Same here, I've had ATI since my 9800 Pro, never had any of the problems I read about all the time.

yeah people are totally making up problems with ati and certain games.

 

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It's so hard to be objective about drivers, since we buy into a video card for at least a year or two. And tend to focus on all it's driver flaws more. Mean while absence from the other brand makes the heart grow fonder.

I'm sure both have flubbered some games with driver updates. It happens. But overall I think both appear to be satisfactory. Though my last two cards have been ATI, so I've been just an observer of Nvidia drivers for a while now. Seems like ATI is doing better about preventing previous bugs from reoccurring (happened a lot in 2009 and 2010). ATI drivers installations have improved a lot too (had a driver install render my OS unbootable and I wasn't the only one).

I really had some ATI driver nightmares during the ownership of my 4870x2. But they began to show real improvements and I was comfortable enough with their progress to buy two 6950s anyway. So far I don't have major regrets. I definitely would have bought Nvidia if my motherboard supported SLI, but at least I'm not in driver hell anymore.

With ATI drivers, I like the color and gamma adjustment settings better. Can't remember why, but I recall these being somewhat awkward to use with Nvidia's drivers. But with Nvidia I like that each game has it's own profile that you can tweak settings on. If I want to force AA in one game, it won't affect others like ATI drivers do (ATI has manual profiles, but they suck).

These days when I'm buying a video card, the drivers weight a lot less on the decision process. Nvidia does have early access to optimize drivers for game before release, but ATI has much more frequent profile updates and is often releasing updates before games release as well.

So I look more at the price, the performance, the cooling solution, and noise, than I do the drivers.

I never had driver issues with either nVidia or ATI. Using 5870 for over a year now, and had 8800GTS before that. Both run fine. For ATI I have always installed the full CCC package. Always used Intel CPUs for my gaming machines. The only 2 times I got ADM CPU was for my wife's PC and the media PC. Both are plagued by weird hiccups and goofy problems from time to time.

 

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People that never have driver issues just aren't trying hard enough.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RAGE-Radeon-GeForce-FPS-Pc-Gaming,13653.html

There you go, purge Carmack rage over drivers

 

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Appeared there were Nvidia and AMD driver issues. The AMD ones appeared worse with artifacting and texture popping that didn't happen with the Nvidia drivers.

To make matters worse Rage and Battlefield 3 Beta both came out together. AMD released a beta driver for Rage and a separate beta driver for BF3. So if you were playing both games, then one driver would break the other game. AMD is coming out with another beta driver (might already be available) that combines both fixes. Not sure of Nvidia went through the same drama because of the two games needing emergency drivers at once as well.

However Carmack is also probably deflecting, because it sounds like the game has more issues than just bad video drivers.

I've had mainly ATI cards and have never had any real issues with them. One reason for that may be that when I have a driver that is working well I stick with it until there are compelling reasons to upgrade it. The more often you mess around with driver installations the more likely you are to have problems in my view.

Same here, I take the approach I was taught a long time ago, if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

As new games like Rage and BF3 show, kinda forced to update regularly though if you want to play newer games with all the eye candy tweaked up.