Nothing but trouble with ATI

jonny72

Thats it, had enough, ATI cards are a total headache, since installing the latest one...

Massive windows errors, etc, a whole day of installing reinstalling catalyst drivers even though i perfectly removed all my nvidia drivers with driver cleaner etc..

Crashes

Card performing RUBBISH in new games

Performing even worse in older games..

Same thing happened the last time I bought an ATI card years ago, never again, tough luck that they are the small guy, rubbish cards, don't recommend anyone get one, also try reading a review of any ATI card where the reviewers 'don't' have an issue with the cards on trial. They can have all the horsepower in the world, doesn't matter when they don't work half the time.

Rant over

Overheal

which card are we discussing, what power supply.

Cuddlesworth

Funny because I refuse to buy Nvidia cards knowing bugs with their drivers that are over 2 years old and still no fix.

jonny72

I was replacing a 7900gs with a 4670 for light gaming.

PogMoThoin

Maybe You should do a fresh install with the latest driver, could be your windows is borked

uberpixie

jonny72 wrote: »

Same thing happened the last time I bought an ATI card years ago, never again, tough luck that they are the small guy, rubbish cards, don't recommend anyone get one, also try reading a review of any ATI card where the reviewers 'don't' have an issue with the cards on trial. They can have all the horsepower in the world, doesn't matter when they don't work half the time.
Rant over

hhhmmmm replaced my geforce 8800GTS 320mb as it would randomly blue screen after installing any nvidia driver past 169.25....

Have had radeon 9800 np, X800XT PE and now a 4850: all have served me well.

Have also had nivida cards, geforce 2 pro 64mb, geforce 4 4200 and a 8800GTS 320mb.

Have had small drivers issue the odd time with both brands, nothing terrible show stopping bar the bug with the 8800GTS which is currently in a mates pc and working perfectly with the latest drivers.

ATI make good cards which consistently age much better than nvidias offerings of the same gen. Custom pc did a huge gfx card shoot out ages back: the older ATIs came out much better in modern games than their Nvidia counterparts.

Perhaps your psu is too low, perhaps you still have traces of the older nvidia drivers on your system causing the issue, perhaps you got a dodgy card...

I wouldn't say all ATI cards are crap because you have had a bad experience with one: again I have had several which have never let me down.

Donald-Duck

uberpixie wrote: »

stuff.

Everyone knows ATI have incredibly bad driver support, NVIDIA tend to do a better job. If ATI supported their cards better they would have the market dominance.

Sure you can fix it by getting XXXXXX third party drivers but that just is not convenient for a normal user

Overheal

uberpixie wrote: »

Perhaps your psu is too low, perhaps you still have traces of the older nvidia drivers on your system causing the issue, perhaps you got a dodgy card...

My dads pc had a 7300 LE and after getting flight sim X for his birthday, he DEMANDED I find him an upgrade worthy of Mordor - I got him the 4870.

But I had the foresight to check the power supply, which only had 305Watt output, and ATI recommends about a 450watt supply for the 4670. So an extra $120 later, FSXruns like hot butter now.

Donald-Duck wrote: »

Everyone knows ATI have incredibly bad driver support, NVIDIA tend to do a better job. If ATI supported their cards better they would have the market dominance.

Sure you can fix it by getting XXXXXX third party drivers but that just is not convenient for a normal user

I've decided not to invest any more money in nvidia for a while since the whole defective chipset debacle that the inquirer popped the lid on. The way nvidia has handled the entire situation is very poor. The GPU in my laptop (an 8400m gs) used to overheat pretty woefully until I demanded a fix from HP.

But as an aside I much prefer the catalyst application over nView. Nicer set of controls, even if as you say the driver support is less than good.

uberpixie

Donald-Duck wrote: »

Everyone knows ATI have incredibly bad driver support, NVIDIA tend to do a better job. If ATI supported their cards better they would have the market dominance.

Why yes nvidia do release better drivers: this explains why there first batch of vista drivers were terrible and didn't get fixed for a few months. When vista was first launched ATI infact had stable working drivers Vs the shoddy release Nvidia brought out.

I have had both brands of cards and certainly never suffered greatly in a game by having an ATI gfx card. I have had issues with both brands whcih has been always been resolved going back or going forward a driver. No big deal.

I would rate their drivers as equally as good/bad unless you look at Linux where the Nvidias do have better support but ATI have much improved theirs: recently got an old X800XT PE outputting to a telly on an install of ubuntu without incident: just installed the ati driver and told it to connect to a tele....

The reason Nvidia have market dominance atm is the 8800 series and the fact the 2900XT released at the time was total pants.

8800 series is the best series out in a very long time for nvidia and some of the best value ever in gfx cards: there is a reason people bought them is such great numbers.

Look at the steam survey:ATI come in 3rd in the list of DX10 capable gfx cards for the 4800 series: pretty good considering they only recently released it also if you look at the nvidia 260/280 series they come much further down the list.

1st: 8800 series @ 27.5% !!
2nd: 8600 series @ 16.7%
3rd: 4800 series @ 6.53%
6th: 9800 series @ 5.35%
13th: 260 Series @ 1.48%
15th: 280 Series @ 1.22%

ATI lost a huge amount of market share due to the 2900XT fiasco: they deserved to loose market share over that, at least they bounced back with the 4800 series which has forced Nvidia to bring their prices down greatly which is great for everyone.:D