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LAN Party Forums => General Discussion => Started by: Mr.Tibbs on December 11, 2008, 05:18:01 PM
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Go get em:
Drivers (http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html)
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People still use ATI cards?!
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um, hell ya. Welcome to 2008... where Nvidia still makes buggy hardware and no longer compensates with awesome drivers.
ATI still makes great hardware and for the last 6+ years, their drivers have been kick ass.
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LIES!
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um, hell ya. Welcome to 2008... where Nvidia still makes buggy hardware and no longer compensates with awesome drivers.
ATI still makes great hardware and for the last 6+ years, their drivers have been kick ass.
If they are so much better than why are they vastly outnumbered in the steam survey? (honest question)
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html (http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html)
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I have no concrete answers, so obviously i can only rely on my own experience...
With that said, to answer the steam question... ATI hasn't had a competitive graphics card (speed-wise) arguably since the x800 series. The 2xxx and 3xxx were not very fast, although they made up for it somewhat in sweet features (HDMI passthrough, bringing back the AIW brand, hardware accelleration for mpeg 4 and h.264, etc). Only until a few months ago when they came out with the 48xx series did they start kicking nvidia's ass in speed again.
Of particular note from the survey, i don't even see the Radeon 4850 or 4870 series at all in that list. And to be fair, i don't see the geforce 260 or 280 either. The survey started November 2007. it was updated last month but who knows if they were really taking new info for a whole year or no. The fact that no new graphics card is showing up must mean that the sample was maybe only a month or two?
My own personal stance has always been to find the best product at the time. I could care less about popularity. The way I see it, popularity has never been an indication of quality. Previous to my Radeon 4850 was the 8800gtx. It was very fast but horribly horribly buggy. I'm so happy i'm back to ATI. The last vestige of crappy nvidia hardware (and the cause of frying all my memory and a weekly lock-up) is my 680i motherboard which i'm looking forward to replacing some day.
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ATI drivers are always a bit bloated if you ask me. The newer 4800 series cards are fast theres no denying that. I also think they are on the right track with their 4870x2. they just need to put those drivers on a diet. As a company they've overcome the odds by coming back from the dead and kicking the crap outa their competition. I like their newer products but if i were to buy a 4870 1gig vs a 260gtx 216 shader card. I'd go with the nvidia.
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I wasn't looking at card names. I was looking at driver names.
Video Card Driver Name
nv4_disp.dll 856,654 48.21 % ################################################
ati2dvag.dll 481,609 27.10 % ###########################
nvd3dum.dll 247,463 13.93 % ##############
atiumdag.dll 59,154 3.33 % ###
ialmrnt5.dll 47,953 2.70 % ###
Other 84,219 4.74 % #####
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Ya, i saw that... and the fact that the data is at least a year old indicates it's not taking into account anyone buying ATI's latest 48xx series cards.
And a year ago, ATI didn't have any competition when it comes to speed.
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Did ATi change the driver name?
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not that i know of
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Then the data is good.
"Last updated: 3:53am PST (11:53 GMT), November 09 2008"
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I don't think the data is up to date. There are no driver versions in the list for 2008 except 1 ATI driver. All the others are 2007 and back.
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That's why I asked if the DLL had changed it's name.
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I think we need to look at this list
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/)
for better indication of video cards in use, where 11 of the top 12 are nVidia cards, the ATi Radeon Hd 4800 being the only exception at number 5. As to why the number is so high, I think it's because all of those Counter Source players out there that only update their hardware once every 5 years. That's how you get cards as old as the GeForce 6200 and 6600 series appearing in the aforementioned top 12. ATi's latest decent offerings are not represented very well by the skewed hardware population. If you look at this list 2-4 years from now we may see a different story as what was once the age of nVidia shift to a more balanced scale of equilibrium. If I were building a system today, I would seriously consider an ATi card to put in it; something I haven't done.....well, ever.
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I thought I would never use a ATi card in my life. I always stuck with Nvidia. But now that I have a 4870 crossfire setup, it is beyond what I had ever expected. I do like how ATi releases new drivers every month. It seems that they are releasing them eariler everytime they do. But I like the fact that they mention the performance increases and tell you the known issues that still exist and what new ones people have come across. I just can't wait till ATI/AMD release their new AM3 motherboards; and Phenom II processors.
