AMD vs nVidia Drivers in single card market

[Waco]

The problem is that AMD doesnt really focus their new drivers on support for their older cards especially older card crossfire...

With Nvidia they dont forget about their previous customers so your older cards work fine - they even add new features to the older cards via drivers such as the adaptive AA and all that stuff with the 300 series drivers

All cards use the same Crossfire profiles (with the exception of the first few releases for Skyrim). Any bonuses newer cards get in Crossfire tend to work with the "older" cards as well.

 

The only thing I currently hate with AMD drivers is getting them installed properly so that CCC works as intended and 2D clocks work properly. I'm on 12.1 beta for my desktop because every newer driver sticks the second GPU at 3D speeds even on the desktop.

[wevsspot]

AMD releasing newer drivers that do not support older game titles is like someone obsoleting my library of books because they are only written in English. Just because they are only written in a single language doesn't make them any less valuable or enjoyable to me. Now if it were technologically impossible to provide support for the newest hardware and latest game titles while maintaining support for older hardware and titles I would understand that. But, unfortunately (as nVidia seems to prove over and over) it is possible to have your cake and eat it too. A perfect and recent example - I built a cheap scratch rig for my son in law using an old 8800GTS video card. The card works flawlessly using either the oldest driver that was released to officially support the card, or the most recent driver that nVidia released. And for some old school I installed C&C Generals on his rig so he could check out some of the "vintage" stuff. He played the game using the card and the old drivers - played great. He played the game using the newest drivers - played great.

 

Conversely, on the HD 5770 that is in my HTPC machine, every time I've updated a driver I've had to spend 20 minutes tweaking the settings for video and hdmi sound to work correctly with my home theater system. And there were at least two driver releases that I never could get working correctly. So, once I found a driver that caused me the least heartburn, that's where it has stayed.

 

Long story short - in the last few years my personal PC (gaming rig) has run nVidia. I've got AMD in my HTPC and my laptop.