The GT300/Fermi Thread - Part 2!

[***Deimos***]

No

I got my old baseball bat out of the closet to get a good whack at the dead horse.
IMHO I know drivers.

1. What are drivers? There are many components to control hardware and display output.. and then there is some sort of GUI. Bad GUI = Bad driver??
Is it more important that brightness control on HDMI doesn't work, or that a game crashes on startup? What if driver install fails, but only in some very rare situation like triple-SLI/CF 99.99% of users will never see?

2. GUI accessability. Before CCC (tree on left side, preview on right) ATI used "Control Panel" with tabs.. amateurish at best. CCC, built on .NET, had HORRENDOUS startup times (~40sec), and even button click lag. So nVidia wins by default, right? Well, I don't care much for huge mickey mouse icons, or Vista-like "what would you like to do" left column. I like the current nVidia Control Panel and its left "topic" tree, because its emulated CCC.

3. Bad game developer, sit. Lets face it, the industry is young. And not all of the hundreds of games made every year are properly checked out. So if dev expects code to return 15, but its coded to return 14.7 causing game to crash, who's fault is that? Well, if nVidia get a beta before release, notices issue and adds exe detected workaround, every ATI card owner automatically assumes its their ATI driver's fault since it works on nVidia.

3. BSOD. There are many charts. Many statistics. And until recent ATI GSOD, nVidia was the only one with threads HUNDREDS of pages long on debilatating issues and BSOD unresolved for GF6, GF7, GF8, GF9... well pretty much all generations. Check for yourself - try and install nVidia driver on XP64 SP2 - BSOD before getting to desktop... talk about "great user experience". nVidia blames MS. MS blames nVidia. No issues with ATI.

4. nVidia and MS sitting in a tree. Ever since the fall from grace when ATI was first with DX9, and won contract for XBOX360, nVidia has been far behind the OS curve. After a lot of kicking and screaming about Vista's new driver model and what it required, nVidia caved in. If you were fortunate enough to be a beta tester for Vista (2006), you're probably trying to forget how clicking GUI buttons can cause crashes and BSOD. 3D, multi-display, rotation... either not supported or "experimental".

5. Finally a shout out to Intel. A million monkey may not be able to recreate Shakespeare, but have somehow managed to make a "3D" driver. Just 2-3 years ago, your stupidity for trying to play a game on IGP would be rewarded with startup crashes. Due to lack of vertex shaders. Due to memory allocation errors. Due to the wrong moon phase. Ofcourse there was the long "exclusion" list - games it was hopeless to try running. 9% of all Vista BSOD, caused by Windows GUI and a little simple low setting 3D graphics. Fortunately, Intel driver has greatly improved just in time for actually working (!!) DX10, HDMI and Win7.

PS: Anybody here remember VIA GART drivers (back when it was on chipset instead of GPU), or special game specific drivers (ie Tomb Raider, UT, S3 Metal)?

[Chickenfeed]

Well said sir. I can't say I disagree with any of the points you've listed.

CCC has improved vastly performance wise ( I remember when it had 1min+ startup times... ) but in the past, yes it was beyond unacceptable.

I cringed when you mentioned the Vista beta... I had used it as far back as alpha and my god... epic fail. It took a good year until after it formally released until I'd call it remotely stable ( and another year to regain my sanity )

PS: I remember the gart drivers Facepalm to the max.

[zerazax]

If you were unfortunate enough to be a beta tester for Vista (2006), you're probably trying to forget how clicking GUI buttons can cause crashes and BSOD. 3D, multi-display, rotation... either not supported or "experimental".

Fixed

[Aerwidh]

Just 2-3 years ago, your stupidity for trying to play a game on IGP would be rewarded with startup crashes.[..] Due to the wrong moon phase.

Yeah, those are particularly annoying