AMD vs nVidia Drivers in single card market

[VaporX]

I know AMD has seemed to do nothing right in the area of multicard drivers for a while now. However I am curious to see what people are thinking of the single card, play at 1080 drivers. You see in my testing of a few video cards over the last few weeks I have seen no driver issues with AMD and in fact had a few glitches with nVidia. I wanted to get others experiences as well.

[EuroFight]

I have had many issues with Catalyst install, firstly on my old Dell Precision 670 Server (Win7 x32), where the system would just crash inexplicably, and again on my new custom FX-6100 gaming PC (Win7 x64), when the machine just BSODs. In both cases, I resorted to using the default Windows drivers

[wevsspot]

Guess that I've been lucky because I haven't had any real issues with nVidia or AMD drivers and multi-gpu setups in quite a while. However, based on past experience I'm still gun-shy when AMD recommends or releases an updated driver package. Generally, when I find an AMD driver that works well it is set it and forget it. On the other hand, I willingly give a go at all of nVidia's new releases. Seems kind of counter-intuitive I know, but that's just how I roll

[jdm_freek]

I know AMD has seemed to do nothing right in the area of multicard drivers for a while now. However I am curious to see what people are thinking of the single card, play at 1080 drivers. You see in my testing of a few video cards over the last few weeks I have seen no driver issues with AMD and in fact had a few glitches with nVidia. I wanted to get others experiences as well.

the only driver issue i have is when i overclock to high

in games no problems

[Guest_Jim_*]

I never had any issues with AMD drivers when I still ran with my 5770, even in the Hybrid PhysX setup (the 5770 with a GTS 250). For the past several nVidia drivers though, I have had issues with it locking at least the 250 to its 2D clocks, and even the 570 will be stuck that low and only restarting will fix it. I've complained about it numerous times to nVidia and don't get any response back but to just use older drivers. Fortunately 301 is behaving better than those before it, but I still get the problem occasionally. Not sure if this issue is related to using the two GPUs (which are obviously not SLI'd together) but it has made me shy when it comes to upgrading nVidia drivers.

[Waco]

I had issues with the 7 series cards locking up randomly since 12.2...12.6 seems to be okay though.

[Nyt]

I had issues with the 7 series cards locking up randomly since 12.2...12.6 seems to be okay though.

 

Same, not very often though but you I do get the feeling of "instability" with these 12.6 WHQL's. Some random screen flickers too. Both camps have driver issues...

[Waco]

Feeling? It's either stable or not. No issues so far with 12.6 though. Stable for weeks on end.

[Bosco]

I had enough of AMD's drivers to the point I do not use them in any every day rigs. They sit in testbeds now and thats the only time they get used.

 

I find the biggest issue with AMD is their game support sucks, there is a lot of games I own that work on Nvidia cards but blue screen or crash to desktop with AMD cards.

[Guest_Jim_*]

I had enough of AMD's drivers to the point I do not use them in any every day rigs. They sit in testbeds now and thats the only time they get used.

 

I find the biggest issue with AMD is their game support sucks, there is a lot of games I own that work on Nvidia cards but blue screen or crash to desktop with AMD cards.

I have to ask what games these are because I've never had this happen to me with any card. I've heard of it happening to people but that's all; only ever heard of it.

[Bosco]

Dune 2000

Mafia

Gangsters

First Medal Of Honor

SimCity 2000 ( Not 2000 its Sim City 4 my mistake, it acts up quite a bit.

Roller Coaster Tycoon

A bunch of the old GTA games crash a lot

 

I have more those are all I could think of at the moment.

[Guest_Jim_*]

Dune 2000

Mafia

Gangsters

First Medal Of Honor

SimCity 2000 acts up quite a bit

Roller Coaster Tycoon

A bunch of the old GTA games crash a lot

 

I have more those are all I could think of at the moment.

Are any of the other ones (for single card setups, which is what ComputerEd asked about) newer than 2002? I'm not trying to be an ass Bosco, but you have to admit it is not completely fair to demand drivers for modern GPU architectures and engines have to work perfectly with games from 1998, 2002, 1998, 1999, 1999, 1995, and 1999 (the release years of each of those you listed in order, except for GTA, as you didn't give exact titles). (GTA games have been released in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2009.)

Losing compatibility for older technology happens because sometimes it is just going to be a bad decision to keep it. Of course it would be nice if all of these games worked correctly, but it isn't like we're talking about a bunch of DX9+ games, which was released December 2002. We're talking about games that at best were DX6-DX8 (with the possible exception of some GTA titles). I'd love it if I could get some really old games like Castle of the Winds to run on Windows 7, but that won't happen without a workaround because compatibility for 16-bit was removed, and I'm fine with that.

At least, for the current list you have given, we're looking mostly at games 10+ years old. Apple is worse than that.

Of course now the question is why is nVidia keeping compatibility with such old games? Is this natural to their driver architecture or are they actually diverting resources to that instead of fixing bugs and optimizing for modern games.