Have AMD drivers improved overs the yrs? Are they better Now then Nvidia's?

[sebastian869]

I have always pretty much stuck with Nvidia GPU except once over 10 yrs ago last build i recall there were issues with AMD GPU drivers, i guess these days its less likely because of non stop new versions though if theres a bug in the framework then it could be some time before they fix your bug. Who do you guys think has more solid drivers AMD or NVIDIA?

 

[eidairaman1]

They both are pretty much on par with eachother. I havent had any issues with the Amd drivers. Awhile back i had 1 nv driver issue but im currently in process of building a machine...

 

[erocker]

I foresee this turning into a chilling and mature debate!

I've been sticking to WHQL drivers and things have been going quite smoothly for quite some time.

Generally if there are rampant driver problems, it will be known.... and there's not.

 

[Aquinus]

I haven't experienced many driver issues with AMD. I've heard about fewer issues other people have had lately than in the past though, but my own experience is that they've been fine for the last several years, but that's me.

 

[GreiverBlade]

i used a mix of AMD and nVidia card those past 3 years .... no issue on both side with driver as far as i see

I foresee this turning into a chilling and mature debate!

I've been sticking to WHQL drivers and things have been going quite smoothly for quite some time.

Generally if there are rampant driver problems, it will be known.... and there's not.

indeed ...

 

[RealNeil]

AMD drivers are more mature than they were 4-5 years ago when I had a lot of problems with them. I ended up selling my AMD based GPUs and going with NVIDIA for quite a while.
Now I use both without any real issues.

They have come a long way in a short time. Using only WHQL drivers is a good idea.

 

[RejZoR]

Driver wise, they are pretty much the same. Interface wise, i prefer CCC, though the trey menu is a bit of a mess. It's just better organized. I don't get it why NVIDIA hasn't followed NVMax interface. I loved that thing back in the days. Can't understand why they make pretty much zero effort in quick FSAA and AF settings. Sure games support it, but if you play older games or you prefer it forced through CP (like i do), it's a necessity. For example in Natural Selection 2, you have only Anisotropic Filter ON/OFF. But even with ON, textures look all washed out at distance. But with forced 16xAF, they are nice and sharp.

 

[Fourstaff]

AMD on my laptop, Nvidia on my desktop. Both are doing just fine, you can't go wrong with either. Nvidia comes with ShadowPlay which is pretty nifty for selected customers.

 

[Champ]

What about on the multiple gpu side of things?

 

[BiggieShady]

They both work fine for most titles but I'd say nvidia drivers are more mature as in you can use beta drivers and expect stability with all games, with AMD you often need to pick WHQL driver version that has least issues with one or two problematic games in your collection.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I have not had a issue with either companies driver in years.

 

[GreiverBlade]

Nvidia comes with ShadowPlay which is pretty nifty for selected customers.

and AMD come with GVR and Replay (well in fact since the AMD Gaming Evolved app (Raptr) is not limited to AMD gpus like GeForce Experience is with nVidia gpus, you can use it with any card, unless they changed a thing in between, tho the auto optimize thing is a mess the rest is perfectly fine.)

well let say both offer tools and drivers and multigpu goes to nVidia but AMD still does better and better in CFX

 

[RejZoR]

I wish they'd feature more optional aggressive optimizations and new potentially experiemntal features. Kinda miss the old days where we got new features here and there, but currently all we get are stupid multiGPU profiles and that's it. Booooring. Last good one was MLAA. And that's basically it. Just more stuff to play with...

 

[ZentiX]

I have to say YES and NO.

AMD drivers has become better, but they are too far behind nVidia when it comes to stable drivers.

I was really stoked about going over to AMD and bought first a 7950, and later on another 7950 for CF. It was then I was starting to have trouble, terrible 144Hz support in CF mode, so I had to drop down to 120Hz. If you want to use 144Hz, you have to use 2 CF bridges. And this is not written on AMD, you have to find out this the hard way and google it.

