Tweak Town's Analysis of Catalyst 9.2

[L1qu1d]

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1760/3/ati_catalyst_9_2_analysis_xp_vista/index.html

 

[SpinachEater]

Wow 20% my arse

I guess it was supposed to be for CPU limited systems though...sorry overclockers

 

[L1qu1d]

6 months later and this happens, I'm pretty disappointed. Especially since ATI drivers are once in a while, and not as frequent as Nvidia's.

 

[jjokubauskas]

6 months later and this happens, I'm pretty disappointed. Especially since ATI drivers are once in a while, and not as frequent as Nvidia's.

i think you have it backwards. ATI generally releases a new driver every month.

 

[cjl]

6 months later and this happens, I'm pretty disappointed. Especially since ATI drivers are once in a while, and not as frequent as Nvidia's.

What was 9.1 in January then? Or 8.12 in December?

ATI releases new drivers all the time - Nvidia are the ones who make you wait.

 

[L1qu1d]

Nvidia releases Betas alot, which compensate. Everytime a game has a problem Nvidia always releases Beta, while ATI doesn't quite have as much.
Nvidia released 10 drivers in 9 months taking in example from the 280 Life thats not including all the Betas released since the card released.

I might be wrong, any1 have a count of ATI drivers, Beta or none Beta.

Anyways, Any thoughts on the current driver? Apperently every1 was saying that this would bring massive gains. Any1 tested directly? I'm not moving from 8.12 till i see ppl happy with the new drivers.

 

[cjl]

ATI released 12 drivers (not beta - full release) in 2008, is up to their second in 2009 so far, and released 12 drivers in 2007 too (so they average about one a month).

 

[L1qu1d]

yes I kno its about a month I use to have ATI, i'm just saying that Nvidia releases to fix problems not just WHQL stuff. I would like to see the driver reliability ATI had when I had my 9800 XT.

Any1 interested in a 4870 X2? 250-300$ CAD.

 

[EXT64]

Yeah, I think what L1qu1d means is that NVidia's drivers normally do something. Some of these recent ATI drivers have been pointless, even for the high end. I thought though that these new 9.2 drivers did help the 4870X2 a bit (one site said so, for certain games).

 

[techgeek]

I do need to mention that ATI releases hotfix drivers for games that come out which dont' work with their current release of drivers. These would equate to nVidia's beta releases.

Personally I have had more luck with nVidia drivers than with ATI's. Most of ATI's drivers offer little to no performance differences between releases. You get the occasionally bug fix or new feature, but for the most part, ATI's driver releases are yawners. I also dabble with Linux and I have always found nVidia much better that ATI in Linux. Of course I don't want to get into a debate about proprietary drivers.

Now I guess you could argue that the reason we don't see major differences with releases on ATI's drivers is that they get them right the first time. I am not going to play the devil's advocate here, I personally think nVidia's drivers are better. Also nVidia does a better job with OpenGL. Not as important as it once was (in Windows), but still a merit worth mentioning.