[Mr.Deviance]

 Spirrwell, on 08 May 2011 - 07:54 PM, said:

NVIDIA is superior than ATI, but I think there should be another video card maker. There are times when I have trouble with NVIDIA drivers. That's due to hardware conflict, but I'd still like to have another choice. Just one more. Unless there's one floating around that I don't know about.

Weird that you say that because I have never in my entire life had hardware conflict errors from the nvidia drivers, and I do happen to overclock and test 100 nvidia cards a week at the oc club that I have.
I bench test stuff and I even destroy vid cards on many occasions but I don't get hardware conflict errors ever.
So you must really have a serious problem or be missing something to get such errors.

[MusicallyInspired]

I hear that ATI has better cards....or at least cheaper cards? Something...some small benefit over NVidia. But as TX said, it's immediately nullified by the horrible drivers. And they're unpredictable. I remember when I first got my Radeon 9800Pro. The stock drivers would render fine, then I would update and break the system, so I uninstalled everything and put on the original drivers that came with the CD again and the textures in every game came out completely garbled and strange. The exact same drivers I used previously that came with the card.

[YicklePigeon]

 MusicallyInspired, on 09 May 2011 - 04:18 AM, said:

I hear that ATI has better cards....or at least cheaper cards? Something...some small benefit over NVidia. But as TX said, it's immediately nullified by the horrible drivers. And they're unpredictable. I remember when I first got my Radeon 9800Pro. The stock drivers would render fine, then I would update and break the system, so I uninstalled everything and put on the original drivers that came with the CD again and the textures in every game came out completely garbled and strange. The exact same drivers I used previously that came with the card.

I remember when I had a 9800SE, no not the Pro version obviously for the nitpicky amongst you, and what I remember is that the card itself was semi-fast for its day but had its stability issues. It wasn't long before I went back to nVidia and got the GeForce 6600. This was, however, many years ago!

Since then, I replaced the aging 6600 with the Radeon HD 4650 and it was stable, offered consistently better performance, no issues with any game that I played. And since that time (over a year ago) the 6600 lives on in my mum's PC (she's biased towards nVidia) with the HD 4650 there as a reserve (technically better, especially for HD video...my mum doesn't game but still). As for me? Radeon HD 5750 graphics now, still stable, still does everything as it should.

Points being that one; the Radeons have been stable for years and a decent purchase if you want more features over speed as opposed to the GeForce which comes across as more speed over features at the same price points. And the second point being that those that complain about the drivers these days have probably got a bad card or its been damaged by them or a third-party. Certainly my 9800SE qualiifed as a bad card.

All that being said, here's a somewhat amusing true story. One of my sister's friends decided that I could do with a "better graphics card" than what I had. What this friend suggested was the Radeon 7000 - this was back in 2002 or thereabouts and I had the experience (*shudder*) of the Rage series and knew what I had read about the Radeons back then, so I figured "why not give it a test? It's free after all!". It was intended to "replace" the Kryo II that I had...but in tests, I found the Radeon 7000 to be horrendously slow as compared to the ol' Kyro II. Even my then early vintage Voodoo 3 (2000 PCI at that) with its third-party drivers (with all those lovely special options enabled) thoroughly beaten the Radeon 7000. I ended up getting a GeForce 3 Ti 200 in mid-2003 or so that ran roughshod over them all for $20 inc shipping best value graphics card EVER! =D

And yes thats USD. Woo for bargains back in the day! Oh and as a testament, the 9800SE died after I handed it to my dad for his PC, and seeing as I had the GeForce 3 laying around at the time, I handed that over as a replacement. To my knowledge the GeForce 3 is still going strong, even though it was well used before I got it and survived the trip from Texas to England and was used for gaming for many more years afterward indeed.

Cue a big audience-style "Awwwwwwwwwwww!"

Regards,

Yickle!

P.S. For the sake of BBC-style impartiality, my dad has had a Radeon HD 3450 for a number of years now and is also still going strong.


P.P.S. Added the "HD" bit for the modern Radeons so as not to confuse the young 'uns with all these different model numbers

[Spirrwell]

 Mr.Deviance, on 08 May 2011 - 10:49 PM, said:

Weird that you say that because I have never in my entire life had hardware conflict errors from the nvidia drivers, and I do happen to overclock and test 100 nvidia cards a week at the oc club that I have.
I bench test stuff and I even destroy vid cards on many occasions but I don't get hardware conflict errors ever.
So you must really have a serious problem or be missing something to get such errors.

I was talking specifically about IRQ problems. I got a stock computer from like Dell or something, so I couldn't change anything but the hardware. It doesn't happen to me anymore, I build my own computers now.

