Forceware vs Catalyst which drivers have been more satisfying?

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mutantmagnet

Limp Gawd
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My experience with Nvidia drivers has been limited but I've looked my experience with Catalyst over the past few years.

While scouring on the net for any comparison of the two I came across this recent entry but I thought it would be interesting to see what hardforum goers had to say.
 
ATI Catalyst drivers usually tend to exhibit higher peak framerates in FPS for me....but in actual gaming running racing and flight simulation...in television, external view, the Nvidia drivers have always proven smoother. I do quite a bit of racing and flying, so not many FPS. I'd have to say due to the very slight microstutter I've experienced in those views with Catalyst...the Nvidia solution for me is most satisfying.
 
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mutantmagnet said:
My experience with Nvidia drivers has been limited but I've looked my experience with Catalyst over the past few years.

While scouring on the net for any comparison of the two I came across this recent entry but I thought it would be interesting to see what hardforum goers had to say.
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six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. take your pick. to be honest I have had less issues with ATI then Nvidia, but over all it seems pretty well matched. I can say this, ATI hardware (4800) is more driver dependent then the Nvidia for performance, or so it seems to me. not unusual for Nvidia cards to do better at release with ATI catching up afterward. (just my impression though)
 
Both companies have their own driver problems, there is no solid evidence showing that a driver from a company is better than the other. Most people won't be affected by any problem and most problems can be troubleshoot actually. I would also say that most problems are actually user related.

There are people who will spread FUD saying that a driver from the "company X" sucks and the driver from "company Y" is much better just because they have a bad luck with a driver.
 
very true alg7. depends on your experience.

personally i find forceware to be more stable but i like the layout of the CCC much better and i find more options to play with in catalyst
 
alg7_munif said:
Both companies have their own driver problems, there is no solid evidence showing that a driver from a company is better than the other. Most people won't be affected by any problem and most problems can be troubleshoot actually. I would also say that most problems are actually user related.

There are people who will spread FUD saying that a driver from the "company X" sucks and the driver from "company Y" is much better just because they have a bad luck with a driver.
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This. I am sick of people overgeneralizing that either company is better just because they had a slight driver issue with their ex video card.
 
JaYp146 said:
This. I am sick of people overgeneralizing that either company is better just because they had a slight driver issue with their ex video card.
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Lol, I hope that they won't become gay just because they had a slight issue with their ex girlfriend. :eek:
 
For me, it has depended on the card. Here are my last 4 setups...
My Ati X700 pro was flawless
8800GT was ok, but more than a few nv_dsp blue screens (erroring driver)
4850 crossfire setup was a debacle. The drivers were TERRIBLE. Hosed my MBR at one point. Most forums have shown that there is some kind of connection with Vista64 and a crossfire setup.
GTX260- flawless.
 
Yep mileage varies from person to person. ATI has been better for me then NV has but that doesn't make ATI "better" then NV.

Had a BFG 6800GT OC back in the day which replaced my aging 9700 Pro. I couldn't get the 6800GT stable to save my life. Gave it to a co-workers son and it has been running like a champ for him ever since (he still uses it today).

But my X1950 Pro Crossfire setup, HD3870 Crossfire setup and my current HD4870 Crossfire setup have all been flawless.
 
I've ran a good mixture of both but right now I'm using Nvidia. One thing I do like about ATI drivers is that you can download 'just the driver'. They don't make you use the control panel if you don't want to. Nvidia on the other hand wants to make upgrades or changes to game settings easy and they don't offer 'just the driver', but at least if you decide to plug in a second card for SLI or make a quick game setting change, it's right there and no additional software is required.

Overall though I don't recall Nvidia or ATI drivers at any point being bad except for the rough launch Nvidia had with Vista, but that's ancient history. Really though with drivers, people begin to run into problems when they start upgrading for no reason then are forced to roll back or whatever. If everything is stable and working as intended, leave it alone. If it works and you don't mess with drivers, they won't mess with you. Every driver comes with release notes and if they are not affecting cards you own then upgrading them is for nothing but possible problems. You may see "Up to 10% boost in fps on a certain game" but that may be with a certain GPU at a certain setting at a certain resolution. You really have to dive into the notes to see if your actually going to gain anything.

So a good rule of thumb for both Nvidia and ATI is when you have a driver that is stable, stick with it until you have to upgrade them. This way you'll run into the least amount of issues with both brands.
 
I have use both Nvidia and ATI driver. I had problem with both driver but nothing major to a point where one company is better than the other.
 
I've had much better luck with nVidia when it comes to multi-gpu. I use mixed GTX 260 Tri-SLi in my main rig; that's two 216 cards and one old 192SP card.

I've got two Gigabyte HD 4850 1Gb cards in my secondary computer that are stuck on the 8.10 driver because using any driver later than that causes the enable Crossfire option to vanish from the CCC. Gigabytes position is that Crossfire works with 8.10 so they've fulfilled their obligation.

I've tried all drivers after 8.10, Vista Ultimate 32 bit fully patched, Vista HP x64 SP 2 and WinXP SP3. Same results on all of them with fresh installs; no Crossfire option with any driver later than 8.10 using two Gigabyte HD 4850 1Gb cards.

BTW I am not alone-

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=262&threadid=104951&enterthread=y
 
I must say that I prefer the ATI CCC over the nVidia Control Panel, but then again that is just my preference. I have also had less issues with ATI drivers than nVidia but then again I have only owned a few ATI cards compared to the larger number of nVidia cards. Naturally there was more of a chance for a bad nVidia experience to occur than an ATI one.
 
