Who do you feel has had the more successful GFX Vista Driver Launch?

I put in a vote for ATI. I'm not exactly "cutting edge" though. I've historically used soon to be discontinued technology to build my computers with. For at least another year or two I'll be operating my good old socket A boards with an ATI Radeon x850 Pro and a Gigabyte NVidia 6600GT. I play old games too.

I haven't used the computer with the NVidia card for a while now, but I recall the lack of features available to adjust on the beta series of drivers and not much difference when using the Microsoft provided ones.

With ATI, although not fully featured they still offered more than NVidia's.

Now, with the release version of Vista and ATI, once I discovered that I needed to leave my cd drive on D:, I see things have come a long way. I needed to redo my system as I had been playing with Open SuSE Linux on my 2nd hard drive and the updater did a Kernel update that wound up totally ruining my multi-boot setup. My whole 1st IDE hard drive was full with all its files but not even FDISK /MBR or FIXMBR could access the drive. The GRUB boot loader could not load anything including Linux, though I could boot into it from the install DVD. YaST would not save any changes I tried making to the boot setup. Even if I manually rewrote it, when reopening the Grub text file the crap the Kernel update wrote to it was still there. Completely fubared everything.

After using Partition Magic to delete all partitions and using FIXMBR I could then use my hard drives again.

Jeez, that sucked.

Anyway, I installed just Vista to my whole 1st hard drive since I just don't have the patience to go through multi-OS installs now. Plus, lots of my games worked just fine when I tried them before with these Catalyst 7.2's on Vista. All my multimedia works fine. I think I'm pretty much in Vista to stay, as far as Windows goes.

Now that I'm up again, I'll be checking some of the Linux forums to see if anyone else had their setups destroyed by that Kernel update. It wasn't even to the latest version. It was just a minor update of the default OpenSuSE Kernel. Although it rebooted fine the first time, it had removed my access to my Windows hard drive and when I went into YaST to fix that it automagically also "fixed" Grub so that Linux wouldn't bootup either. Like I said, any changes I tried to make manually couldn't be saved either. I could only get into my system from the DVD, but several processes such as Novell ApArmor wouldn't startup. And there were no updates to any of my existing software available to make things compatible to the Kernel update.

They really shouldn't make updates to the Kernel be automatically pushed to the OpenSuSE Updater if they can cause that kind of mayhem. I think even if I had left the bootloader alone (leaving no access to Windows) I would still have several important programs not able to work until they pushed further updates. Pretty stupid of them. I thought I'd only need to reinstall the ATI driver, as Novell wouldn't push this update as recommended unless it was safe, right? (Wrong.)

Also, I had tried some Windows games in Wine. Folks say NVidia drivers are better on Linux than ATI but the games I got to work looked great and performed fine. It was the audio that was the biggest problem. Fantastic elsewhere, but in Windows games through Wine I got really lousy sound no matter how I adjusted things.

 

How would thery have any more gamre experiance time? The games aren't here.
And surely if they where they'd be tested internally for issues. The point is right now
DX10 is nothing more then MS pressed "hype". Also No way really to improve your
DX10 with out test "subjects". to expose flaws, weak points, /bugs / what ever.
Keep in mind NV's haveing trouble on DX9 cards so it's hard to say it'a due to dx10
wich isnt being used yet anyways.

AS for haveing mass product at launch remember, AMD is behind them now, and
they are calling the shots, placeing time tables etc... I will have my motherboard
with intergreated X1250 tomarrow with HDMI support. If that means anything, thier
intergrated soultions have been shipping . Abit being the 1st to market since the 5th.
(NV haveing nothing simularly powerfull in that market yet I might add.) also ATI has
a history of supplying more then just a top end card, at launch or shortly there after.
So far NV's only really pimping thier stuff at the ubber top end.

A successful driver launch, if the next is a successfully hardware launch, NV may be
left feeling the squeeze.

