“Game optimizations” is being pretty generous. Lots of time it’s days, weeks, or even months til you get really basic fixes. If you get them at all of course.
Nvidia probably did some shady shit in the back room, sure. But unless they’re actively sabotaging ATI’s driver releases, the blame still lies squarely on ATI’s shoulders. They just have some straight up shitty drivers… and, as far as I remember, always have. It’s a mystery that I really wish I knew more about. Maybe just a shitty base they’re clinging to due to rapid change in management?
Anyway, I apologize for this turning into a firefight. I just wanted to know if I had to reformat ala the XP days or not.
It’s not just game optimizations; it’s not merely a matter of performance. ATI cards had major, major issues in Rage and Skyrim recently. And while you may not have seen any bugs, I personally experienced those I listed earlier in the thread. At one point I was using drivers 7 months old just so my monitor would sleep properly and my card wouldn’t be stuck at 99% GPU utilization at all times, generating tons of heat and taking ~45s to switch resolutions. These were known bugs, with threads hundreds of pages long in the AMD forums.
As for ATI vs NV being shady, remember “quack.exe”? They’re all guilty of this.
Oh, yeah. ATI use to play some dirty pool, too. But you have to go back pretty far to find anything substantially underhanded at this point. “Quack.exe” was literally a decade ago, and since then application specific optimizations have become the rule, not the exception.
Same boat there with the 4870, at some point something happened after 10.4 or so and a bunch of changes were made irreversible on the 4xxx line both in CCC and with RadeonPro (somehow equivalent in terms of bugs to the Subsurface format optimisation option in 5/6 cards with 10.4+), so I was stuck with a choice of bugs in different games dependent on the driver set installed. Combine that with the GPU shroud fan dying (endless stream of bullshit with these not kicking in aggressively enough to cool the card too), I was left with a card that to me seemed to have large problems both with the hardware and software that I was not inclined to encourage further from AMD.
Look I’m not sure nVidia is at the point of creating an anti-competitive environment with its actions. nVidia doesn’t exactly have every single developer in its pocket. ATI had merged with AMD and could well have pushed some cash to counter nVidia’s marketing push, but strings of mistakes have added up, even when nVidia got egg on its face several times (the driver overheating debacle, its laptop GPU debacle, and I think I remember something with XBox).
That is manufacturer set, not ATI. I recommend HIS.
And well, given the fact my previous Nvidia experienced involved having to assemble custom drivers by hand from bits of other drivers to get windows working outside safe mode, I’ll happily stick to ATI, and only upgrade my drivers when I hit issues. (Unless you’re SLI-ing, that is what you should be doing, bluntly)
Yeah, I mistakenly bought an ATI when I built my brother’s system and it’s yet another piece of shit that hits 80 no problem. Down here in the South, he often overheat-crashes on some of the dumbest shit.
ATI’s old “sweet spot” strategy was incredibly successful. It debuted with the HD 4800 series. Basically, they focused their design upon delivering a GPU at an affordable mainstream price, and designed it to be scalable upwards and downwards in both performance and price. That way they weren’t stuck selling expensive giant chips with low yields at the highest tranche. The real products were the 4850 and 5850, respectively, they just scaled up/down from there by binning, disabling portions of the GPU, GDDR4 instead of GDDR5, less memory, etc.
Compare this to the “halo” strategy that nVidia always followed, and it looks like ATI is back to now, where you build the fastest product possible with a near-total disregard for price, in the hopes that owning the high-end will win mindshare with consumers and thus sell the mainstream products, which are where you actually make your money.
Now it’s important to keep in mind that when ATI/AMD followed their “sweet spot” strategy, nVidia managed to, well, fuck up in each and every generation. The 4850s and 5850s wasn’t just cheap, they also compared very well to nVidia’s “halo”, at a much cheaper price. And ATI made bank on that. So the “sweet spot” strategy of it has never really been proven. And now it looks like it won’t be, since they clearly abandoned it with their $550 release today.
The best case scenario for them is that they are really still using that mid range strategy, but just happened to produce the fastest single GPU card so they can charge prices in line with performance. And the NEED to, since AMD is hemorrhaging money.
I like that the idle power usage is super low now. If you get an efficient PS the electric bill should only go up in proportion to how much you game with the card.
Their numbering scheme is still out of control. The 6970 was $350 (or $300?) and now the 7970 is $550. Stop them before they numerically identify again!
Again, nobody makes money on these ultra high end enthusiast cards. I mean, they’re not selling at a loss, don’t get me wrong, but compared to the $200 market, it’s a drop in the bucket.
The 6xxx series was still firmly in the sweet-spot strategy. The 6870/6850 weren’t super speedy, but they were great deals for the performance. For the super high end, they resorted to dual-GPU cards.
I’d say that they are just trying to get the money from the idiots who have to have the fastest, and they’ll bring prices down once nVidia’s new stuff comes out. I have no problems with them trying to catch consumer surplus like this.
The 7970 is the first mass-market chip on the 28nm process. As such, they obviously aren’t getting high yields, and won’t until they refine their process, which takes a long time. They won’t have the opportunity to drop prices without taking a loss for at least half the product cycle, and even then, it’s still 380mm2. That’s one huge-ass chip-- sandy bridge intel CPUs are 150mm2 and they’re on a 32nm process. The size alone means it’ll remain expensive. Prices will never substantially drop, instead it’ll be replaced with a cheaper, faster, chip.
They definitely abandoned the “sweet spot” strategy.
