Tangible differences between Latest Nvidia and Radeon Mobile graphics

I agree with what you said....there are more reports of AMD driver problems than nVidia driver problems. I only offered my personal experience and was suggesting that the OP should not let perceived driver problems scare him away from a good value video card.

 

Almost every AMD driver issue has to deal with Crossfire. Single GPU users have very little to fear.

 

How many percent Increase from sIngle 7970m to 7970 cf? And are the latest drivers for amd unstable today for gaming ?

 

Depends on the game and resolution. Again the driver question all depends on the game.

 

Ok what's a good driver for amd right now on skyrim, crysis 1 and 2, battlefield 3, metro and basic apps like Internet web browsing and such?

 

9 times out of 10 you want the latest drivers.
Many notable mistakes in the past that required us to roll back to old drivers to play games and such but the latest are what you want.

 

So how are the latest drivers?

 

Very good. I'm on catalyst 12.4. They are rock solid, and the OC utilities built in are also solid and stable. No problems with over clocking the CPU, gpu, multiple monitors, scaling options, video, game performance. Perfect. If you hunt for people with problems, you'll find them regardless of brand.

 

Great cuz I want to play skyrim, bf 3 , crysis 1 and 2 with fast fps mAx settings on 7970m cf on my x7200 on e avail

 

We'll see.. AMD tends to make people cry at the most unexpected times.

 

Wow... not so much difference as people claim.

I give Nvidia the edge overall, but after years of using both Nvidia and AMD (and before that ATI) I don't think I have ever regretted buying an AMD/ATI card due to drivers when it was still supported.

AMD/ATI does have a tendency to abandon their hardware sooner... which is slightly annoying for someone like me who keeps systems running for long term.

I was incredibly surprised when I had to remove my Radeon 9800 Pro due to lack of correctly-functioning dirver support and my Geforce 6600GT had full and current driver support through latest drivers.

 

The 6600gt is a newer generation. They were probably dropping support for the 5 series at approximately the same time.

 

Is an extra psu needed if I do a cf 7970m? My unit is a Clevo x7200.

 

Barely a new gen. The 6xxx series was early 2004, the 9800 pro (especially this revision) is late 2003. Kinda splitting hairs given the gap of support we are talking about.

Note, Nvidia's legacy drivers for the previous gen are quite functional. The legacy drivers for the 9800 pro are abysmal.

For those wishing to keep score... Nvidia currently supports 6xxx series (since early 2004) AMD is stopping full support for anything before 2010.

Of course, none of that matters in the present with a fully-up-to-date GPU.

 

They "support" them but actual driver code wont have changed.

 

the radeon r300 series is from august 2002. the nvidia fx/5 series is from january 2003. the nvidia 6 series is from april 2004.

the 9800 pro tech is actually slightly older than the geforce 5 series tech. The 6 series is a solid generation ahead. It's really not splitting hairs to say that the 6 series is newer. your date selection isn't right, because the chip tech and driver support is linked to technology version, which dates back to the original chip.

Even if you want to compare apples to apples for later chips of a series, it still wouldn't make a difference. The 9800 pro was ~april 2003. The Geforce 5 5900 was December 2003 / early 2004. I would argue that it makes less sense to compare these dates, but the point stands either way - it's not fair to say that ATI has shorter support for their GPUs if your evidence is that they dropped support for their older tech before Nvidia dropped support for newer tech. It's similarly unfair if you're going to measure Nvidia's support from their early GPUs of a certain series versus ATI's late GPUs. Think about it.

In summary, not splitting hairs at all. There's a complete generational difference between the chips you're comparing, and it makes sense that ATI dropped support for their significantly older chip before Nvidia did for their newer chip.