NVIDIA vs ATI driver fight

I'm a NVIDIA user for ages already. I love their performance, I loved their control panel and it always had the a great price/performance as well as additional features in games. How ever, NVIDIA drivers have also been always kinda buggy for me (e.g. http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/644407-color-profile-lost-after-sleep-mode.html ).

So for my HTPC I decided to get a passive cooled ATI HD6670 and so far I wonder if I should switch to ATI or stay with NVIDIA?

Seeing price/performance tests, the HD6690 would be way better than the GTX 560 (in my laptop build).

The ATI drivers on my HTPC worked like a charm so far. Automatic updates without any need of drivesweeper, etc... I think I didn't even had to reboot it. I got the "new ATI driver available" pop up, pressed download, installed it, done.

Now I'm on my laptop.. had to manually check for a newer NVIDIA driver. Now I downloaded it and wonder if I can just install it or if I should use drivesweeper, etc as the NVIDIA driver update process was always kinda buggy.

What do you guys think?

 

im old skool so do it the old fashioned way.
nvidia does give a popup in the taskbar now but you have to tick the box to get updates.
with the question you ask you will get pro's and con's by lots of people which will confuse your decision even more.
i still use driver cleaner pro, driver sweeper and cc cleaner which each find different bits of nvidia crap still left in the registry.

so in the end the decision is upto you if you do a auto or manual update.

 

for a laptop, stick with nVIDIA, because the ATI drivers you download off the site don't work on laptops. You have to stick to your manufacturer's drivers, which means at the end of the day, you are better off with nVIDIA since they release compatible drivers for all on a regular basis

I have a Radeon HD5650 and this is the last time im buying a laptop with an ATI chipset as its a hassle to get drivers

i finally managed to find a universal update that works on all ATI chipsets for laptops but this took me a year till I found it

ATi Catalyst Mobility 11.12 display drivers for notebook computers (13/12/2011)

 

i never used any of those tools for any gpu since the radeon 9700. that's now nearly a decade back, now isn't it?

mostly ati, some few nvidia cards. never bothered about any such tools, and so far, never had problems. but nvidia, i won't buy them again after what they've done to vista.

 

well I've been purely using ati on my desktops since 2004-2005 and now a 6990m on my laptop (previous laptops were mostly work laptops so it was mostly if not all were nvidia low end cards at the time).

never had any driver issues whatsoever when updating my drivers and all I do is download a new installer every time there's an update and install.

never uninstalled a driver or use any driver cleaners.

 

Yes you THINK you don't have any issues... it is a known fact that with Video Drivers are the most sensitive and you may be able to simply upgrade like you did. But the performance wouldn't be the same! You should use a proper driver cleaner before you install the new one....

Don't believe me...try to run 3Dmark and see what score you get now....then format your PC or clean it using a driver cleaner such as Driver Sweeper 3.2.0 (you must run Driver Sweeper in SAFE MODe

Then reboot and install the latest driver again, then reboot, then test 3DMark and watch the difference......

I love it how people say I haven't had any problems....well offcourse you won't have a problem it's a driver update it's not like it will wreck your PC! Its just not the optimal way of installing them!

 

ATi has a pretty steady release schedule, whereas Nvidia's are rather irregular, with the gap between the 285.62 release and the 295.73 was almost 3 months. However, Nvidia's beta releases are usually very stable, so if you count those in their release schedules the time gap falls to one every 2-3 weeks.

Both of my laptops use switchable graphics. Nvidia allows you to use the latest Verde releases and Intel stock drivers. AMD on the other hand requires you to use manufacturer releases or modified drivers such as the ones found at leshcat.blogspot.com. You can use the latest AMD stock drivers but not the latest Intel stock drivers, and the Intel drivers must be modified if you want the latest and (supposedly) greatest. Thus, Nvidia wins my vote on this one.

Lastly, I found the installation of both companies' drivers pretty straightforward, never needed to uninstall old drivers and rock solid either way.

 

If you choose "Custom Install" with the newer NVidia drivers, you'll have the option to perform a clean install, where the installer will remove all remnants of your existing drivers, and install from a clean slate. In my experience this works quite well; I haven't had to use DriverCleaner in a long time.

 

ATI and nVidia will go back and forth for days to come. Sometimes I wonder if they do collude to share the graphic cards market :lol:

For notebooks the safest way to go is waiting for manufacturers to update the drivers (one can wait forever here ) or use some tweaked drivers from certain 3rd parties. And yes, I would use driver cleaner to un-install the previous one before installing the new one, AFTER creating a restore point

cheers ...

 

If you refer to the DOX drivers as "3rd party drivers" then I can't recommend them. Did several tests with a lot of their drives on my older notebook (the thread must be somwhere) results: The newer the DOX driver, the hotter the GPU and the less score @3dmark06... but that was ~2 years ago.