[Person of Color]

 Mr.Deviance, on 08 May 2011 - 06:25 PM, said:

Bullshit. There is no such issue with any driver in those games that you've mentioned.
It might be your card itself that's shit since it's zotac.
It's also that 400's in general were overheating. If you read what I posted above some months ago, my 480 was recently toasted and I was planning to get an evga 580 which but since then I've decided on buying a msi 580 and a few weeks later I got a second 580 from msi.
The cards are perfect, they are cool and silent and the drivers perfect pristine in every single game that I've tried, including the ones you mentioned above.
Don't blame the products, blame your hardware or your windows config.
I still maintain what I've said months and years ago!

Ati drivers suck major ass and if mys single opinion is not enough for you then I can tell you that I have a few online friends from different countries, all gamers and all started being ati lovers and now they constantly bitch and whine about their ati drivers.
Why is it that only ati users bitch and while about their drivers and I only see an nvidia user criticize the drivers once every 10 years?

That "POS" Zotac card you are talking about idles at 30C and never even hits 70 under full load, although I have yet to FurMark it. Zotac was shit in years past, yes, but they are one of the few companies making non-reference cards with custom memory configurations. The build quality of this newer card is really excellent.

When I bought this card only Palit and Zotac were making 2GB 460's, and the Palit one was a crashy, overheating piece of shit, so I sent it back. If the card indeed had faults, they wouldn't go away with driver updates. This is definitely one of the better cards I've owned, I plan on buying a second one for SLi in a month or so.

Many of the hardware mouse cursor problems I had were fixed by the latest drivers. The only Source game I've run is Portal 2 and it doesn't have the light source stuttering the other games had, hopefully the older versions of that engine are fixed too.

Also, compared to nVidia, ATi's drivers were far better when the 9700-X800 series cards were around. During that timeframe, save for their OpenGL ICD (Which they pretty much fixed in 2004), they beat the piss out of nVidia. To say they were always shit isn't fair at all, but they used to be pretty fucking terrible. I've messed around with enough Rage Pros to know that (Thankfully I didn't own any of them...).

Actually, that's what I miss most about my old 9xxx and X800 cards...they just fucking worked, every God damn time, never a trouble. I only had issues with one driver update. It sucks ass no one writes drivers like they used to.

[bullerbullerseven]

 Mr.Deviance, on 08 May 2011 - 10:49 PM, said:

Weird that you say that because I have never in my entire life had hardware conflict errors from the nvidia drivers, and I do happen to overclock and test 100 nvidia cards a week at the oc club that I have.
I bench test stuff and I even destroy vid cards on many occasions but I don't get hardware conflict errors ever.
So you must really have a serious problem or be missing something to get such errors.

From what you say that you experience, you sound like a very intelligent guy. But the way you post it makes you look like an arrogant fool xD

[robotman5]

hey.... i use a ati card.. WELL not right now because their updates sort of screwed it up abit..


might just reinstall the drivers from the CD and see if it's fine..

[Mr.Deviance]

 Descent, on 14 May 2011 - 01:24 PM, said:

That "POS" Zotac card you are talking about idles at 30C and never even hits 70 under full load, although I have yet to FurMark it. Zotac was shit in years past, yes, but they are one of the few companies making non-reference cards with custom memory configurations. The build quality of this newer card is really excellent.

When I bought this card only Palit and Zotac were making 2GB 460's, and the Palit one was a crashy, overheating piece of shit, so I sent it back. If the card indeed had faults, they wouldn't go away with driver updates. This is definitely one of the better cards I've owned, I plan on buying a second one for SLi in a month or so.

Many of the hardware mouse cursor problems I had were fixed by the latest drivers. The only Source game I've run is Portal 2 and it doesn't have the light source stuttering the other games had, hopefully the older versions of that engine are fixed too.

Also, compared to nVidia, ATi's drivers were far better when the 9700-X800 series cards were around. During that timeframe, save for their OpenGL ICD (Which they pretty much fixed in 2004), they beat the piss out of nVidia. To say they were always shit isn't fair at all, but they used to be pretty fucking terrible. I've messed around with enough Rage Pros to know that (Thankfully I didn't own any of them...).

Actually, that's what I miss most about my old 9xxx and X800 cards...they just fucking worked, every God damn time, never a trouble. I only had issues with one driver update. It sucks ass no one writes drivers like they used to.

Here's a late response but better later than never.

