Driver wars - Nvidia & AMD

[whitedragon101]

The new 390x is on its way and looks like it might be the new top dog until nVidia Pascal or a 980ti.  But I really don't feel comfortable with AMD.  Historically they have had more driver instability than nVidia and also I also heard on the Oculus forums that since nVidia have a MUCH bigger market share most developers just target 1 optimisation cycle at nVidia hardware and don't do AMD optimisation.

 

 

1)  For stability is there still a difference today between nVidia and AMD card drivers ?  (i.e games not working, stuttering, poor performance)

2)  Will nVidia's Gameworks propriatary DLL program kill AMD performance ?

3)  Are AMD improving Crossfire as it seems SLI works well in terms of fps and latency and Crossfire perform worse for both? (certainly latency)

 

Basically my gut feeling is :

nVidia = plug it in, install drivers, enjoy a warm fuzzy feeling that whatever game you are running nVidia had a hand in it and get a drip feed of improvements

AMD = plug it in, install drivers, hope its all fine.  Don't expect driver improvements as they don't have the the resources to do this.

 

edit PLEASE READ

The danger of asking anything based on a company is you get people who are super loyal to a particuluar company and could be agressive.  But I think these are issues that can be discussed rationally and respectfully if we all put our sensible hats on.  Thanks

[Merlorz]

You do know you might start a fanboy/flame war with this topic

[zappian]

Yes gameworks rigs games.

 

Look at a 770 having way more performance than a 280x ON a nvidia title.

 

The cards on non rigged games are on par.

 

The proof doesnt lie I am afraid.

 

Does AMD does the same with mantle and gaming evolved titles ? Yes but its usually

not as big of a gap.

 

[Nup]

 

You could have made this a much less fanboy/famewar inducing thread... But back on topic; 

 

Having just gotten an amd card, i cant really complain about the driver at all. 

 

Sure, Geforce experience makes it uber easy, but that doesn't have much to do with the reliability. 

[KamiKatze]

I have had both in the past and i have never really gotten onto AMD's rewards in Gaming evolved, i mean what for? It's more annoying than usefull imo. Other than that i really like the Nvidia GeForce experience settings option. It's a quick and dirty solution if you have a weaker graphics card. But then again, AMD has that too. I think there's not much that puts one driver over the other.

 

Just today i recieved the new nvidia driver with improved performance in games of up to 15%. Stuff like that just amazes me.

[Fulgrim]

AMD gpu's drivers are not as bad as some people claim. The only issue i've encountered, was years ago back when it was ATi, and they kinda stopped doing driver updates, and people started making their own. And that little fiasco, forgetting to put Hydravision or whatever it is into one of the AMD Catalyst updates. Aside from those cock-ups, i've not ran into driver issues myself.

 

People have differing experiences with different companies, but overall AMD gpu's are fine and do the job.

[SirRoderick]

Well there hasn't been a big release in like 6 months that HASN'T had problems with SLI, so let's not use that as an argument

[Briggsy]

AMD release driver improvements over time as needed, but usually release them as beta drivers so they aren't delayed for WHQL certification. AMD tend to also support older hardware for longer when releasing WHQL drivers, whereas it may not be wise to update to a new nvidia driver if you have a 5 year old nvidia card (I am effing serious on that one). 

 

Historically from my own experience, Nvidia drivers have only gained decent stability since 600 series. before that, Nvidia drivers were hit and miss. I bounce back and forth between brands, and most of the complaints about drivers seem to be a propaganda weapon with fanboys, either that or all my cards have been special and mostly unaffected by bad drivers.

[hitsu1]

Meh if you wait long enough the drivers eventually more or less balance out. I just got the new Total War game I and I saw where the GTX 760s were out performing R290Xs. I remember the opposite happened with Shogun 2: Total War where 2 year old AMD cards were out performing NVidia flagship cards. In the end it is pretty much a wash though and the part/performance comes in line with expectations.

