Who's seriously considering leaving AMD for their next GPU purchase?

AMD has given us a very poor driver support this year. I feel sorry for people that bought 6990 and expensive CFX setups.

Hard OCP said:

Are you seriously considering leaving AMD for next GPU purchase?

 

Chalk up yet another useless thread to the ATI section.

 

i kept saying it over and over again, but was being called a troll and flamed to death ... now HardOCP is saying exactly the same thing, i at least hope AMD will do something about it and their fanboys admit the fact.

sorry, i really wanted to support the underdog but in 3 years i spent more time fixing glitch, building drivers and waiting for crossfire profile than actually playing with my 4870x2.

 

I have used ATI / AMD graphics products exclusively since 1999 and have never had a problem with drivers. I have had to roll back Nvidia drivers on family members machines a few times though. I see no reason to ever use more than one graphics card in a machine so that's why I've never had a problem. Every game ever made will run just fine, and in many instances better, on a single card. 30-40 fps is perfectly acceptable and even 20 can be dealt with. You certainly don't ever need to have framerates of over 60 since you can't see it anyway.

 

I really prefer 60fps over 30-40. That is a personal preference. I also like to use a lot of AA.

The issues affect mostly CFX users but, we pay a double-price and get a ****load of issues. Drivers are often late and often buggy.

I just feel 2011 has been a terrible year for crossfire.

 

ahem dude do you even know you're on an enthousiast forum and not on playschool computing right ? guess not everyone is happy playing their games at 20fps with minimum details. if i was i would have bought a console...
now if single gpu really is the ultimate setup, why do they even offer and advertise crossfire solution hmm ? if we follow your own logic, only to screw people off then, right ?

i for one don't think it's the case, and so i would like to see AMD at the same level of support than nvidia. they already got better quality product, but they mess everything right at the end with the software that supposed to let you use it ? :bang:

this is not trolling, it just enrage me when i see stupid stuff like that.
it be like "hey we designed a brand new car, it smoke a ferrari, cost 2/3 of the price, and can do twice more miles to the gallon. the only little problem, we forgot to fit the 2 back wheels so it drag his ass all over the place. but we'll fix it, eventually, well at least you're kindly invited to hope for it."

but if only i had 50cent each time i read "i never had problem playing solitaire and checking my mail with my single gpu setup" i'd be billionaire...

 

Nice one, sickb0y!

 

Ever since CatalystMaker left, thing have gone to hell. Been really disappointed with AMD's driver support this year. Performance and quality are not consistent. Its all over the place .

 

Only issue I had is flickering shadows. See it in Skyrim and Bulletstorm in particular. But other than that, haven't had any issues.

 

I was exclusively nVidia from the Geforce2 era to the FX era. Other than the FX series being a complete waste of money, nVidia was still a great company in my book.

Then one day years ago nVidia launched it's Display Optimization wizard in a driver release. It set the contrast ratio on my Sony Trinitron to -1000 permanently, forcing me to buy a new monitor and throw away my perfectly working one.

A few years later I bought a 6800GT, nVidia touted its new PureVideo acceleration and it was one of the key features I was looking forward to when I purchased the card.

It never worked. They never fixed it, they just told everyone to buy a 7xxx series card if they wanted Purevideo.

After that I went with ATi and was semi disappointed with their driver support but at least the drivers didn't destroy my hardware on a whim. After AMD took over, things gradually got better to the point where I find it bearable to use Radeon cards.

Thanks to people who use Radeons and contribute to the community like the author of RadeonPRO and people like Asder and VonDach, my troubles with running a Radeon Crossfire Setup have really not been that bad. Usually I spend more time waiting for lazy game developers to release a patch that fixes some game breaking bug in a game than I do waiting for a driver.

And never once was I unable to play a game at launch.

I'll never go back to nVidia for these reasons.

 

I decided I've had enough of AMD's drivers.

 

I haven't had any game-breaking graphics driver issue (well, RAGE with 11.11 made everything blue, but in all fairness, I had already beaten RAGE just fine with a preview driver from before). So I'll stick with AMD. I don't approve of Nvidia's "ways", and respect my computer enough to not throw that crap in it

 

AMD/ATi's crap, Nvidia's crap, same difference.

 

I don't really see a reason to swich over to nVidia. Some things will be better and some worse which evens out on the bottom line.

 

I have played many games with single cards and never had a problem. You don't need more than 4X AA in box mode and AF X 2 to make things look good. Anything more is usually just a drain on performance with little or no difference in appearance. In some games AF isn't needed at all, trilinear filtering is sufficient. And, yes, advertising SLI or Crossfire is a marketing ploy to get your money. All you need is a decent single card and you're good to go and wont have anywhere near as many driver issues. You probably won't have any.

 

Even if the thread was made with bad intentions I was actually curious to see how many are upset enough to not consider an AMD card for their next purchase.

I should have been more clear when I said I've had enough of AMD drivers. I would consider buying an AMD card in the future, but only after it's abundantly clear that the drivers/support have significantly improved.

This year's drivers have really left a bad taste in my mouth, so much so that I'm afraid of updating my drivers right now since these are the first in months which are mostly functional. When an experienced user is afraid of updating drivers because he thinks it might break something (something not listed, AMD admit to breaking 4 games in the last changelog) that's a really bad sign. Even if it was only the 4 games AMD listed, that's still unbelievably bad.

 

Oh, and for those refusing Nvidia for ideological reasons, consider this.
If next gen AMD GPUs really is using XDR2 memory, then you'd be supporting a litigation-happy company a.k.a. Rambus.
They just got beaten in a ruling, so they'd need your money more.

 

That doesn't sound as bad as paying developers to ruin games/lessen effects/restrict features/etc specifically on AMD GPU's

 

:3eyes:

I stopped reading your long post at that point.

 

Yeah fair comment, I was a bit quick to judge there I think...