Nvidia Drivers VS AMD Drivers

[Nik Balor]

in many places on the web there's people spitting on Nvidia's driver support for older cards while other bash AMD's drivers. I even heard Nvidia makes drivers for their older cards worse so the newer ones look better. Nvidia optimizes for their newest cards and leave the older ones in the dust (Kepler), AMD cards (older GCN) age more gracefully with driver updates. AMD is sort of known for releasing drivers over long periods of time that gradually increase performance over time. Nvidia is known for getting almost the maximum output of their cards for popular titles immediately. I'm just wondering what does Nvidia does better in their drivers that AMD doesn't?!! is it just that With Nvidia you get what you want once you pay ?! i mean someone has to be concerned about Nvidia leaving older cards at a much lower priority!

[chiller15]

It's been a long time since I've devled into AMD graphics drivers, but from what I remember (and this is from a number of years ago), AMD/AIT's drivers were hit and miss. There were a lot of bad driver updates that caused issues. At that time, Nvidia were releasing mostly stable drivers, which is where a lot of hate towards AMD drivers came from. I can't comment on what AMD's drivers are like now, I've only got expierence with Nvidia with my 1070.

 

However, I had a GTX 580 from 2011 until earlier this year. It continued to perform well in games, up until it couldn't handle current games at 1080p 60Hz. That wasn't an issue with drivers, just that games had improved to the point that the card couldn't handle them. Therefore I don't believe that Nvidia purposefully slow their cards down with driver updates to entice people to buy new ones. If they did, and they were caught...they'd be taken to court, as that sort of practice is illegal.

[Spoilt]

Nvidia has better tie ins with game devs. Not to mention that majority of the consumer run Nvidia chips so it made sense for dev to optimize team green over team red.

 

 

 

Contrary to popular belief, nvidia still optimizes drivers for their old cards. It is just that there's only so much you can extract from card after optimizing it for like 2 years or so

 

 

AMD on the other hand just have not enough resource to send their engineer to every game dev to help them optimize, let alone getting the devs to optimize their games for AMD in the first place.

 

[DJ46]

My first gaming GPU was a GTX560 and it was also my last card from Nvidia. I didn't know that much about more complex issues back then, I barely learnt how to build a computer.

That card had an issue where it wasn't able to stay in the highest power mode at 850MHz and it kept underclocking to 405MHz, which was useless. The temperatures and power were completely fine, nothing changed from before when the card worked. This was also the first time I heard of power states and things like that.

 

I had to install and run a separate bit of software (Nvidia Inspector or something like that) just to make a profile for every game I played so that the card would stay at 850MHz.

 

When it came time to upgrade, I had a choice of the GTX6xx series and HD7xxx. I chose the 7870 (AMD was better value for money) and never looked back.

Since, I had a 7950 and I'm now running an RX480. I don't play the latest games so I can't comment on that, but I've not had any issues.

 

I LOVE the new clean install feature when I update drivers.

[Atmos]

Their software interface and driver management is far better on nvidia.

Long term driver support in my own personal experience has been better on amd, but honestly, the gimping that happens with nvidia's cards sometimes with new launches typically isn't that noticeable and usually due to changing technology more than anything else. I don't think they purposefully nerf older cards, but rather do just shift focus to the new products.

 

AMDs drivers stability isn't nearly as bad as it used to be, people complaining about it tend to blow it out of proportion. In all my years of using amd, and I used almost exclusively amd in my personal gaming setups up until a few weeks ago I only ever rarely had driver related issues, and when I did they tended to release a fix rather soon. Over that same time, I've noticed again in my own personal experience that my friends with nvidia cards, have had far more issues with drivers, though half of them are on laptops so some of that can be attributed to that.

 

Drivers are a constantly changing and adapting field for both companies. they routinely throw the crown of "worst drivers" back and forth constantly with each release. In the grand total of things amd has had that honor more often, but driver related issues these days are rare on both platforms when looking at the scheme of things.

[DJ46]

Also, I don't believe Nvidia gimps their old GPUs, even if I wish that was true so that I could rip them a new one

 

But it may look like that to people who see how much better AMD cards get as they get older. Nvidia has more people that make drivers so they can get all the performance relatively quickly. AMD cards are overbuilt to be competitive even with slightly less optimized drivers, so they have a lot more performance that can become available later.

[Sakkura]

13 minutes ago, Atmos said:

Their software interface and driver management is far better on nvidia.

