those era's

My 9500 I bought was a great little soft modder :D , then I fried it .. (no i'm not going to say how!), moved onto a 9600proAIW just so i could have that extra capability, loved it, wanted more of it, so i bought a 9800pro, i didn't think video cards could get any better then those back in the day

as for the R420's vs the NV40's, i'm a mixed bag, first owned a X800pro, modded it to X800XT, well the little booger died out on me (my own fault what ever), too many people were talking about how great the 6800GT was back then so why not? its a great card, and i still use it, just it has bad memory on it now, can't use it for long-term intensive gaming (linux card now)

as far as drivers, never had a problem with any of them, just stupid setting not sticking on the NV side, got frustrated one night and threw something ...
 
I think it's pretty much accepted that the 9x00 series completely blew the horible 5x00 series' out of the water and I sure did love my 9800 Pro. However, IMO, I think the pairing of the 6600GT and 6800GT and the later 7600GT and 79(8)00GT gave the edge to Nvidia in the past 2 generations. Of course there were great cards from ATI in that span like the above mentioned X1950 Pro and the great little X800GTO2 but the price/performance ratio when new, of Nvidia in the higher and midrange categories gives them the advantage. Throw in the fact that Nvidia is already going to release a more budget oriented 320MB 8800GTS before ATI has even put any "next gen" cards on the market gives them the nod IMO. Of course that's all my opinion and I am all for competition because it helps everyone so I hope ATI can come out with a killer sometime soon.
 
nst6563 said:
I've never had any problems with either ATI OR Nvidia's drivers to be honest. I don't really like the fact that ATI has 3+ processes running for their drivers though...
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I hear the 3+ processes have alrdy been "fixed" in Vista drivers. The rumour is that 7.2 CCC will only have 1 process and CCC should be blasing fast to start up (compared to what it is now) :)

I have never been excited about a driver update, but 7.2 CCC for XP is the first one. I have also been using ATI from a while, 9800pro -> x800pro -> x1900xt and have never had a problem with ATI drivers. I dunno where the Nvidia fans found their smear campaing "ATI drivers suck" but it certainly is not true. Also it pains me that most people think that CCC are the drivers, while its only the Control Panel for the drivers. CCC has been a slow monster for awhile, but that has not made the drivers bad IMO. Looking how things are going I would say Nvidia is the one putting out crapula drivers while ATI delivers high quality drivers.
 
I jump back and forth between Nvidia and ATI depending on what I think is a good bang for the buck. I do like Nvidia's driver packages better, except I don't really like their new control panel. The older one was much easier to use. I never liked the CCC. I would just tolerate it to use a fast card.
 
yeah the 9x00 series was the shizzle. I had a 9500pro and 9800pro and both kicked ass. Of course, now I'm using a 6800gt which is still kicking ass thanks to sm3 :p I will be upgrading to something sub-200 in a month or so, though, so hopefully there will be something dx10 capable in that range by then.
 
i had a 9550 for quite a while, loved it to death, as for my nvidia purchases, the card died in 2 months. the x850xt PE i have i love. ill stick with ati. the drivers suck for them tho, just use omega
 
Congrates! After moving to a 8800GTX a few months ago, I miss ATI's desktop display and DRIVERS.
 
forrehmmnd said:
i had a 9550 for quite a while, loved it to death, as for my nvidia purchases, the card died in 2 months. the x850xt PE i have i love. ill stick with ati. the drivers suck for them tho, just use omega
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Newsflash for you, there has been NOTHING for the old R400 cards for many many many driver releases. So, you may as well stop updating them unless you run into a problem with a new game or something.

And Omega drivers, all they are are ATi's shit with different settings and little proggys. They are not magical works of coding.
 
Met-AL said:
Newsflash for you, there has been NOTHING for the old R400 cards for many many many driver releases. So, you may as well stop updating them unless you run into a problem with a new game or something.

And Omega drivers, all they are are ATi's shit with different settings and little proggys. They are not magical works of coding.
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A little bitter? :p It's always good to have new drivers. You never know what sort of problems they may fix. Good way to prevent headaches.
 
I wont lie,
I have never had any driver issues with my ATI card.
and I really wish I knew the people that did so I could fix them.
 
For the last 5-6 years I've used ATI cards and never once had a driver issue, not once. Not even a hiccup like crashing or corrupting. I overclock as well, which is impressive considering the hell I put my cards though with high temperatures. Until ATI gives me a crap card with crap drivers that don't work, I'll gladly pronounce their high quality (both hardware and software).