Now I'm on 2x R9 290X in CFX. Now I have problems with AMD 14.4 driver, BSOD when watching flash or html5 videos trough browser. But this problem came after an Flash update for 3 or 4 weeks ago. This BSOD is related to AMD drivers. 0xa0000001. So when I watch a youtube video I kinde hope it's not going to be a BSOD. I have sendt a ticket to AMD so I hope they are aware of it. Playing games is never been a issue with 14.4. So as long as I'm aware of BSOD problems with 14.4 driver, I'm using it over a unstable BETA driver.
I do not dare to try 144Hz on my 290X in CFX, since crossfire is trough PCI-e lanes.
( I did not buy those 290X, I won them)

But when it comes to performance, AMD is great. I have no problem running BF4 on ultra with 100+ fps, but I'm not a graphics whore, so I want stable FPS and 120+ FPS is great for me.

When it comes to AMD vs nVidia drivers, I have to go with nVidia here. For me i feel like AMD is way behind.

 

[Sempron Guy]

My experience with AMD drivers is not much worse than I had with Nvidia. I spent half of my time using the GTX 460, lookin' for stable drivers ( TDR issues anyone? circa 27x.xxx drivers if I remember correctly )

 

[RCoon]

Back in the day, both NVidia and AMD had catastrophic problems with their drivers. Both people from each side would moan and berate the other. This simply isn't the case anymore. If anything, both drivers and driver software from both AMD and NVidia is practically identical now. GeForce Experience and AMD's Raptor are just goats with different coloured tuxedo's on. They're still goats though.

Stick with WHQL drivers and there will be no problems. Although AMD did have an AHCI driver issue with a WHQL 14.4 driver which was instantaneously fixed.

The only people I still see moaning are the ones that test out BETAs and then moan when something breaks.

 

[neliz]

What about on the multiple gpu side of things?

http://hardocp.com/article/2014/07/23/gtx_780_oc_6gb_vs_r9_290x_4gb_overclocked_at_4k#.U9oqKvmSzDU

Before we dive into the questions above, there is one topic that has been burning on our minds to talk about since we've been testing a lot of SLI and CrossFire lately. We need to discuss where we are in terms of SLI and CrossFire smoothness and frametimes. That old issue about choppy or stuttering gameplay under SLI and CrossFire which we have been addressing subjectively for many years now.

In the past it was commonplace to complain about stuttering or choppiness with any AMD CrossFire solution. Times have changed, and we actually find that the roles have now reversed, at least at 4K. AMD has introduced its frametime averaging technology and is fully implemented on AMD R9 290X. AMD R9 290X also introduced new CrossFire technology that does not require a bridge atop the video card and improves communication through the PCI-Express bus. These improvements have proven to be successful in reducing the awful stuttering AMD used to be known for with CrossFire.

In all of our gaming we have shown you today, in every single game AMD CrossFire feels smoother to us than NVIDIA SLI. That's right, the tables have turned on this issue. In fact we experienced many situations where there was choppiness or stuttering with the two ASUS STRIX cards in SLI. It was noticeable, and when we switched to AMD R9 290X CrossFire; CrossFire just felt smoother.

One example of this is in Crysis 3. When we ran 4X MSAA at 3840x2160 with "High" settings we had a smooth experience with ASUS R9 290X CrossFire. However, with ASUS STRIX 780 6GB SLI we had a definite stutter, non-smooth experience despite what the framerates read and despite having 6GB of VRAM. This is a case where the framerates were reading what looked to be playable, at times in the 40's of FPS yet the actual gameplay felt choppy, like it was under 30 FPS! This is exactly the type of phenomenon we used to experience with AMD CrossFire.

Another example of this also happened in Far Cry 3 even running at just 2X MSAA "Ultra" settings. Our experience was altogether smoother with AMD CrossFire. It was as if the numbers we were seeing in FRAPS wasn't matching what we actually felt in game with SLI and this is exactly the way it use to be with AMD CrossFire.

Yet another example is the actual frametime results we have from BF4. Since we are now running that game under Mantle on AMD cards we have to use its built in frame time recorder and from that derive the average framerate. This displays to us the actual frametimes of the game. We often find that the AMD CrossFire frametimes are less than (better) than the NVIDIA SLI frametimes in the game. Granted we are using Mantle on AMD cards, but we have seen that to be true.

Today we can confidently state that AMD CrossFire is going to give you the better gameplay experience than SLI at 4K.

there you go.

Personally, as I get to switch both around and have mixed hardware they both have their own issues and I can not say that either NVIDIA or AMD is better, it is impossible.