 

nv is having trouble with dx9 cards? no more id say & maybe less than ati at this time. they r having some issues with dx10 cards...
amd is having its own problems finacially & not sure if an integrated mb is the answer to their problems. in fact even if it is highly succesful-which i doubt- it wont be enough. amd will recover but it is going to take some time & some cost cutting.
'nv is only pimping their stuff at the uber top end' & 'ati has a history...' were do you get this crap from? u know as well as i do that atis launch 'history over the last couple of years as been less than stellar & in a couple of cases purely paper. you say dx10 is 'hype' then downplay nv for being smart enough not to spend the $$ to release a bunch of dx10 cards. as far as midstream/low end cards they have at least as many if not more models available than ati. definetly have more bang for the buck imo.
nv will have 5-7 months head start on ati with driver exp for their new card & vista/xp. ati will have to go through some growing pains..
deal with reality neon ati is playing catchup right now & until they come up with a similar hardware release in the same time frame as nv that is the way it will stay.
their new gpu wil have to be a major upgrade from nvs gpu to be a major success, have yet to hear anything to convince me of that. imo i think that is part of the reason they delayed launch - to get more perf out of that card. they know it cant be on the same level or even a little bit better than nvs gpu it has to kick its ass or they are going to have sales problems.
gl with your mb bty hope it works out good atis chipsets are a crapshoot imo. some r good some r bad. while amd has the capability to make a good chipset they just dont have a lot of exp. really hope this mb works out for them and u.

bty neon how about the 8800gts 320? can be had for $269 with rebate. normal price is $289

 

imo..... dealing with Nvidia drivers on vista and ATI drivers on vista.... i can easily argue that while nvidia has some obvious high pointers worth mentioning, ATI has just as many killer pointers as well.


ATI does/will probably conitnue to lead in the multi GPU Vista arena. Crossfire under vista is purely amazing imo. Crossfire under XP is completely crap in comparison to Vista.

The initial issues with Crossfire and Vista was kinda mixed nutz. However 7.2's cleaned nearly every single conceiveable crash/bsod/stability issues right up. And heres the kicker, Vista's own interface and gui gets a massive boost from crossfire. You'd have to experience to really get the feel for it.

Next is the overall capablities and performance of the drivers within Vista... even vs XP

While nvidia's are "so-so" in many cases that i've experienced thus far.... While i haven't had a 8800 series in my posesion for any reasonable length of time to draw any conclusions on, even if just baised on a short period of time.

My experiences are that while some games or 3D apps do work, they have a tendancy to crash occasionally. Some work wonderfully well. OpenGL isn't all that great imo. Experience with the few cards i've had has been "stick with windows xp, vista isn't exactly a good experience" kinda thought.

ATI however initially had the similare issues, but not nearly as savear. Initially i had some driver issues that ended up being directly related to a driver/download/install actually failing. Redownloading the drivers resolved this issue emediately, from there the only issues worth mentioning is terrible performance in serious sam 2.

Crashes with ATI? Initially i did, but after the driver install, i haven't had a single BSOD, crash, or even "vista has reset the graphics to basics due to a problem" or anything similare. Lockups are non excistant.

Hell, i even can state for a FACT that my ATI Crossfire experience in vista is anywhere from 5% to 15% FASTER in vista then XP.... yes you heard me, my 3Dmark06 score alone is reasonably faster then that of XP.

So which do i think is an obvious winner today?

ATI

Why?

It's fairly obvious, no crashes, nearly full 3D application performance across all venues including OpenGL, And Faster performance under certain circumstances under vista.

vs

Nvidia's semi good/bad experience with vista just running vista by itself.......

 

well ATI bad a Beta driver out long before Nvidia did, this gave them more data than Nvidia, not to say Nvidia won't catch up... They just don't seem to be there yet.

 

ATi definitely.... it took 3 months for NVidia to release anything that would even work on Vista when I was using Vista 24/7 on my X1900XTX no problem.