Driver stability: AMD vs nVidia

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Kliewer

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I am adding either an Asus R9 280 or a MSI gtx 760 gpu to my rig. I understand the benchmarks- the cards are a toss up. The computer also serves as the main household workstation and thus must be highly reliable. It seems that I keep reading that the nVidia drivers are "better" and people have problems with catalyst. Are these problems just in the gaming environment or is there a difference in overall driver stability in non-gaming computer tasks?
 
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Nvidia spends a lot more on driver support as a corporation, so the odds and historical reputation would support them having the more stable drivers. An interesting exercise is to read the driver discussions on Guru3d.com from each company's latest release to see if you can detect a difference in attitude from actual users.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=392402
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=391474


This review of drivers from HardOCP presents evidence that Nvidia is better at support for new games, while AMD tends to lack and take as much as a half year before their drivers catch up.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd_nvidia_driver_performance_summary_review/#.VBYN0JUtCUk

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thor220

thor220

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Dec 15, 2009
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You aren't going to notice any instability from either maker while outside of games unless you get a dud card. Either card will be good.
 
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jitpublisher

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Sometimes you get a bad card of course, it happens. Sometimes with a new driver release, you get a few bugs that crop up and need to be fixed in the next release. However, there is no way to point a finger at one maker or another and say their drivers or software is any better or worse than the other.
 
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17seconds

17seconds

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Nvidia spends a lot more on driver support as a corporation, so the odds and historical reputation would support them having the more stable drivers. An interesting exercise is to read the driver discussions on Guru3d.com from each company's latest release to see if you can detect a difference in attitude from actual users.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=392402
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=391474


This review of drivers from HardOCP presents evidence that Nvidia is better at support for new games, while AMD tends to lack and take as much as a half year before their drivers catch up.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd_nvidia_driver_performance_summary_review/#.VBYN0JUtCUk

Quotes from the Conclusion:

"In 2012 AMD had a rough time developing performance drivers and making them available to the public in a reasonable amount of time. It was evident that AMD was having problems during the first few months of the year."

"If there is one thing that stood out to me about NVIDIA's 2012 driver performances, it is how consistent the performances were. In most of our gameplay tests, NVIDIA's initial driver tended to have all of the possible performance boosts built in to it."

"It is also very important to have public drivers when your hardware is launched. We are looking at you AMD! It was clear that there was a lot of potential for performance in the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950, but we didn't see that performance realized until the middle of the year at least."

"If we could suggest one thing for each company to work on in 2013, it would be improve the driver performance earlier on. AMD needs to keep its drivers up to date and ready for new games during the entire year. It cannot slack off at some point, it is just not acceptable. NVIDIA should also try to improve its software in order to squeeze out extra performance in demanding and popular games. Having a steady and consistent framerate the entire year is good, but we would still rather have more performance if it is available."
 
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Mousemonkey

Mousemonkey

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Sep 3, 2006
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Unless it involves fans switching off, sorry couldn't resist. :ange:

History will always have some bearing on these debates though and as for "current" drivers I have found that the 14.2's have proved the most stable for me so far but I'm currently giving the 14.8's a try and at time of writing they have managed one day and nine hours with the GPU at full load so only another five to go and they will be up there with the 14.2's.
 
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thor220

thor220

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Yeah, AMD is usually later than Nvidia to update for new games. Although this is partially due to Nvida's game program. They go in and help optimize the game for Nvidia hardware but make it much harder for everyone else.

If anything I would buy AMD just because I hate the way Nvidia is so dirty.
 
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Kliewer

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Thank you for the responses, and I apologize if it beat the dead horse. It seems then that these driver stability debates are mostly relegated to gaming, for which u am perfectly capable of fiddling with driver releases. I was more curious if anyone had experience or literature on stability during basic tasks. Fast boot, internet streaming, simple video editing. Like my mind goes back to the good old days when the wrong sound card driver would give frequent BSOD failures out of the blue. It sounds like this is either a nonissue or too difficult to track statistically.
 
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thor220

thor220

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The only recent issues that I know of are

- that certain radeon 7970s and 7950s had a bios that would lower mem clocks too low in 2d mode which cause screen flickering.
- Nvidia Fermi based cards had serious heat issues,even in 2d mode on reference cooler

Those are really the only 2 outstanding issues in awhile. It's rare I ever see a glich nowadays.
 
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