Beware: Latest Nvidia GeForce Driver Thoroughly Borked
- Thread starter The Wooster
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As I said, "in my experience" I have heard of very few such cases. Very few ("not that it doesn't happen" + "far from common") being different then none. I've dealt with a lot of computers, and with support systems that have dealt with thousands more, and ATI driver issues far outweighed any Nvidia issues that came across my desk. But anecdotal is always anecdotal.RiseOfTheWhiteWolf said:
http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html explained many of the issues I did see, and how the entire ecosystem is a tangle of crap all the way down.
Nvidia just cant get a break nowadays it seems. Disaster follows disaster. AMD PR folks must be drinking champagne.
Windows actually installs a graphic driver itself since windows 7 and if you allow recommended updates to be automatic (as opposed to important updates being automatic) it will also update that driver. That driver however is not the same as the one from your GPU manufacturer and is only enough to browse internet, not play games. so you still got to manually install a proper driver. same goes for Audio driver though most people only notice that when the default windows one starts bugging out.
While AMD is indeed improving lately, it still isnt up to Nvidia drivers quality, except of course this incident.Adam Jensen said:
Windows actually installs a graphic driver itself since windows 7 and if you allow recommended updates to be automatic (as opposed to important updates being automatic) it will also update that driver. That driver however is not the same as the one from your GPU manufacturer and is only enough to browse internet, not play games. so you still got to manually install a proper driver. same goes for Audio driver though most people only notice that when the default windows one starts bugging out.
thats not lazy, thats just careful. My current video driver is from 2015-07-10. Now THATS lazy. Still runs fine for every game i play so yeah.Gizmo1990 said:
The only time i experienced these were when my windows instalation was borked on a laptop. Though i know a few broken games can crash drivers as well.Tiamat666 said:
since Nvidia still follows WHQL certification on their non-beta drivers, they must have quality control to follow that standard. AMD has opted out of WHQL citing too expensive licensing, but now they also got no reason to do quality control either.008Zulu said:
There is a difference between "its so rare we remember the driver numbers" and "every release"Charcharo said:
Indeed. i cannot understand how this could have gotten WHQL certification considering its issues. perhaps the certificate testers were just very lucky and didnt encounter these problems. shit happens i guess. I think this was caused by Vulcan since this is the first driver that supposedly support Vulcan and it may have been a bigger change than most.008Zulu said:
Less stable, higher overhead, not always up to date with the game releases (though i blame developers for borking games more than driver makers here) is not better. Im not talking about catastrophical failures like this. im talking about simply being not as good software.Charcharo said:
The Fermi cards were nuclear reactors, but outside of that, AMD cards were always hotter.
Id rather have AMD bring new good cards and compete to make nvidia better. Simply making Nvidia worse, then seeing it get back up and claiming "its an improvement" isnt a good tactic.
The situation with vendor B (AMD) is not unlike the software situation with a well known aircraft manufacture that may or may not be based in Seattle. The blue screen of death is literal with that software.Kross said:
Yes, sadly AMD drivers are still not as stable as Nvidia, though they are much much better than what they were even 5 years ago.Charcharo said:Less stable? Incorrect.
Higher overhead? Correct but there is a reason for that.
Up to date with game releases? To me irrelevant. The game is not playable ANYWAY. You need to wait 1-2-3 months till it can be played at all as almost all games are basically broken.
Irony is EVEN without drivers AMD cards often do better or just as good as Nvidia cards with drivers. So much for game ready drivers (those usually do almost nothing anyway, mostly memory management for Gimperon 970 and SLI profiles with a few bugs squashed).
I wont buy Nvidia anyway these days (till they get kicked a bit more that is) so it does not matter what they bring out. Their DX12 performance so far is ... mediocre at best. Anti-competitive mediocre BS is also a big No no.
We shall see of course, but buying Pascal now would be really humorous for me, Strazdaz
It may be irrelevant for you and me that new released dont instantly work, but there is a vast amount of gamers that do care about being able to play on day one. the day-one sales and pre-orders prove it.