What. The Nvidia driver interface is pretty poor, and AMD's been more user-friendly since AMD got rid of the old Catalyst Control Center (which was comparable to what Nvidia offers to this day).

[Atmos]

13 minutes ago, DJ46 said:

Also, I don't believe Nvidia gimps their old GPUs, even if I wish that was true so that I could rip them a new one

 

But it may look like that to people who see how much better AMD cards get as they get older. Nvidia has more people that make drivers so they can get all the performance relatively quickly. AMD cards are overbuilt to be competitive even with slightly less optimized drivers, so they have a lot more performance that can become available later.

There was the maxwell fiasco where it did appear as though they did with version 368.69 where many games saw a noticeable drop in performance after the launch of pascal. Again, I don't think it was on purpose, but it certainly did happen.

[Atmos]

3 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

What. The Nvidia driver interface is pretty poor, and AMD's been more user-friendly since AMD got rid of the old Catalyst Control Center (which was comparable to what Nvidia offers to this day).

I absolutely must disagree with you.

Removing the control panel from both companies respectively, (because they are the same in usability) geforce experience is such a nicer interface to work with its not even funny. Its just the little things that add up, like not requiring a restart with updating drivers, and being able to one click update/rollback drivers and not what amd does, where you download a separate package that you then have to manually install. AMD's interface is just a glorified download page for the installer.

[Princess Luna]

nVidia has always had the best driver support, no wonder since they can afford it.

 

Old cards gets bad over time simply because they are old and the newest games won't really take Fermi/Kepler cards into account nowadays, that doesn't make it nVidia's fault, it is just progress.

 

Also nVidia control panel is a lot better than AMD's, not talking about GE but the control panel, it is simple, clean and easy to use... we don't need fancy looking interfaces we just need usable ones.

[DarkBlade2117]

10 minutes ago, Atmos said:

I absolutely must disagree with you.

Removing the control panel from both companies respectively, (because they are the same in usability) geforce experience is such a nicer interface to work with its not even funny. Its just the little things that add up, like not requiring a restart with updating drivers, and being able to one click update/rollback drivers and not what amd does, where you download a separate package that you then have to manually install. AMD's interface is just a glorified download page for the installer.

Whole requiring restart blah blah out of the way, it's almost a one click update. Just go to the update screen, click express/custom install and let it do it's thing. Rolling back drivers, oh boo hoo you have to go to their website. 

Having used both interfaces, AMD has a much cleaner design that works well.
In the end, I could really care less, I like AMD's ecosystem better but I'm not going to whine and cry over little shit.

[Sakkura]

27 minutes ago, Atmos said:

I absolutely must disagree with you.

Removing the control panel from both companies respectively, (because they are the same in usability) geforce experience is such a nicer interface to work with its not even funny. Its just the little things that add up, like not requiring a restart with updating drivers, and being able to one click update/rollback drivers and not what amd does, where you download a separate package that you then have to manually install. AMD's interface is just a glorified download page for the installer.

Geforce experience is a companion app, it's not part of the driver at all.

 

The Radeon Software interface is a lot better than the Nvidia control panel. And no, you don't need to manually update AMD drivers.

[Hiebly]

For mainstream triple A gaming they're both similar. But AMD has more edge cases of things going horribly wrong. The ReLive drivers bricked a lot of R7/9 200 cards for example. And a lot of times the newer drivers for cards that have just come out are really bad.

 

I've also run into the issue on AMD drivers where they get stuck uninstalling. Tried leaving it for 2 hours and still stuck on uninstall, and unable to cancel the uninstall from within the uninstaller, lol.

 

Nvidia's are far from perfect (with recent drivers reducing overall performance) but overall I've encountered fewer major issues despite spending more time with them.

[Connor Price]

Personally, I've had no issues with the AMD drivers recently. I must admit, they were pretty rubbish back in the day when I had a laptop with a 4650m. But, coming from a 750Ti I had for years, the past year or so I've had this 480 have been painless. The ReLive drivers were great and the new Adrenaline drivers are fantastic. Having in game fps and temp monitoring built in is brilliant. Installing new drivers is simple, just one click and a restart. 

One thing I will say, I've found that AMD drivers tend to have small glitches every now and again such as your mouse cursor disappearing. Absolutely no idea why that happens, but it doesn't happen often. 

