Exercise extreme caution with ATI

#1 Thanks a million Dreamer, you probably just saved me tons of grief!

#2 From everything I have ever read ATI has the worst driver support. I have had that experience of it not working at work with a FireGL4 which is supposed to be a top of the line card (when it was made). To top it off this was under Windows XP! The hardware is not the issue, it is the driver support. When I spec'd my laptop I made sure it was an Nvidia card (to the tune of $300 to$ 400 extra). I have never had an issue with their hardware or their software. I know before releasing a game I will need to make sure it works with the ATI cards/drivers, but for development this is an "Nvidia only shop".

#3 Thats actually the exact opposite of what I've heard, I heard that the Nvidia drivers were terrible...
But then again, I never actually had any trouble with an ATI card.
Not that I can say the same about my GeForce 2...

#4 Ditto as Mincetro.

#5 This was originally a post about ATI drivers on Linux. Which yes, those suck. The other post mentioned one of their workstation cards, which probably is a seperate set of drivers from normal cards, and being OpenGL and ATI, probably does suck as well.

#6 ATi is damned horrible for OpenGL support, shameful really...

#7 Yup, I have to agree, I just went through a bunch of driver grief. I will be going back to Nvidia asap.

#8 I know this is in the Linux forum but I figured I'd give my 2 cents also on comparing stability between the two makes, we do have some Linux machines but my experience is mostly with Windows desktops, we have much fewer Linux desktops, they're mostly relegated to server rooms ;)

I've worked as a field technician for 5 years now, and we have around 20,000 PCs to support with a team of 30, I can honestly say that ATI drivers are abysmal, they are absolutely horrific and always have been (before I was doing this job, ATI drivers were historically even worse again). It's somewhat of a shame because the cards themselves are good kit but I've encountered countless problems with our ATI based machines, whereas our nVidia based machines have always been great. With nVidia you just slap on the latest detonators and away you go, with ATI the kind of issues I've seen regularly with a whole range of different ATI cards are things like:

- Installer claims drivers aren't the right ones for the card even though they are, you have to manually rip the drivers out the executable and force Windows to accept them. Now, you might think we've got the wrong drivers here and it's our fault, problem is we're talking about the drivers that came with the card in a lot of cases.

- ATI control panel claims ATI drivers aren't installed though they are and everything else works fine, easy solution is to disable the control panel of course but somewhat annoying! This is most common on Samsung laptops with integrated ATI cards.

- Various windowed mode Direct3D apps. on Widescreen monitors in widescreen resolutions cause problematic jumpy rendering

We've had other issues, those are the most common ones. With nVidia's we've had faulty cards and such but no more than the usual failure rate of ATIs and other hardware. In all honesty though I can say I've NEVER had a driver issue with nVidia cards, I've certainly heard some other people say they have so I'm sure there are issues but they're so less common. Also, I've found ATI drivers generally more unstable, that is our nVidia machines providing the rest of the machine's hardware is in good state can go literally 3 years without a single crash, whereas ATI cards in the same departments, in the same circumstances are far more prone to graphics related crashes.

I'm not an ATI hater, I have an X800 in my laptop, I've just found ATI drivers to be some of the most problematic drivers of all hardware we support (although there's no fear of them being the worst, HP printer drivers outright dominate control of the worst drivers award). ATI do well in benchmarks and were well ahead of nVidia for a while (9800 vs. GeForce FX 59xx) but now it's much closer again I hands down choose nVidia and I'll always choose nVidia for stable systems for the time being. If ATI can do something about their drivers then I'll simply go for whichever card gives the best price/performance ratio but they have some way to go yet - fixing the drivers is one thing, convincing people like me who have been and still are being scarred by having to support systems with such unstable/buggy drivers that they've fixed the issues and will produce more stable drivers in future is going to be a hard task for them.

One final note is that I don't intend to sound overly critical, and I don't want my post being taken out of context - I'm not saying every ATI based system we have is problematic, that's certainly not the case, I'm saying however that a higher percentage of ATI based systems have problems, in terms of graphics card related issues we're seeing about 1 problem in every 10 machines with ATI cards, compared to perhaps 1 in 100 with nVidia - I'm not totally sure, they're guestimates but if anyone's really interested I can run some stats off our helpdesk system next week and get an exact percentage (assuming the other techies have logged their fault resolutions properly ;)). Again I hope this isn't going to turn into an ATI/nVidia war I just figured I'd post my experience in working with such a large computer base and hence getting to see the bigger picture - just for reference a lot of our machines also uses Intel integrated chipsets and they've also been pretty stable like the nVidia's. On the same note however, we rarely need to update drivers on those because anyone with an integrated Intel chipset generally isn't doing anything that needs newer drivers anyway so it's probably not so fair to compare them as they don't change drivers so often.

In relation to the original post though, and to be a little more helpful to those who have got ATI cards I'd say the best thing you can do is research drivers before you use them, don't jump straight to the latest and greatest if you can help it - always wait a little while first and then find out if they're stable.

#9 Yeah we have been having problems with our non Torque game engine too. It's a bit hit or miss whether you have good ones or not. The worst problem we had was a hard reset in DX9, and slow FPS in GL. Recent drivers fixed that, but the newest are causing other problems again.

Being a 3D artist. I've always used Nvidia for their superior GL drivers, allthough I have been tempted to get ATI, since most 3D apps now work better with DX9 than GL.

#10 I have both ATI and NVIDIA cards and at one time or another both drivers wind up braking things.

#11 Keep in mind that only the Linux drivers have these problems. The Windows/Mac drivers are absolutly fine.
Also, I just tried updating the Linux ATI drivers in Ubuntu and so-far everything seems fine. Now for a test - the Original UT!