AMD cards dont do better on synthetic tests and only do better in games where developers worked very closely with AMD guys. they arent more powerful in raw power terms, quite the opposite. To add to that, AMD cards are great at doing raw math, but not that great at graphics, whereas its the opposite for Nvidia, which is why Nvidia performed better on videogames front and AMD was the card of choice for bitcoin miners. Considering that on Enthusiast level AMD cards come out later and still only do on par with AMD except the titan flagship that hasnt been beaten (but i dont really count that as videogame card, its for server renderers, not for home computers).
Now it is interesting what AMD will bring out for next gen since the hype promises a lot, but we saw that kind of hype with Bulldozer and it turned out to be false, so i wont be holding my breath. I do hope AMD get better, i want both manufacturers to get better. that would be the only good way for the market. if only one of them get better, no matter which one, its still going to end up in monopoly.
DX12 performance is on par with Vulcan performance with only minor variations based on game tested, so its not really going to be a killer for Nvidia. Though the Win 10 exclusivity may play a big part in people not adopting DX12, especially if MS keeps pusshing its horrible windows store on games.
AMD's software has improved a lot over the past few years, but still pales in comparison to Nvidia's abilities. I will say that since the release of Crimson, AMD's drivers have been excellent, no complaints thus far.Deathfish15 said:
AMD hardware has used a far more intelligent, forward thinking architecture design for some time now, though until very recently you wouldn't really know it based on gaming performance benchmarks. The benefits of AMD's "long-game" gamble are only starting to pay off in DX12 games that use asynchronous compute, where their higher end cards appear to have jumped into the next highest price
erformance tier. Pretty damn impressive that a $425 R9 390x can keep up with and even outpace a $650 GTX 980 Ti. 
A more complete list of card for Hitman benchmarks in DX12:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Hitman-Spiel-6333/Specials/DirectX-12-Benchmark-Test-1188758/
Sucks that Nvidia is very close to 100% market share while AMD is crippled by debt. A monopoly will be bad news for all consumers regardless of preference. Hopefully, AMDs Polaris GPUs and Zen CPUs will put them back on the right track and breath some competition into the hardware market.
You had, as you admit, two Nvidia PCs. meanwhile im using information quoted by industry professionals that dealt with thousands. In this thread itself we have Kross claim the same.Charcharo said:
Oh, AMD cards most definately do have issues with many games on day one releases. They usually patch it up with drivers in a few days or find a workaround, but its so frequent nowadays that there is a meme going around about new games being unplaying with AMD cards.
Also you do realize that those cards where you claim sales matters are usually a rebrand of last generation cards that "dont matter", right? Usually there are only 1 or 2 new flagship cards while the rest of series is rebrand with some tweaks. Without those "irrelevant" cards we wont have the relevant ones next year.
Also interesting think in those tests. Nvidia cards perform better on DX 11 than DX 12? that is contrary to all we saw before. Even if AMD is getting bigger boost from DX12, Nvidia does not go backwards. Something is fucked up in Hitman.
Also of course 970 > 780 ti. Like i told you before, there is much more in a GPU than raw power. Division and games like that utilize these new features in the 9XX gen like exessive tesselation with very little processing power, something older cards arent as capable of handling since they were never built with that in mind.
So, totally forget the PS4 bricking, the PS3 bricking, the 360s bricking and losing optical drive functionality and the long laundry list of the last two gens of consoles having issues after updates or just in general.deadish said:
When a console bricks, it's the manufacturer's fault. If it's under warranty, they will replace it - heck, even if it isn't under warranty they will probably have to fix it somehow or risk a class action lawsuit.LegendaryGamer0 said:
PC broken? Good luck. You are on your own. The fact that it could be one out of half a dozen parts that can be broken, and it's either the software drivers are bugged or the hardware is dead, doesn't help.