ATi = most stable drivers

Agreed. I've never had a problem that I could attribute to unstable drivers, nvidia or ati. And that's with 6 various cards starting with TNT2 and ending with x800xt.

I'm sure nVidia could hire a company that would find that forceware is more stable than catalyst, but these results are Interesting nonetheless.
 
Well, ATi definitely does a good job keeping their customers posted with monthly releases and stable drivers.

nVidia would probably get some love if it released monthly drivers, but who knows maybe they like releasing big updates every 1/4 or so.
 
jebo_4jc said:
Agreed. I've never had a problem that I could attribute to unstable drivers, nvidia or ati. And that's with 6 various cards starting with TNT2 and ending with x800xt.

I'm sure nVidia could hire a company that would find that forceware is more stable than catalyst, but these results are Interesting nonetheless.
Click to expand...


Agreed on all counts. I have had 8 cards over the last 6 years and so far not a one has had issues that were serrious related to the drivers (3dfx, Matrox, NV, ATI, Kryo2). Of course now that I type it watch me find one on my current hardware :)
 
I've always liked ATI's drivers......on my PC's. :D

Back in the day when I had a 500mhz G4 Server with a 32mb Mac Edition Radeon card......it was another story. That buggy crash ridden pos I swear. loolololll
 
Mister E said:
I've always liked ATI's drivers......on my PC's. :D

Back in the day when I had a 500mhz G4 Server with a 32mb Mac Edition Radeon card......it was another story. That buggy crash ridden pos I swear. loolololll
Click to expand...

thats because I wasnt working there at the time

:D
 
"ATi commissioned a series of independent tests"

That's the only part I needed to see. Old marketing trick, typically resulting in bullshit science and slanted results. Alternately if the company you commision ACTUALLY bothers to test anything and not rig the results, you can always just sweep it under the rug instead of issuing a press release.

Summary: nothing new, marketing marketing, ATI's ethics are still as profit-driven as ever.

Not that they're the only company to pull crap like this, but instead of inspiring confidence in their products it leads me to trust them less than before.
 
That's great, ATI. Too bad I've never had a stability issue with my Detonator or ForceWare drivers (and I've gamed A LOT.)

I guess paying someone to say your drivers are stable is pretty cool though. Now all they need to do is make some decent 64bit drivers like nVidia does.
 
robberbaron said:
That's great, ATI. Too bad I've never had a stability issue with my Detonator or ForceWare drivers (and I've gamed A LOT.)
Click to expand...


You think gaming is the only way you test the stability of those drivers' ? There's more to the function of drivers' than fps.
 
mohammedtaha said:
You think gaming is the only way you test the stability of those drivers' ? There's more to the function of drivers' than fps.
Click to expand...

Such as visual corruption in 2D and such? Never had that either except when OC'ing the hell out of my CPU, oddly enough.
 
robberbaron said:
Such as visual corruption in 2D and such? Never had that either except when OC'ing the hell out of my CPU, oddly enough.
Click to expand...

How about HDTV support, not being able to display certain display modes correctly. Not being able to detect if a second display is present or not .. HUGE performance loss when a second display is added .. can't hardware decode wmv's .... there are many things which show stability and instability and what should be expected from a card ..

it's not all corruptions and overclocking or gaming .. check the fixes they perform EVERY month and read what they fixed .. most of them have to do with the drivers supporting things you wouldn't even think about .. it's not all just games ... I'm sure one of the first thing on ATi and nVidia's driver fix list is to increase fps on Doom3 or increase 3dmark05 scores or enhance overclockability of their video cards .. :rolleyes:
 
robberbaron said:
Now all they need to do is make some decent 64bit drivers like nVidia does.
Click to expand...

As well as Linux drivers. nVidia are waayyyy ahead in Linux driver devolpment, which is no secret by any means. Also, I've had plenty of problems with ATi drivers. I've finally settled on the Omega drivers and they're doing me well, but I can't say so for some of the others I've used...

This reminds me of when people were posting links on a few other message boards about how Windows was actually cheaper then Open-Source software because some big-wig testers said so. At the time, no one seemed to mind/notice the little tag in the corner that read "Paid for by your friends at Microsoft"...
 
I really don't understand the point of this "award". Just looks like more trivial bullshit to put on a package to help the underinformed buyer at best buy make up his mind.
 
mohammedtaha said:
not being able to display certain display modes correctly. Not being able to detect if a second display is present or not .. HUGE performance loss when a second display is added
Click to expand...

You know, I had most of those new problems until I switched when I got my new card...