I have used both over the years. I have had much better luck with ATI when it comes to hooking up to TV's/LCD's, especially when considering custom resolutions, and resolutions not native to the LCD or TV.

However for gaming and normal use both are about the same.
 
None of the drivers from ATI or Nvidia give blowjobs, so by that criteria I'd have to say none of them are satisfying :D
 
hstuehmeyer2000 said:
Nvidia has the best drivers, especially in linux.
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actually as of late can't say that. it certainly used to be true that ATI had poor linux support but now I would actually have to say its better. have to see if this continues.
 
WOW. just WOW. this is the first ATI vs Nvidia thread I have seen that hasn't been flooded with fanbios, flames, or wildly off topic. ( Knocks on wood) This is type of threads we should be producing here.

To get back on subject bigdogchris brought up a point, I wonder if the difference schools of thought make a difference here. I am one of those that usually install the latest driver while others get it stable and leave it. it would be interesting to here from both and see if their positions are the same
 
Personally, I only update drivers if

A: A driver is released that addresses an issue I am having
B: I buy a new game or video card.
 
I recently upgraded my 8800GTS 512 to an ATI 4870.

Things I like about CCC:
1. 60MB download vs 100MB Nvidia
2. Control panel launches much more quickly than Nvidia's
3. Overclocking, fan control, temperature monitoring all included
4. More AA options

Things I liked about Nvidia:
1. Game profiles included
 
My personal experience:

I've found ATI drivers to be less stable in the past, getting BSOD because of it. Only very recently has this changed and they are now much more stable.
 
Modred189 said:
Hosed my MBR at one point. Most forums have shown that there is some kind of connection with Vista64 and a crossfire setup.
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Ahahaha i remember your dumb ass post here on [H] way to go, way to go blaming the drivers. "CCC hosed my MBR" ahahahha... joker.

On topic: Catalyst for me, nVidia drivers doesn't like my system :( constant BSODs in L4D, but none with 4850!
 
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As far as stock drivers go both sides have their ups and downs I've had issues with both. The one thing I do like about Nvidia isn't their drivers but the ability to use nhancer which is the only thing I miss when I use ATI.
 
Vlad_13 said:
Ahahaha i remember your dumb ass post here on [H] way to go, way to go blaming the drivers. "CCC hosed my MBR" ahahahha... joker.

On topic: Catalyst for me, nVidia drivers doesn't like my system :( constant BSODs in L4D, but none with 4850!
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Woah there. If you remember back, the consenus was that the drivers were at fault, especially since the machine crashed when using two cards and crashed when installing the drivers. Then the MBR was gone, and switching to one card (either of them) or an Nvidia card fixed the crashes.
And at the time I was not the only one struggling with them (Catalyst 8.9-8.12).

No need to get personal, so back off.

No where did I say that ATi drivers were bad, just that THOSE, in MY particular circumstance caused me a lot of headache. Now the ones for my X700, when I had it, were perfect, and my current GTX260 has been great.
 
When Catalyst debuted, I used them on the 9700PRO and it was slow as hell, but the drivers never got me any issues. Later on with the X800XT I experimented some lock ups, with the X1950XT, the drivers were more stable and less dependant of optimizations, with the HD 3850 they were rock solid but I experimented some issues with some games. With the HD 4800 I experimented some slow downs when Custom Filters are used in some games, but that's typical, specially that they're shader intensive in games which are also shader intensive. ATi since the debut of the R600 architecture and it's derivatives, it's superscalar nature requires driver optimizations to keep the execution units busy. But the CCC starts much faster, specially since it debuted along with the CCC.exe, CLI.exe and MOM.exe, and uses much less RAM than before.
 
Stellar said:
Things I liked about Nvidia:
1. Game profiles included
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According to an ATI rep, I don't remember if it was Eric Demers, Terry Makedon or somebody else, but a way to force AFR by creating your own game profiles is in the works. They haven't given a time frame but they have said it's coming. Only time will tell though...here's to hoping it is sooner then later. :)
 
Vermillion said:
According to an ATI rep, I don't remember if it was Eric Demers, Terry Makedon or somebody else, but a way to force AFR by creating your own game profiles is in the works. They haven't given a time frame but they have said it's coming. Only time will tell though...here's to hoping it is sooner then later. :)
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Holy shit, yes please! I've been hoping, and waiting they'd do something like this for quite some time now. Might as well ask this here, but does anyone else get Crossfire disabled when running in windowed mode in any/all games?
 
The last ATI card i owned was a 9700 pro so i don't have much first hand experience with there latest drivers. I never had any issues when i was last running them though.

A friend of mine has a pair of 4850's and it seems like every time he updates drivers he has to uninstall the old ones completely and then reinstall them with the
individual packages or it won't work at all. Other then that they seem to work fairly well.

I've never had any issues with the latest Nvidia drivers on my 280.

For me i would say i was just as satisfied with both company's drivers for the most part.
 
On topic: I have experienced BSOD with both side of the drivers in the past, but my current ATi setup is actually quite stable, i think vpu recover might have save me from BSOD on few occasions (from my tweaking with ATT).

Off topic: I don't understand, aren't you people with ATi cards using ATI Tray Tools for game profiles? or is there problems not known to me with ATT's game profile feature?

note: I use ATT but haven't used the game profile feature so far (use it mostly for tweaking the fan setup, displaying fps and saving desktop icons).
 
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