NVIDIA's Strong-arm Tactics - How they treat GPU Partners and Media - Polidicks

There are problems with drivers on both sides. Its like this Nvidia gpus are reactors joke. Ive had from Geforce 6600 LE and Geforce 7900GTX i also had plenty of AMD:ati all in wonder x800 and Radeon 850 XT and HD5770 and in my new rig a HD7950 and to be honest i never had any driver issues believe it or not and if i had a problem it was my fault or just windows xp for example being wonky. The thing is there are so many different pc configuration that there is something that will not work for you because of some reason. Many people don't have problems with steam, but there are some people who have problems.

All of you claiming you've had great experiences with AMD and bad ones with Nvidia. That's wonderful and I agree with a single HD 6970 that was the case apart from some issues relating to specific games. It is NOT that way for people who use AMD Crossfire. Microstuttering is visibly more of an issue with Crossfire compared to SLI. It's hard to really explain but a game running at 60fps on SLI feels more fluid to me than 60fps on CFX. HardOCP's review of Battlefield 3 mentioned this. Another issue is that AMD doesn't consistently work with developers to have Crossfire profiles out for when a game launches, just for big launches like Crytek and Dice games, Nvidia does. That being said, I bought a $250 HD 6950 that turned into what was a $350 HD 6970 so I had no complaints then. Not so happy with two of them.

And then other say that Crossfire scales better than SLI :wink:

The Id Tech 5 drama made it very easy for me to decide to stick with NVIDIA. Despite the heavy competition that NVIDIA faces in benchmarks these days, I feel like the "evil" side just works.

[QUOTE=Strikebango;37315958]There are problems with drivers on both sides. Its like this Nvidia gpus are reactors joke. Ive had from Geforce 6600 LE and Geforce 7900GTX i also had plenty of AMD:ati all in wonder x800 and Radeon 850 XT and HD5770 and in my new rig a HD7950 and to be honest i never had any driver issues believe it or not and if i had a problem it was my fault or just windows xp for example being wonky. The thing is there are so many different pc configuration that there is something that will not work for you because of some reason. Many people don't have problems with steam, but there are some people who have problems.[/QUOTE] To be honest, the memes surfaced during specific GPU generations. Nvidia's 8800 series (and the 200s too if I remember) ran bloody hot, while early ATI generations had a lot of driver issues (although I've never had a chance to experience them first-hand). Nowadays both manufacturers produce quality products without much to complain about, although every generation will have its quirks. HD 5000s were terrible with tessellation, current Geforce 600s are bad at GPU computing, etc.

[QUOTE=POLOPOZOZO;37315671]It's sad you only have two companies to choose from on the most expensive parts but I've been using nVidia since I've ever had computers ever :\[/QUOTE] I've seen some ASUS based graphics cards last time I went shopping, but I doubt anyone ever gave it the time of day. [editline]20th August 2012[/editline] Now that I think about it, I think I'll head towards ATI next time I consider upgrading..

I'm sorry but the article in the OP, in style and inner logic, I not of a quality I would expect from a journalist. It sounds as if a teen did a really serious blogpost, yes, but it explains nothing at all and more important is totally one-sided.

[QUOTE=Combin0wnage;37322054]I've seen some ASUS based graphics cards last time I went shopping, but I doubt anyone ever gave it the time of day. [editline]20th August 2012[/editline] Now that I think about it, I think I'll head towards ATI next time I consider upgrading..[/QUOTE] Buddy. ASUS is an OEM. You're buying an AMD or Nvidia card made by ASUS probably with some non reference cooler that they designed. Not a GPU designed by ASUS.

[QUOTE=Rusty100;37307492]Call me bias, but I just think ATI/AMD just seem like a much nicer company. nVidia's always felt a little underhanded and money grubbing to me. Kind of like Apple, except nVidia still makes nice products (unlike the majority of apples (yes this is my opinion, sue me)).[/QUOTE] You are biased, and that's not exactly a secret, is it. On the consumer side, nVidia has always been aggressive and there is no doubt corporate ego has a great deal to do with it. Jensen's ridiculous diatribes are a perfect example, and their attempts to corner news articles with strong arm bullshit and spec spoiling during AMDs launching are rather well known. On the dev side, the bad guy is AMD. Their dev support is in a word, shit. Absolute shit. Their samples are ALWAYS late, ALWAYS have bad vendor IDs and the drivers are always a fucking mess. Every time. The one and only time AMD has had their shit together was the DX11 SKU launch. It was a mess before then, and a mess after. nVidia will fucking send you a dude(ette)(s) and card custom taped to what you need, well before you need to hit a benchmark/vertical slice/promo date. AMD? Good luck getting an email explanation of why you got drivers that are a month behind and for the wrong damn chipset until it's way too late to do anything about it, unless you're the size of EA or Activision. Unless of course, you develop exclusively for consoles. Then AMD suddenly, somehow has their shit mostly together. Hmm, a mystery. AMD lags behind in the PC graphics department because they have a about the third of the software engineers that nVidia does. The reason they have a third of the staff is because console hardware/software and bulk sales is where they make their money now.