[SpagettiNinja]

Both of them work just fine, now stfu all of you fanboys. Just stfu and leave.

[Tacitus]

You're right in some respects, wrong in others. The 390x I predict will be top dog this generation, I don't think Nvidia will have a solution for a while.

 

Historically Nvidia have been perceived as having better drivers, but AMD has really closed the gap the past couple of years. If there was anything fundamentally wrong with AMD people would not be loyal to them.

 

Nvidia games works is a bad thing, as are projects AMD collaborates on with devs. The reality is that it is corporate money marginalising the competitor, generating favourable benchmarks until the opposition can create good drivers. Watchdogs is a prime example - IIRC AMD only got access to the game a few days before launch to start making drivers, and on launch, though performance was shit across the board, it was noticeably more shit on AMD cards. In that case, I think a 770 was outperforming a 290 for a few weeks.

 

Crossfire has also been improved markedly, and across a variety of games AMDs high-end cards scaled better than Nvidia's last-gen high end cards, especially at high resolutions. This trend remains true - the 290x and 970 in CF/SLI are close competitors at 1080p and 1440p, but at 5760x1080 and 4k the 290x pulls away by 5-10%. AMD also suffered really bad frame pacing issues, but those are a thing of the past for the most part. Their multi-GPU support isn't as widespread, but the past year has shown a lot of that is down to developers; neither Nvidia nor AMD have had the best of years for it.

 

Overall, from what I've read, and what I've experienced, I get the feeling Nvidia is slightly more refined than AMD, but people get over-excited and blow the differences out of proportion. I wouldn't shy away from AMD, go to OCUK forums and look at the 290x/295x2 owner threads and you'll see a lot of happy people.

 

If you're on the verge of a purchase, it's a tough time to be deciding.

[Tacitus]

For me I thought it was easier than ever. I got my 290X Lightning two days ago. A binned 290X still substantially cheaper than a standard 970? At a time when Nvidia is burying itself in dirt? Where do I sign?

 

My 970 got picked up about an hour ago by the courier haha.

 

Getting 2 290x's I think.

 

2 of them for £400, or 2 970s for ~£600.

 

It's easy for me too, but I must admit, I loved my 970.

[rentaspoon]

I've had both and never had issues with either of them, I prefer nvidias software but I wouldnt pay extra just for it.

As for stutters etc, you would hope that if it was an issue that Luke or Linus would say something during the benchmarks

[Najuno]

These topics... you literally ask for people to go in flame wars.

 

Everybody has their own opinion and experience with GPUs and drivers. So by the end of it, people will only reflect their personal experience based upon what they had/have in their PC. That doesn't apply in general.

 

I've had driver issues with both companies in the past, and good experiences with both as well.

[whitedragon101]

Thanks guys.  Looks like there is not a great deal in it. (Although not quite sure how physx fits into the brand choice equation )

 

I think my decision will come down to who gets their Oculus Rift optimisations right.

[Tasuma]

My only complaint about my r9 290x is I didn't know I need 8 and 6 pins. And I lost my other connector so had to buy one off amazon. Q_Q But other than that 0 issues with the card and drivers.

 

Edit: I've had NVidia drivers crash my GPU until I went back an update or two. When I had my first AMD card 0 issues with drivers or crashing.

[Shally]

Let me grab my popcorn.

[Monarch]

When I got my 290X latest driver was 14.4. It gave me BSODs when watching vids on YT. I found a lot of complains online so I wasn't the only one. Then a later version, I can't remember which one, caused core clock to be stuck after the GPU was previously fully stressed. Ridiculous. I used to have a GTX 760 before I upgraded and never had such issues.

The problems are gone with the latest Omega driver, thank God.

 

Another thing that bugs me is that AMD's DX11 is far less efficient than Nvidia's. I'm aware it was Mantle that pushed Nvidia to reduce their DX11 overhead, but most games don't and will not support Mantle. It's not a big deal when you're GPU bound like at high resolutions, but it is when you're CPU bound and aiming for 60 (or more) fps.