Well, you say you like your Zotac card because it does what you want it to do which is great and I hope it keeps working as intended.
From my experience with testing lots of cards, Zotac cards are known to act weird even when they are supposedly working correctly. The problem with Zotac cards is that they are the most unstable out of all that I've tested.
I've had at least 4 Zotac cards that all shown signs of various glitches. Some showed artifacts that would only go away when you underclocked the card, some had their bios act up retarded when they were supposed to initialize during boot and would sometimes freeze at windows boot or at driver installing process.
I've even seen some randomly heat up with more than 20 degrees C than other identical models.
I've seen Zotacs report wrong hardware ids which got the drivers confused as shit up until you shut down the entire pc and reinserted the card into the slot.
I can confirm that all of these problems were not driver related but precisely Zotac hardware related.
Contrary to popular beliefs they are even easier to destroy or find already broken than Evga cards which are renowned for being already broken or fucking up in the first week of usage.
Evga sells shitloads of already broken or semi broken cards that fuck up in the first week of their usage but their life time warranty programs more than cover for that issue and once you've gotten a working Evga card, you are going to find it exceptionally good in both temps and overclocking threshold.
If you want my personal opinion, the brands that produce the most durable and reliable Nvidia cards at this point are:

1. MSI: Produces non-reference cards with kick ass cooling systems that keep the temperatures and the noise to the absolute minimum and they also come with military graded transistors and caps.
Believe it or not, even though it may sound like a marketing gimmick of theirs, I can confirm that the caps and transistors are from a completely different planet on the new 4xx and 5xx cards.
They truly have aluminum and tantalum fillings inside them and they are so well welded and baked together that I've found it impossible to fail then even with extreme overvoltaging and temps.
In short I have not been able to destroy a msi card with overvoltage until now even though I've attempted to do so, which leads me to believe that they truly are certified with military standards used on space shuttles and satellites as they claim.
I've split some caps and chockes on a 560 ti with a burned gpu from some overheat tests and looked inside and they are the real deal, you can't fail them no matter how much you oc.
Everybody I know there started calling MSI (Mechanized Super Infantry) because each cap and transistor is like an army tank.

2. Leadtek: Produce the sturdiest video cards with classic components out of them all and have been doing so since the old ass 5xxx series.
There is literally nothing that you could to do fuck these cards up!
I still have the fx5900 from Leadtek even after many years of abuse, it still works perfectly fine to this day.
The same goes for a 6600gt of a mate, a 6800 ultra that I've bought back then, a 7800gtx that I've bought a 8800 GTX, a 9800GX2 and last but not least a 280gtx which are all my cards and all bought with lots of trust and love from Leadtek and overused and abused like mad.
After I broke that Leadtek trend and finally made the mistake of buying an Evga for my 480 generation, I got burned exactly as I expected! In the end I said that I will buy an upgrade plan and get the 580 from Evga for only 20% of it's price but I since decided to get a 580 from msi which I've tested in the lab and came to the conclusion that it kicks major ass in all fields.
The reason why I didn't get a 580 from Leadtek was because I am pretty disappointed in Leadtek's lack of a non-reference card and I find the non-reference model from MSI to be miles ahead of everything else.
The armored caps and transistors of the MSI and the slick silent and very effective cooling system had a huge impact on my decision to skip Leadtek this time.
I'm still hoping for a Leadtek comeback with the 680 series but you may never know what's in store for them.

As for palit, they overheat and they are absolutely shitty when it comes to overclocking. They barely oc and when you manage to get a small OC, games start artifacting like mad, and on top of everything, they also look like plastic toys and cost more than msi cards which is a travesty...
As for their durability, they are somewhere close they don't have a particular long life with them fucking up after 1-2 years in most cases and they also produce unjustified head even when idle.

[The Commander]

8800 512MB GTS vrs ATI 5750 1GB

I have tried these two cards extensively the past two days, I can state that the 8800 works great for Polymer compared to the ATI, it also runs certain games that use Physx (Crazy Machines 2) better.

The only problem I have with the 8800 that the ATI comes out on top of is that on the chance that either card bugs out I will get a blue screen with the nvidia where as the ATI has that VPU Recover.

[Person of Color]

Deviance, were those newer or older Zotacs that had those issues? When I worked at Micro Center I got a couple of old 7 series Zotac cards on clearance. I got a 7600GS for $18 with HDMI out and a 7900gs for $12. I also got a Galaxy 512MB 9600gt with a fan the size of our sun for $22 (This was in late 2009). God Damn I loved it when the warehouse guys would lose shit, find it a year later and by then the system had slashed the price by over 90%.

Now the Galaxy seemed fantastic but I gave it away before I could test it (They seem to be kinda ghetto usually so I was intrigued).

Those Zotacs were surprising, and very mixed. First off, they had 256MB of VRAM which wasn't too common for 7 series cards. Both cards ran hot (With stock coolers, nonetheless), but at least the 7900 was a really great overclocker. The core and RAM went to the moon on that thing.

