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Doom-Child

nVidia jams another one up my ass

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You think XP is the problem?

If a program/driver acts goofy on XP it's the program/driver's fault, it's not XP's fault Godammit. You can still say that DOS based shit is the culprit but I haven't had WinXP do one fucknutty thing since I've gotten it, and 95% of everything I've done has gone smooth as silk.

The only positive thing about nVidia drivers is that they're very, very compatible. Other than that... there's nothing remarkable, and quite a few lame things.

And how fucking dare you say that the next ATI card will cost $600. Are you just dumb or what? nVidia is the only end user video card company to charge $600 for a fucking video card, the GeForce 3. ATI's latest monster card didn't come near that price range at release.

The only video card company with drivers that don't suck would be PowerVR. The drivers for the Kyro2 are fucking flawless.

And Goddamn nVidia for turning off the self-optimization and taking some screenshots in a game and spreading them all over the internet, claiming that the Kyro2 is a piece of shit and the GeForce 2 MX is better all around. Why, because it costs the same price but only performs half as well?

Fuck nVidia. Fuck them and fuck their shitty drivers and fuck their Microsoft tactics. Fuck them to hell.

I'm definitely going to the ATI side, and my drivers may not be 100% compatible but I'll have a damn good, competitive card that WON'T BREAK WHEN I INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVERS.

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Originally posted by deadnail
You think XP is the problem?
If a program/driver acts goofy on XP it's the program/driver's fault, it's not XP's fault Godammit. You can still say that DOS based shit is the culprit but I haven't had WinXP do one fucknutty thing since I've gotten it, and 95% of everything I've done has gone smooth as silk.

Same for me, hasn't crashed once, doesn't kick me off the net every 5 minutes like 98 did, and runs a lot faster than any previous OS I had, even with all eye candy on. I have a p3 600mhz 128 ram pc btw. It's also the same for everyone else that I know who owns WinXP.

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I dunno about you but every NVIDIA card I've ever used has had all of its features working right out of the box

Funny...My video card's performance has almost doubled and the image quality has improved noticeably since June 2001 when I built my system

Clearly all its features weren't working right out of the box if the second quote is the case.

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I stopped getting new detontaors after I tried the 21.81 drivers. They sucked. I'm still using 12.40.

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Originally posted by NiGHTMARE
Clearly all its features weren't working right out of the box if the second quote is the case.


Clearly you can't distinguish between features not working, and driver optimizations.

All the hardware enconded features on my three NVIDIA cards (T&L, FSAA, DOT3 Bumpmapping, multi texturing, etc.) worked right out of the box.

Contrast that with the Radeon8500 that did not have functioniong Trueform, FSAA, and DX8 hardware features when it was released becuase the drivers were very poor.

Tweaking drivers to get better performance over time is one thing, but not having the primary features of your new high end chip (upon release) up and running is another!

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DELL, COMPAQ, and GATEWAY go to build computers they're going with NVIDIA


Then how come the Compaq Presario 6000 and 8000 both use the ATI Radeon 8500?

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Clearly you can't distinguish between features not working, and driver optimizations

Personally I'd rather have a card with disabled features that most current games don't support anyway, than a card which is running at 50% of it's maximum possible speed.

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Originally posted by NiGHTMARE


Then how come the Compaq Presario 6000 and 8000 both use the ATI Radeon 8500?


I was referring to OEMs which put in low end cards just to use brand names. They would choose an NVIDIA MX card over a PowerVR KyroII

Why don't you READ my fucking post again?

Personally I'd rather have a card with disabled features that most current games don't support anyway, than a card which is running at 50% of it's maximum possible speed.


Oh...features like FSAA, right? No games support that =)
Did I mention dual monitor support was nowhere to be found, as it was also not working? There's some other stuff but I have to go dig it up.

And the DX8 features, ATI was lucky because they had since march of that year to come up with a DX8 card, but no developers made DX8 games.

And not a SINGLE card is running at its full potential were running at their target speeds, it's just that they improved and optimized the drivers to make them faster. It's different than having it only perform at 50% of it's intended speed on release.