 

Difference between dropping below 60 (to ~40) and maintaining 60+. Can confirm this on my rig.

 

 

 

 

FX 6100 yields 80% more performance with GTX 980 than with 290X. 

[Redpalmtree]

I remember last year when Ubisoft and Nvidia Gameworks combined their powers of suckitude, and ACU turned out so bad that even Nvidia GPUs had problems with it.

 

And with Nvidia not letting AMD optimize for Gameworks features, you how its going to end.

I solely pick AMD because of this. NVIDIA is just flat-out playing it dirty. It turns more into a moral thing, but it also affect us consumers directly.

 

I don't feel I'm missing out on performance at all, reason for this is I think every game that has to do with Gameworks sucks. Not even because of the Gameworks, but the actual game.

 

NVIDIA stop raping pls. Help out for once.

[ItsAFeature]

The drivers these days are pretty much equal. Sometimes it swings in one direction, sometimes in the other. I gave up on SLI because it's broken half the time when a new game releases. Total War: Attila for example has had a lot of users complain that the game runs better with SLI off.

 

The biggest issue that I ever see with AMD is that even when a game isn't using GameWorks, a good chunk of the time the development machines are running Nvidia hardware which naturally translates into an advantage for Nvidia users on release. I'm not saying all devs do this but I have definitely seen my share of lazy devs that either don't bother to test on any other systems than the ones in their office or only test on the newest hardware that only a fraction of the users actually have.

 

TL;DR: If the AMD card has the best performance, buy it. The drivers are mostly irrelevant these days as both companies either are quick to fix it or the devs have released an unfixable turd (see AC:U).

[ThE_MarD]

Heyyo,

Drivers? AMD and NVIDIA are on about the same footing now. AMD's Omega drivers were overdue, granted. Proper frame pacing in Multi-GPU setups? Why the FUCK did that take so damn long!? But oh well, now AMD and NVIDIA have great anti-micro-stutter implementations.

Upscaling? Same thing. AMD took longer to get that out the door but hey, it's here and it works the same as NVIDIA's DSR. All is well.

There's a few other things that Omega Drivers did but I don't feel like going into major details so I won't lol... but suffice to say? Both are on roughly the same footing.

Now, for Multi-GPU support in game titles? That's a toss-up between AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI though... Sometimes AMD's quicker to get support for CF in games? Sometimes SLI gets a taste first. Usually though? If games get one? the other follows... there's only a rare few exceptions to that rule though... WarGaming's games as a prime example. World of Tanks got support for NVIDIA SLI in 8.4 patch (came out March 2013) but still no support for AMD CR, same goes for their other game World of Warplanes (but no one cares about that lol War Thunder has better planes).

Lol, you can't blame ACU on NVIDIA... Ubisoft was just complete SHIT in 2014. Go on YouTube and search up dissapointing games of 2014 and there's always one or two Ubisoft titles. They fucked up SOOO bad compared to how damn good Ubisoft was in 2013... AC Black Flag was amazing... FarCry 3 & Blood Dragon blew my mind... yet 2014? Watch_Dogs sucked major poop and I regret ever spending $60 on that damn game and vowed not to get ripped off by Ubisoft so I didn't buy AC Unity and thank fuck because it's the most broken game of 2014 so obviously Ubisoft learnt NOTHING from Watch_Dogs and then FarCry 4 has multi-GPU issues so thank fuck again I didn't buy that Ubisoft game... the only game in 2014 that Ubisoft didn't totally fuck up? The Crew. A racing game. I don't play many of those these days so I didn't buy it due to that.

[Tacitus]

Lol, you can't blame ACU on NVIDIA... 

 

Nvidia and Ubisoft collaborating on games was disastrous for AMD. AMD didn't get WD until a few days before launch, and FC4 doesn't have a CF profile yet because Ubi didn't bother implementing multi-AMD GPU support.