Oh, wait. I had an ATI card with those issues, like the two before it, and I have an nVidia card that doesn't. My bad.


Aaron_ATX said:
I really don't understand the point of this "award". Just looks like more trivial bullshit to put on a package to help the underinformed buyer at best buy make up his mind.
Click to expand...

Apparently you understand quite well.
 
ATi and NVidia have both been very stable in recent history. ATi has been not just stable, but also have a rare few video-glitches.

Now if crappy super-unstable Intel can only get Guildwars to stop Bluescreening on me with anything other than the PV14.9 drivers, lol...
 
jebo_4jc said:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050609/nyth059.html?.v=10

Suck it down nVidia !!!!!!s.
Click to expand...

Who's the fan boy? You for defending a company that can't get their products to market when they say they will, doesn't support DX9.0c when their competition has for a year, makes the WORST piece of software since Bonzi Buddy AKA the Catalyst Control Panel. What a piece of shit application that is. All it does with is "AI" is turn your quality settings to lowest to boost FPS. ATI didn't support true trilinear filtering even until people caught them using bilinear samples for most of the image, and their AF sucks too. Their high-end cards are nothing but overclocked 9800's with 4 more pipelines. ATI is old news and since they can't seem to deliver any products on time they're even sticking to more OEM jobs now because they can't compete in the high end market. Oh let me see, do Dell and IBM's high end workstations come with Quadro's or FireGL's? Quadro because they spank ATI in every way. I <3 my Quadro 3400 and its rock solid stable drivers. Shit even my lowly 5700 spanks the 9800 pro I sold in image quality. My several year old Ti 4200 did too!
 
"AppLabs used publicly available test applications extracted from Microsoft's latest Windows Hardware Quality Lab test suite 5.3 to conduct the study in its Lindon, Utah facility."

I don't use WHQL test suite 5.3, but it only took 3 hours for my desktop to crash with Catalyst 5.5 and a BBA x800 XL. Maybe Cat 5.6 is a lot more stable. :p

For comparison, 71.89 on a 6600GT has never crashed for me, even after 30 days of uptime.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Oh let me see, do Dell and IBM's high end workstations come with Quadro's or FireGL's? Quadro because they spank ATI in every way.
Click to expand...

No, but Dell does come with Intel CPU's.
 
pxc said:
"AppLabs used publicly available test applications extracted from Microsoft's latest Windows Hardware Quality Lab test suite 5.3 to conduct the study in its Lindon, Utah facility."

I don't use WHQL test suite 5.3, but it only took 3 hours for my desktop to crash with Catalyst 5.5 and a BBA x800 XL. Maybe Cat 5.6 is a lot more stable. :p

For comparison, 71.89 on a 6600GT has never crashed for me, even after 30 days of uptime.
Click to expand...

So here we have two "independent" tests giving conflicting results. Which should I believe kiddies, the one that was actually paid for by ATI and thus presumably not very independent after all, or this new one?
 
mohammedtaha said:
No, but Dell does come with Intel CPU's.
Click to expand...

This is because Intel has done a lot more marketing, so it makes Dell's life easier if they build Intel-based systems.

Generally speaking Dell systems are at least moderately stable, because it cuts down on after-sale expenses. They're not going to spec a part that costs 3x as much, but neither are they going to spec something where they'll lose any price savings in support costs afterwards.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Who's the fan boy? You for defending a company that can't get their products to market when they say they will, doesn't support DX9.0c when their competition has for a year, makes the WORST piece of software since Bonzi Buddy AKA the Catalyst Control Panel. What a piece of shit application that is. All it does with is "AI" is turn your quality settings to lowest to boost FPS. ATI didn't support true trilinear filtering even until people caught them using bilinear samples for most of the image, and their AF sucks too. Their high-end cards are nothing but overclocked 9800's with 4 more pipelines. ATI is old news and since they can't seem to deliver any products on time they're even sticking to more OEM jobs now because they can't compete in the high end market. Oh let me see, do Dell and IBM's high end workstations come with Quadro's or FireGL's? Quadro because they spank ATI in every way. I <3 my Quadro 3400 and its rock solid stable drivers. Shit even my lowly 5700 spanks the 9800 pro I sold in image quality. My several year old Ti 4200 did too!
Click to expand...

For a minute there I thought you were talking about FX cards not capable of supporting DX9 features, even though the competition had for some time, and were very late to boot.

The CCC has never given me any problems, but ATi still offers the standard control panel for those that don't want to use CCC, so this is a non-point.

Yes, ATi did use a different method for calculating AF based on viewing angles. Funny how NV uses the same method now. :rolleyes: Oh, and lets not forget that ATi has superior AA.