[QUOTE=27X;37323412]You are biased, and that's not exactly a secret, is it. On the consumer side, nVidia has always been aggressive and there is no doubt corporate ego has a great deal to do with it. Jensen's ridiculous diatribes are a perfect example, and their attempts to corner news articles with strong arm bullshit and spec spoiling during AMDs launching are rather well known. On the dev side, the bad guy is AMD. Their dev support is in a word, shit. Absolute shit. Their samples are ALWAYS late, ALWAYS have bad vendor IDs and the drivers are always a fucking mess. Every time. The one and only time AMD has had their shit together was the DX11 SKU launch. It was a mess before then, and a mess after. nVidia will fucking send you a dude(ette)(s) and card custom taped to what you need, well before you need to hit a benchmark/vertical slice/promo date. AMD? Good luck getting an email explanation of why you got drivers that are a month behind and for the wrong damn chipset until it's way too late to do anything about it, unless you're the size of EA or Activision. Unless of course, you develop exclusively for consoles. Then AMD suddenly, somehow has their shit mostly together. Hmm, a mystery. AMD lags behind in the PC graphics department because they have a about the third of the software engineers that nVidia does. The reason they have a third of the staff is because console hardware/software and bulk sales is where they make their money now.[/QUOTE] NVIDIA was always really nice on the developer side, to me at least. Back in my last year of high school you had to get permission from NVIDIA to use PhysX, and they gave it to me. I used it to make a simple virtual lab for physics with OGRE and I got a lot of post secondary offers as well as recommendations from my school because of it (not to mention I really enjoyed programming with PhysX)

You guys don't think NVIDIA pays off game developers to specifically support their graphics cards? Why the hell do you think NVIDIAs logo appears in the introduction of a lot of games, and most of these games "have problems with ATI cards." *tinfoilhat*

I don't understand where the issue here lies, nVidia not giving them shit is totally normal, a reference card from the chip suppliers themself are rather rare even for the biggest outlets. What I don't understand is why they are attacking the manufacturers who gave them cards, since that is purely between the manufacturers and the site. Basically, they are complaining about an issue that isn't one and nVidia is doing bad stuff about stuff that isn't their concern.

[QUOTE=27X;37323412]You are biased, and that's not exactly a secret, is it. On the consumer side, nVidia has always been aggressive and there is no doubt corporate ego has a great deal to do with it. Jensen's ridiculous diatribes are a perfect example, and their attempts to corner news articles with strong arm bullshit and spec spoiling during AMDs launching are rather well known. On the dev side, the bad guy is AMD. Their dev support is in a word, shit. Absolute shit. Their samples are ALWAYS late, ALWAYS have bad vendor IDs and the drivers are always a fucking mess. Every time. The one and only time AMD has had their shit together was the DX11 SKU launch. It was a mess before then, and a mess after. nVidia will fucking send you a dude(ette)(s) and card custom taped to what you need, well before you need to hit a benchmark/vertical slice/promo date. AMD? Good luck getting an email explanation of why you got drivers that are a month behind and for the wrong damn chipset until it's way too late to do anything about it, unless you're the size of EA or Activision. Unless of course, you develop exclusively for consoles. Then AMD suddenly, somehow has their shit mostly together. Hmm, a mystery. AMD lags behind in the PC graphics department because they have a about the third of the software engineers that nVidia does. The reason they have a third of the staff is because console hardware/software and bulk sales is where they make their money now.[/QUOTE] While AMD's backwards compatibility on drivers is shit, its not a problem; JUST STICK WITH THE LATEST STABLE DRIVERS. An example is all those 48XX users out there (<3 you guys) After the 58XX Series came out, REALLY bad shit started popping up; lots of artifacts, crashes, places on your screen that would make everything LAG. But assuming you stick with recent versions (I for one have upgraded to a 6950) then driver support is stable and works just fine. As for AMD's developer stuff, Yeah its shit, Its outdated, and most of it is pointless; but at-least they have contributed to open-source projects and documentation, while Nvidia has just payed everybody off to stay in the lead.

uhm my 4850 runs todays games without issues (sleeping dogs, bf3, everything else)

[QUOTE=PelPix123;37317748]I beta-tested Crysis for Crytek. Earlier in 2007, the game ran really great on my 2900XT and looked wonderful. Then an update came. No changelog. Suddenly it looked awful and performance was shit. We asked, Crytek answered that they had "moved over to the nVidia reference shader tree for all architectures." nVidia had apparently paid them an undisclosed sum of money to 1. Completely fuck over the experience for ATi users 2. Use their proprietary code 3. Turn Crysis into a techdemo for their new 8xxx series. I never bought a card from them after that, and it's just been fuckup after fuckup; I've never seen a company care so little about their customers so openly.[/QUOTE] Nvidia is known to sometimes make developers do a little extra for their cards, just so it won't run as good on the AMD counter-parts. [url]http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/6[/url] In this article you'll find that Nvidia's architecture does better with tesselation, short as that, but as you'll also see, the amount of tesselation is completely disproportionate with quality. Just read the conclusion really.

[QUOTE=meppers;37306482]i still remember the infamous driver disaster of 2010 that made nvidia cards overheat to the point of dying they killed my 8600GT and the pcie slot of my motherboard both things were shit anyways so i never cared, I just haven't bought an nvidia GPU since, and probably never will for a long while[/QUOTE]Well, that explains why 2 8800 GTs and an 8600 fried on me :c

I've never had a problem with AMD drivers AMD Cards series I have owned are from HD4000 series, HD5000 series, and HD7000 series I guess I missed the shit drivers era, but AMD is now releasing their drivers as betas a month in advance of it's actual release now (this practice literally started like 2 months ago)