 

[Octopuss]

I never used any of the problematic features like Crossfire or multiple monitors or whatever, so from that perspective, I can say the AMD drivers are - FOR THE MOST PART - fine.
In my opinion, the problem with AMD is that they don't give two fucks about fixing the less serious but still possibly very annoying bugs, and that can really piss you off.
Still, for single card setup, I would say they are fine.

 

[neliz]

I never used any of the problematic features like Crossfire or multiple monitors or whatever, so from that perspective, I can say the AMD drivers are - FOR THE MOST PART - fine.
In my opinion, the problem with AMD is that they don't give two fucks about fixing the less serious but still possibly very annoying bugs, and that can really piss you off.
Still, for single card setup, I would say they are fine.

If you think "multiple monitors" and "problematic amd" go in the same sentence, try to build a tri-sli multi-monitor rig. It kind of works now barring plenty of exceptions and "WTF" moments but there are plenty of times you hope NVIDIA to "please be just like AMD" when it comes to ease of use there.

 

[Mussels]

Generally on par with each other.

I've got AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards in the house. no real problems with any of them.


these days its more about a crap particular model, than crap drivers in general.

 

[GhostRyder]

If you had asked me about 5 years back, I would have told you it was not worth the time messing with certain aspects of ATI/AMD graphics. I had times where the card would work great and then a few others I tried always had issues.

The first serious set of AMD GPU's I got were a pair of HD 6990's, after that I decided I was going to stick with AMD GPU's for awhile based on my experience with the whole system and CFX scaling. Right now I have my desktop on 3 R9 290X GPU's and my laptop contains a GTX 675m (About to upgrade that to an 870m) and honestly between them when it comes to drivers and support I find neither better than the other. I had trouble with the recent WHQL from Nvidia where my laptop failed to install it over and over until I did a clean install.

I guess if I had to gripe about either of them it would be this:

CCC and Raptr:
Dislike the new overclocking interface (Im just old school sorry)
Raptr (Though I like it) can be annoying with all the notifications and pop ups

NCP and Geforce Experience:
Surround setup is weird and just is not as great as setting up eyefinity to me
The basic Nvidia interface is dated looking and a pain to navigate at times unless you know exactly where to look

I guess I could come up with some real nit-picky stuff for each, but both work excellently at this point and games perform well on both. Were starting to move away from the days of drivers really being a lead cause for picking a side to the point where its just either the most powerful GPU, the GPU that performs best at the resolution, or the best price to performance.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Drivers from both camps are fine. You will get people who have issues with one or the other, but doesn't really mean you will have the same issue. I have never had any catastrophic things happen to my system because of AMD or Nvidia drivers, just small things like performance or weird behaviors like the artifacting issue in BF3 months back, that was fixed quickly. Unless a driver causes system corruption, a dead card, etc, I could care less about the little "issues." Life goes on.

 

[Misaki]

In my opinion AMD drivers >>> Nvidia drivers.

 

[m0nt3]

last major driver issue I remember dealing with was nvidia drivers for the 7xxx series and windows vista. That was a mess.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

I've gone back and forth from a Ti 4200 on an AMD CPU rig, to the X800XT and X1950Pro on an Intel P4 rig, to a GTS 250 then my current HD7970 on my latest i7 950 rig.

The X800XT and X1950Pro series had their driver pains, and I was a bit miffed that the X1950Pro shortly after getting it was relegated to Legacy driver support. That's partly me buying very late in the model cycle, but it's worth mentioning that others with just as old if not older Nvidia GPUs at the time were not having problems with driver support. With Nvidia it wasn't so much about individualized software support as their older GPU architecture being more compatible than ATI's was with newer drivers I think. So you got more trouble free life out of them.

Lately though, as mentioned, AMD's drivers are just as good, sometimes depending on the game, even better at launch than Nvidia's. When I first got my 7970, AMD was releasing new drivers like candy every 1 to 3 months. Now they release less often and usually only include support for the newest GPUs or APUs, or have Crossfire performance gains on certain games.

What worries me is with AMD's tight budget and recent HUGE staff cuts, this focus on new GPUs and Crossfire has them neglecting to look for performance gains and driver fixes with older model single GPU performance, even on major titles.

On capture support, ShadowPlay is ahead of Raptr's Game DVR on features and performance, but Game DVR is still in beta. One of the key differences is Game DVR can record only half the chached gameplay of ShadowPlay's 20 minutes, and let's face it, the caching is THE unique and convenient feature in these tools.