Current day - Windows Direct X GPU drivers - Nvidia vs AMD

[Askew]

I keep reading comments saying things like 'AMD's drivers are crap' and 'Nvidia makes better drivers' specifically on Windows 7 and 8, so I thought I'd make a poll about it for one thing to see if people think it's true, or whether people think that they are comparable and the biased comments are largely unsubstantiated.

 

The second part is, post why you believe your vote in the poll to be the case, if you think AMD or Nvidia drivers suck then we need evidence to support that, I'm tired of reading one lined comments to one effect or the other with zero explanation as to why that is or in what applications/scenarios that is evident.

 

If you think Nvidia has better drivers right now (as I think is the more popular opinion wherever I chance upon users giving it on the subject) then please post evidence as to why that is if at all possible, saying stuff like 'they just are' is not helping people understand your viewpoint, especially me as I've created this thread to try and understand the situation better and learn from it.

[Katsu-K1L]

i tried both amd drivers and nvidia drivers and they BOTH SUCK ASS

i prefer intel.

[ShadowCaptain]

I have always hated AMD drivers 

 

and I have always had smoother better experiances with nvidia

[xAcid9]

They both have their own problems.

[Shakaza]

I can't truly give an unbiased opinion due to the fact that I have never actually owned an NVIDIA graphics card, but from what has been said on the forums, I can say that they both have their own issues. There is one person who said to me that with NVIDIA, you can simply press a button or some such to update, and you don't even need to restart or remove previous drivers before it will work properly. That is a plus, but I'm sure most of us remember the driver that NVIDIA released once that caused crazy artifacts in games and even damaged or destroyed some graphics cards.

 

As for AMD, I can honestly say that I've experienced my fair share of issues, as I'm sure most of us have. Once, when I was relatively new to the computer scene, I used an AMD program to remove drivers. What I didn't realize was that it was only meant to be used with Windows 7, and I have Windows 8(.1). It kinda messed up my OS installation, and I started to experience lag in Skyrim, even with the Radeon HD 7790 I had for a short period of time. I also experienced white lines of artifacting at the lower right corner of my screen, which I assume was also caused by the driver uninstallation program. I did eventually find the cause and sort everything out, but it certainly was annoying. At least it didn't destroy my GPU.

 

This evidence brings me to the conclusion that neither is perfect, and one is not objectively better than the other. Subjectively, one might find that the issues I experienced were so annoying that they are worse than a driver destroying a graphics card, or doesn't really care that one company's driver is easier to install than the other's, though.

[Faa]

It's been awhile I used AMD gpu's but I never had issues with them, their drivers have some things that are better than nvidia drivers like amd overdrive but Crossfire functionality was messy. You didnt really have the option to disable CF just for a specific game, disabling CF when you're running a game gives an instant bsod and CF didnt work in halfscreen. Being able to make a custom resolution is a plus for me, doesnt sound immediately useful but my monitor requires DP1.2 for 120Hz but apparently Samsung decided to put DP1.1 in there causing the monitor randomly black screening and with HDMI the monitor automatically runs at 60Hz so I have to make a custom resolution to have 120Hz.

Something that people didnt notice yet, the driver overhead on nvidia is atm lower resulting in overall better performance in situations when you're held back by the CPU.