...and yes, the x800's killed the 6800. My XT was faster than the Ultra.
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
A little bitter? :p It's always good to have new drivers. You never know what sort of problems they may fix. Good way to prevent headaches.
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Nah, ATi gets the drivers pretty rock solid fairly early in the life of the card. Take a look at this article, its a little dated, but it shows how well ATi does in regards of getting the Catalyst drivers up to full performance early in a GPU's life cycle, which is something I think they learned from the lack of that during the 8500 cards:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2640&p=5


That's_Corporate said:
For the last 5-6 years I've used ATI cards and never once had a driver issue, not once.
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I have only had a couple of driver issues myself in the 4yrs that I have been running ATi cards.

First was back in the 3.x era of Catalyst, I think it was version 3.10. The game was Call of Duty and the 3.10 drivers came out and the game wouldn't run.

The second was with the 4.10 Cats with Punkbuster and Quake 3 based games, which for me was SOF2. They would hardlock and you would have to hit the reset button on your PC. You could play up to the point when the server started it's Punkbuster scans on your system, so usually it was like a minite or two, and then bam, time for a reset.
 
Yup, only had one issue thus far, and I've had five ati cards. It was with shadowing in Fable. Ati fixed it in the next driver release. Outside of their memory usage, Ati drivers are most capable...


Ply
 
Ive been using ATI since the 9800XT release. Ive never once had a problem with their card or drivers. I always prefered NV over ATI before my 9800. The GeForce4 TI 4600 i think it was.. great card great card. what made me switch was the 7600U i had ordered with a new comp. i had that card for 3 days until i couldnt handle it anymore. then i got the 9800XT.

as of late ive run into driver issues since i installed vista. it all started since i installed vista. every once and a while i get the VPU Recovery errors or something. I know its from testy drivers. other then that no problemos

i love both companies for my video gaming needs, both have good drivers and quality cards. i just always seem to have an ATI card in ma box.

*im half asleep, please dont hold my grammar against me >.< lol*
 
lithium726 said:
Odd, I Never had any problems with my old 9600 pro, hardware or driver wise. Games always ran great on it..
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Me either. It was one of the best cards I ever owned. Then the whole box got fried in an incident unrelated to ATI, and I got an X800. It never worked right for me, and I ended with a 6800GT, and a 7900 GTX in my laptop. I'd buy ATI again, though, provided they offered the same quality that the 9600 did in it's time. That was a very good ATI chip for me.
 
nst6563 said:
I liked my 9600XT as well. One of the best overclocking cards I ever owned as well. Stock was 500Mhz, and I got the thing up to almost 700Mhz (I think it was in the 685Mhz range) on the core after cooling and volt mods. I still have it running in an HTPC today as well.

I've never had any problems with either ATI OR Nvidia's drivers to be honest. I don't really like the fact that ATI has 3+ processes running for their drivers though...
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Mine was at 690mhz but the ram only OCed a measley 8-12mhz.

I kept it clocked right at slight artifatcting--like purple colors on some stuff in CS after hours of play.

EDIT**
1996 ATI 3D Rage (intel p1 100mhz 32mb ram 2.5gb harddrive)
2000 Integrated (AMD 1600+ 128mb ram 40gb harddrive)
2003 ATI 9600 (AMD 3200+ 64 512mb ram 60gb harddrive)
2004 ATI 9600XT (AMD 3200+ Athlon *barton* 512mb ram 160gb harddrive)
2004 (1.5gb ram 2x160gb hd)
2005 nVidia 6800
2006 nVidia 7900gs ( in sig)
2007 ATI x1950pro (in sig)
 
Vista 64 and 1900xtx no probs.. Well except for opengl apps. Otherwise card runs like a champ.
 
Caffeinated said:
Me either. It was one of the best cards I ever owned. Then the whole box got fried in an incident unrelated to ATI, and I got an X800. It never worked right for me, and I ended with a 6800GT, and a 7900 GTX in my laptop. I'd buy ATI again, though, provided they offered the same quality that the 9600 did in it's time. That was a very good ATI chip for me.
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Best card I ever owned would have to be my BBA 9700 Pro.
Probably the most dominant card in history. I bet it can play Crysis at max res on max settings with 16xAA and 16xAF.
 
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