 

I've found that the AMD drivers aren't too different from the Nvidia drivers. Nvidia do often get game ready drivers and optimisations out a bit quicker than AMD, but not by much. Also, anything to do with Unreal Engine is a bit hit or miss on AMD. I think AMD are working with Epic games to optimise Unreal for GCN a bit more, so will be interesting to see how that goes. 

[xAcid9]

I like GFE and Radeon Settings, i hate NCP. 

I'm really digging Radeon new overlay feature, too bad Vega 56 is too expensive here.

[Nik Balor]

36 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

I like GFE and Radeon Settings, i hate NCP. 

I'm really digging Radeon new overlay feature, too bad Vega 56 is too expensive here.

im really looking forward to buying a sapphire nitro custom RX Vega 56 , but 3x8 pin power connectors and that's too much power consumption !

[xAcid9]

15 minutes ago, Nik Balor said:

im really looking forward to buying a sapphire nitro custom RX Vega 56 , but 3x8 pin power connectors and that's too much power consumption !

Who the fuck care. Undervolt that shit and u will you use similar if not lower than 980 Ti while performing better.

[Nik Balor]

5 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Who the fuck care. Undervolt that shit and u will you use similar if not lower than 980 Ti while performing better.

how can i undervolt it ?!

[pas008]

both are have their pros and cons

 

will say

nvidia's multi monitor surround shit needs to change asap along with unresponsive control panel

amd just needs to get optimized shit out sooner (its tech not fine wine)

[xAcid9]

1 minute ago, Nik Balor said:

how can i undervolt it ?!

 

[Jon Jon]

I really prefer AMD's interface a lot better than Nvidia's.

 

I feel like, today, functionally, they do what they need to do on both sides. It's more subjective today, than anything else, which is a great thing!

 

So for me, I really prefer AMD's Crimson drivers.

 

However, I have been running Adrenaline for a day now, and I love the fact that I can use the phone dock on my G910 Orion Spectrum and essentially use my phone as a monitoring dashboard. No need to waste screen space for that stuff. I would love to see Nvidia implement something similar. From basic to advance needs, it should all be done from a single pane of glass, not across multiple suites of software (Control Panel + Geforce Experience + Afterburner).

[Sakkura]

7 hours ago, Hiebly said:

For mainstream triple A gaming they're both similar. But AMD has more edge cases of things going horribly wrong. The ReLive drivers bricked a lot of R7/9 200 cards for example. And a lot of times the newer drivers for cards that have just come out are really bad.

 

I've also run into the issue on AMD drivers where they get stuck uninstalling. Tried leaving it for 2 hours and still stuck on uninstall, and unable to cancel the uninstall from within the uninstaller, lol.

 

Nvidia's are far from perfect (with recent drivers reducing overall performance) but overall I've encountered fewer major issues despite spending more time with them.

ReLive didn't brick any cards. It just messed with fan control. Cards would not be damaged from that, just either cause a thermal shutdown (if the fan's too slow) or make unnecessary noise (if the fan's too fast).

 

Nvidia did have a driver that actually bricked cards, but that was so many years ago it's really irrelevant today. ATI drivers were shit back then as well (really, both sides had shitty drivers if you go back long enough).

[Nik Balor]

12 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

ReLive didn't brick any cards. It just messed with fan control. Cards would not be damaged from that, just either cause a thermal shutdown (if the fan's too slow) or make unnecessary noise (if the fan's too fast).

 

 

what do you mean messed with fan control ? how ?

[Jon Jon]

18 minutes ago, Nik Balor said:

what do you mean messed with fan control ? how ?

ReLive uses AMD's VCE (video coding engine, which is a dedicated hardware resource for video processing) for recording, which I could see (if not programmed correctly in software) trigger issues with fan control as utilization increases.

 

Bugs in software, go figure

[Hiebly]

On 12/13/2017 at 10:53 AM, Sakkura said:

ReLive didn't brick any cards. It just messed with fan control. Cards would not be damaged from that, just either cause a thermal shutdown (if the fan's too slow) or make unnecessary noise (if the fan's too fast).

Yes it did. Corrupting BIOS on some 200 series cards. Dealt with this first hand on my friend's system, found at least a hundred posts of the same (including a thread on AMD forums with like 12 pages that got deleted by moderators).

 

Here's one instance of it (not from me, but the exact same issue). After one driver update, even formatting the computer and reinstalling older drivers that worked doesn't resolve the issue. Had to RMA a card because of a driver update.