But the worst part about these cards were the fans. Jesus. H. Christ. They felt cheap as shit and were louder than a jet taking off filled with angry black women.

That Palit was the cheapest feeling card ever. Also I'm pretty sure I fucked it up FurMarking it. It really turned into a piece of shit after that.

At that time, no one was really making 2GB cards besides Zotac and Palit. Since I was going to SLi down the road I didn't see the point of having that much horsepower and only 1GB of VRAM. I really, REALLY wanted the MSI TwinFrozr but it didn't have enough memory.

That worst card ever was that $8 brand new RAGE XL that came with so much manufacturing goop shit on the contacts I had to clean it first before it would let my friends Pentium 1 POST (This was in 2007).

[Mr.Deviance]

 Descent, on 24 May 2011 - 11:16 AM, said:

Deviance, were those newer or older Zotacs that had those issues? When I worked at Micro Center I got a couple of old 7 series Zotac cards on clearance. I got a 7600GS for $18 with HDMI out and a 7900gs for $12. I also got a Galaxy 512MB 9600gt with a fan the size of our sun for $22 (This was in late 2009). God Damn I loved it when the warehouse guys would lose shit, find it a year later and by then the system had slashed the price by over 90%.

Now the Galaxy seemed fantastic but I gave it away before I could test it (They seem to be kinda ghetto usually so I was intrigued).

Those Zotacs were surprising, and very mixed. First off, they had 256MB of VRAM which wasn't too common for 7 series cards. Both cards ran hot (With stock coolers, nonetheless), but at least the 7900 was a really great overclocker. The core and RAM went to the moon on that thing.

But the worst part about these cards were the fans. Jesus. H. Christ. They felt cheap as shit and were louder than a jet taking off filled with angry black women.

That Palit was the cheapest feeling card ever. Also I'm pretty sure I fucked it up FurMarking it. It really turned into a piece of shit after that.

At that time, no one was really making 2GB cards besides Zotac and Palit. Since I was going to SLi down the road I didn't see the point of having that much horsepower and only 1GB of VRAM. I really, REALLY wanted the MSI TwinFrozr but it didn't have enough memory.

That worst card ever was that $8 brand new RAGE XL that came with so much manufacturing goop shit on the contacts I had to clean it first before it would let my friends Pentium 1 POST (This was in 2007).

The zotacs that I was talking about were 2xx 4xx and 5xx
As for the 2GB of vram cards, you should know that is a marketing gimmick. 2gb vs 1gb for those cards does not give you any performance boost, not even at 2560x1600 resolutions where it should technically make a small difference.
It all lies in the way the card splits up memory between the framebuffer usage and other processes like models, textures etc.
It takes what it needs for storing rendered frames and uses what's left for the rendering of let's say raw materials for ex.
So I can ASSURE you that 2gb of vram on those cards are not backed up by proper features to empower your card to take true advantage of that extra gb.

[Person of Color]

 Mr.Deviance, on 24 May 2011 - 03:52 PM, said:

The zotacs that I was talking about were 2xx 4xx and 5xx
As for the 2GB of vram cards, you should know that is a marketing gimmick. 2gb vs 1gb for those cards does not give you any performance boost, not even at 2560x1600 resolutions where it should technically make a small difference.
It all lies in the way the card splits up memory between the framebuffer usage and other processes like models, textures etc.
It takes what it needs for storing rendered frames and uses what's left for the rendering of let's say raw materials for ex.
So I can ASSURE you that 2gb of vram on those cards are not backed up by proper features to empower your card to take true advantage of that extra gb.

I'm totally aware of it. However, I wanted to run two cards, and at that point, you have enough horsepower to take advantage of more than 1GB of VRAM.

The thing is, I saw that a few modern games (Especially Metro 2033) were swamping cards with less than 1.5GB because of the sheer amount of content they were loading in. Some games were also getting close to 1GB of usage.

Even though it's rare now to see that kind of VRAM usage nowadays, I want to get at least two years out of this machine. I wanted extra future proofing, hence the 2GB cards.

At the end of the day, it's an extra $140 total. It adds flexibility to the machine when games may require more video memory.

They might be worse quality, but I'll take a gamble. I'm not too worried about these 2GB Zotacs though. They are very quiet and run ice cold. And they certainly don't feel cheap, unlike that Palit crap.

I can't believe Palit owns Gainward now. Ahhh...Gainward. FUCK I miss that company. Those were some great cards.

[Klapher]

Ati is shit I don't like it. Bad cards. Almost no game works how it shiould and the drivers always fix problems after many weeks of wait.