Can't compete on the top end? that's funny. Overall, they currently have the fastest single card solutioin available; this does not account for forthcoming products, only what is CURRENTLY available.

A 5700 spank a 9800 in IQ. Please, get real. ATi has always had the better IQ, and still does. While NV has significantly closed that gap, you are just being a flat out fan boy to try and make people think a 5700 and 4200 "...spanks the 9800 pro I sold in image quality. My several year old Ti 4200 did too!"

Neither company has a perfect product, hard or software, and anyone that would make comments like this is nothing but a child that can't admit that he doesn't have the best toys around because he blindly buys on baseless brand loyalty.
 
These drivers may be the most stable drivers for winintendo but they aren't for linux. ATI doesn't takes linux seriously as nVidia does. nVidia takes linux compatibility as a important part of the company... and everybody who *really* knows about linux know this... my point, don't buy ati if you're serious guy and you're going with linux, nvidia drivers > ati drivers :D and yes... call me fan boy I love when someone tell me so!.

Did you know nvidia is one of the sponsors of the Gentoo Project? ;) http://www.gentoo.org
 
simon27 said:
These drivers may be the most stable drivers for winintendo but they aren't for linux. ATI doesn't takes linux seriously as nVidia does. nVidia takes linux compatibility as a important part of the company... and everybody who *really* knows about linux know this... my point, don't buy ati if you're serious guy and you're going with linux, nvidia drivers > ati drivers :D and yes... call me fan boy I love when someone tell me so!.

Did you know nvidia is one of the sponsors of the Gentoo Project? ;) http://www.gentoo.org
Click to expand...

I don't dispute the Linux drivers from NV being better. However, I have no intentions of using Linux until software developers start taking them more seriously and start making more software for it...and I'm talking about desktop solutions, not enterprise solutions.
 
Everybody always harps on Company X's Linux support, but what serious gamer uses Linux? It's already hard enough to keep latest games running smoothly, much less when running them in some emulator.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Who's the fan boy? You for defending a company that can't get their products to market when they say they will.........(blah blah blah)
Click to expand...
Flame on. If you paid attention, you would have seen my opinion of this in the third post.....
me said:
Agreed. I've never had a problem that I could attribute to unstable drivers, nvidia or ati. And that's with 6 various cards starting with TNT2 and ending with x800xt.

I'm sure nVidia could hire a company that would find that forceware is more stable than catalyst, but these results are Interesting nonetheless.
Click to expand...
 
Wow, didnt expect this thread to get so nasty.

Seems like 2-3 very vocal people dont like the report much. Sorry you dont like the end result.
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Wow, didnt expect this thread to get so nasty.

Seems like 2-3 very vocal people dont like the report much. Sorry you cant handle the truth.
Click to expand...
That ATI is 8% more stable (implying instability in both ATI and nvidia tests) in a test they paid for? Wow, the "truth" must really hurt. :D

Maybe you can answer why the desktop locks up in heavy 2D use even with recent Catalyst drivers. It never happens on the same system with nvidia drivers.
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Seems like 2-3 very vocal people dont like the report much. Sorry you cant handle the truth.
Click to expand...

I don't buy that kind of logic, and I didn't vote for Bush either. "You don't like what I said, so you're [stupid, a terrorist, a communist, crazy, a no good SOB, etc]" doesn't fly with me and never will.

I stand by my earlier position that the test is every bit as independent as any other paid study (which is to say, not at all) and thus should be completely disregarded, other than indicating the general trustworthyness of ATI's marketing department (which is to say, as little as one can expect from most marketing departments).
 
pxc said:
That ATI is 8% more stable (implying instability in both ATI and nvidia tests) in a test they paid for? Wow, the "truth" must really hurt. :D

Maybe you can answer why the desktop locks up in heavy 2D use even with recent Catalyst drivers. It never happens on the same system with nvidia drivers.
Click to expand...

Sorry my dekstop has never hung on 2D, and I dont see reports of it in my customer support reports.

must be something bad you did to your system.
 
pxc said:
That ATI is 8% more stable (implying instability in both ATI and nvidia tests) in a test they paid for? Wow, the "truth" must really hurt. :D

Maybe you can answer why the desktop locks up in heavy 2D use even with recent Catalyst drivers. It never happens on the same system with nvidia drivers.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a short between the chair and keyboard. J/K :D

I run my CPU o/c from 2.2GHz to 2.55GHz, and my X800 Pro at 540MHz core and 530MHz RAM. I run this thing all the time, even punish it in a room that can get quite warm, and I don't have a single problem with any stability.