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I think we need to look at this list
[url]http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/[/url] ([url]http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/[/url])
for better indication of video cards in use, where 11 of the top 12 are nVidia cards, the ATi Radeon Hd 4800 being the only exception at number 5. As to why the number is so high, I think it's because all of those Counter Source players out there that only update their hardware once every 5 years. That's how you get cards as old as the GeForce 6200 and 6600 series appearing in the aforementioned top 12. ATi's latest decent offerings are not represented very well by the skewed hardware population. If you look at this list 2-4 years from now we may see a different story as what was once the age of nVidia shift to a more balanced scale of equilibrium. If I were building a system today, I would seriously consider an ATi card to put in it; something I haven't done.....well, ever.
Thank you sully! I like seeing the change. Just opening my eyes. I was trying to stay unbiased. (Though I have never been happy with an ATi card. Everytime it's the greatest, I am not thrilled.) I just wanted numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers.
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Trying to find something more recent, i found this article: http://www.crn.com/it-channel/212001134 (http://www.crn.com/it-channel/212001134) dated Nov 6, 2008
"Nvidia's share of the global GPU market slipped from 31.4 percent in the second quarter to 27.8 percent in the third quarter, according to Tiburon, Calif.-based market research firm Jon Peddie Research. Over the same time period, AMD grew the market share of its ATI graphics products from 18.1 percent to 20.6 percent, while market leader Intel of Santa Clara, Calif. also cut into Nvidia's business with a market share gain from 47.4 percent to 49.4 percent."
Also, pretty amazing from the steam hw survey sully found was that the 4800 series has gotten a 3% marketshare in roughly 5-6 months. I think that's a pretty amazing feat and goes right into what I originally said. ATI hasn't had a competitive (speed-wise) product for at least a year and now that they do, people have been scarfing them up. I remember when the 4850 first came out, it was hard to find them in stock due to the low price and amazing power.
So, back to your original question "If they are so much better than why are they vastly outnumbered in the steam survey? (honest question)"
I already stated that popularity doesn't equal quality. I personally think ATI cards are better, regardless of how many people buy them. In the same vein, I'm a huge Opera browser fan and they have some of the smallest marketshare out there.
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I had an x800 xtpe that i liked a bit. when it came time to update that i went with the 7900gtx over the 1900xt. and as of late i've been extremely happy with my 8800gts512. Im not a fanboi of either camp and i will always buy the faster card no matter if it's ati or nvidia. Same goes with AMD/Intel for me. the only company i really loved was 3dfx and the voodoo line prior to the 4000 series. those old glide games ruled and even nvidia had no chance against them. that is until the 4000 series which was the end of life for 3dfx.
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I am going to bust out my Voodoo Extreme! I can't even find a damn picture of it. I think I will go have to find mine and take a picture.
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I actually grew up on an Commodore Amiga 2000. Played games that PCs and Macs at the time could only dream of. (circa 1987 - 1994).
My first computer was a cheap piece of crap thrown together with cheap parts, Pentium 200Mhz. Trident 2MB video card. Over time, i started replacing the parts with good ones until I finally upgraded the CPU and motherboard. In that new computer, I used the brand new Voodoo 3 2000. Freakin amazing card. Made the original game Unreal run like butter.
First card after that was the Radeon 8500. Another amazing card and was one of the first competitive Radeons (speedwise), however the kicker for me was 2d image quality. The Nvidia cards at the time just looked like Crap as they never focused on actual image quality, just raw speed. At this time, however, ATI's drivers were still pretty sucky as this was before the relase of the 'Catalyst' brand for their drivers.
Then came with Radeon 9800pro (no contest there for speed as Nvidia was trying to catch up from the FX mess). The ATI drivers were really starting to get really good, though the CCC was still horirbly slow as it relied on .net framework which isn't native to Windows XP.
Then the x800gto. This was basically me wanting to get a slightly better card that still worked in an AGP slot.
Then the Nvidia 8800gtx. This was when i built my current quad-core rig. Amazing card speedwise. Nothing could come close. But the decision to go quad core and Vista 64bit proved too much for the crappy Nvidia driver developers. I spent close to a year dealing with crashes, lock-ups, etc. 90% of those went away when i swapped out the 8800gtx with the Radeon 4850. The 8800gtx wasn't a bad card either. It was purely driver-related problems.
ATI did have some struggles making a good Vista driver as well, so i can't blame Nvidia completely, but when ATI was fixing bugs on a monthly basis and Nvidia let us 8800gtx owners sit for 7 months without a new driver update, I got pretty pissed off.
It does look like Nvidia has been focusing more attention on drivers within the last 6-8months and I have no problems switching back to them if their driver quality improves again, but until then, i'll stay with ATI.