In fact, the last time I had a video driver problem of any kind was total texture corruption with a Ti4400 and Unreal II that required a driver update.
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Sorry my dekstop has never hung on 2D, and I dont see reports of it in my customer support reports.

must be something bad you did to your system.
Click to expand...
No problems here either.
How could you expect a driver programmer to know what your computer's problem is? It could be your motherboard, it could be your sound drivers, it could be your imagination.

Again, I have never had a problem with video drivers (that I am aware of). All systems suffer from instability now and then
 
Linux or Mac boxes are not meant to be used for gaming reasons. A workstation using FireGL or QuadroFX is not meant to be used for gaming.

Support will be provided for what's more important first. If you game from a Linux computer, you just do it to be different, not because it's better. I'm sorry, but most of the market uses Windows machines, not Linux or Mac.

Don't get me wrong, Linux and Macs are great for stability and day to day use .. period.

This topic has really deviated towards a war, but some people are either in denial or do not like hearing certain things. If nVidia was to release the same thing, many here would have taken the stance of the OP. Am I right?
 
I know I for one would still blow it off as marketing bullshit...then again I buy whichever brand looks to be the best choice at the time...I have no clue why people get so attached to one. Maybe it's because I don't watch much TV so the marketing doesn't get into my brain...:p
 
ashmedai said:
I don't buy that kind of logic, and I didn't vote for Bush either. "You don't like what I said, so you're [stupid, a terrorist, a communist, crazy, a no good SOB, etc]" doesn't fly with me and never will.

I stand by my earlier position that the test is every bit as independent as any other paid study (which is to say, not at all) and thus should be completely disregarded, other than indicating the general trustworthyness of ATI's marketing department (which is to say, as little as one can expect from most marketing departments).
Click to expand...

Hey I would love to discuss this (as long as everyone keeps calm, and keeps the personal attacks out of it).

Ok here is the scenario that we faced

1) Internally we run these tests every month.
2) Consistently we see that our stability score is higher
3) We are very proud of that fact
4) We really would like our end users to see these results
5) We at this point are faced with a choice: a) do we show these numbers ourselves? b) do we ask a tech website to try and run these numbers themselves - well we did try that and no web site wanted to bother to run the numbers c) hire a 3rd party testing lab to run the tests themselves and verify the results
6) We went with option c) and the press realease they did yesterday was from that

If there was a better option, I could not come up with it. Please tell me if this was your job, how would you get these results out. Dont you think your users would want to know these results? Would it have been more credible if I published them myself?

They are a professional company and have their business and reputation at stake. They ran some tests, and published the results.

Please tell me how that is bad?
 
The problem here is not whether or not it actually was performed impartially and accurately, the problem is that "paid independent review" has become synonymous with "bullshit science". If true, good for ATI. But as this thread demonstrates - good luck getting anyone to believe it that wasn't already an ATI nut.
 
ashmedai said:
The problem here is not whether or not it actually was performed impartially and accurately, the problem is that "paid independent review" has become synonymous with "bullshit science". If true, good for ATI. But as this thread demonstrates - good luck getting anyone to believe it that wasn't already an ATI nut.
Click to expand...

Well its obvious you dont believe it, and that is fine. However you must remember you do not represent the viewpoints of everyone else that reads it.

"Good luck getting anyone to believe it that wasnt an ATI nut?"

Oh I have no doubt that people less cynical of the world than yourself will believe it, especially when the full details get published

By the way the lab will by issuing the full report on their website in 10 days. It will have every little detail of what they did. Feel free to reproduce it if you wish.
 
Obviously my opinion is worthless to you, but consider that one of two things is true:

1) I'm the only one in the whole world that sees "paid independant review" and writes everything off as marketing, or,

2) Many people think the same way.

The first one seems just moderately unlikely, especially given the contents of this thread. Also the way you dismiss any contradictory viewpoint contributes to my initial view that it's just more marketing rather than factual and scientific results.

Does anybody know if this guy really works for ATI? Dude, if you do, you're independantly doing more to put me off your products than nVidia's ever managed to. I've used more ATI cards than nVidia, and I don't care about brand so much as who's got the best product. If true and ATI has more stable drivers - like I said, great for them. But if nVidia drivers are a smidge less stable, but ATI's reps act like you? Guess who I'm going to buy from.
 
Okay, just dredged up your first post...you are with ATI...why are you acting like this? Nothing your marketing department can publish is going to convert anyone from nVidia if you turn around and present it this way.
 
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