In my case I am using Win2k, and the NVIDIA drivers, while long established for Win 9x were relatively new in Win2k, so of course I'm not going to get full potential! The performance under Win9x was up to par, but the Win2k drivers were quite immature, but now the 2k/XP drivers actually surpass the 9x drivers, and dont' try to tell me otherwise I have tested both OS's on my system and I've seen it first hand.

ANY card regardless of manufacturer will increase in perofmrnace over time with driver optimizations, it's not unique to NVIDIA.

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My GF3 has never given me any problems, but I do remember some time like a month ago I updated my drivers....and I couldn't play ZDaemon!!! All I do on my computer is use IRC, watch anime, and play zdaemon....so this was a big big no no. I had 2 downgrade my drivers and it was fine.

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Geez, I got bombed on that one.

Here I am, smarter than the average user, and I get blasted for misconfiguring my system? Right, that's why it's worked for the past YEAR AND A HALF. If I introduce a new driver into a working system and the system suddenly fails, I have to assume that the driver poked somewhere it shouldn't have poked with something it shouldn't have been using to poke.

And I think we all learned a little lesson about VIA boards. Thank God I don't own one.

After a repair install of XP and a reinstall of the latest manufacturer drivers, everything runs better than before. That is, at the very least, disconcerting, because everything ran very well before. I'd swear I just pulled an extra ten frames out of RTCW from some ass I didn't even know I had before.

As for OpenGL 2.0, I'd much rather see that supported than DX 8.shit, or whatever they're calling it now. My main reason for wanting to upgrade my drivers in the first place was to pull up my OGL support to 1.3, as opposed to the 1.2 I have now.

I'm a geek. We love to have the newest toys.

Also, can someone point me, utility-wise, to some way to determine what features are and aren't working on my card? I'm fairly certain that FSAA is running because, well, everything is downright beautiful. However, I'm curious about DOT3 bumpmapping.

DC

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And I think we all learned a little lesson about VIA boards. Thank God I don't own one.


The lesson I have learned from that even the word "VIA" written on a piece of paper within 10 miles of your system can fuck it up.

The 4in1 drivers (minus the AGP driver cause I have an AMD northbridge) for my southbridge are so good at fucking things up. Fortunately their latest release has been stable so far, but I don't know for how long.

I think my next mobo is gonna be an SIS chipset cause I've had too many problems even with just a VIA southbridge on my mobo.

As for OpenGL 2.0, I'd much rather see that supported than DX 8.shit, or whatever they're calling it now. My main reason for wanting to upgrade my drivers in the first place was to pull up my OGL support to 1.3, as opposed to the 1.2 I have now.


If you're daring enough to try this: you can use the OpenGL DLL from newer drivers in older drivers to do a Mix and Match, but some combinations can cause instability.

It'll be "nvoglnt.dll" (for me running win2k at least) or something along these lines: "nvoglxx.dll", that you can use to replace the OpenGL DLL file in an older set of drivers to update ur OpenGL version without using drivers that may not play nicely with your system.

Windows doesn't contain ANY OpenGL stuff when u install it (only direct X is included) so the nvidia drivers actually install the OpenGL version on ur comp, and you can update it using the method above.

NOTE: Although unlikely, doing the above instructions MAY RUIN your operating system installation, so just be careful when cutting and splicing drivers together.

And it's a good idea to always uninstall the old drivers before installing new ones, just to avoid any problems.

Also, can someone point me, utility-wise, to some way to determine what features are and aren't working on my card? I'm fairly certain that FSAA is running because, well, everything is downright
beautiful. However, I'm curious about DOT3 bumpmapping.


you can get a tweaker such as NVMax (good for changing things quickly) or RivaTuner (lots of options to fool around with). You can go to madonion.com and download 3DMark2001 se, and run the DOT3 bumpamapping test just to make sure.

Dot3 is coded in hardware and as far as I know there's no way (other than hacking ur registry) to disable it in the drivers, so it should be working by default.

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2. Made doped drivers that sacrificed image quality in Quake 3 (a widely used benchmark) to boost performance (ATI tried to play it off as a driver bug, but everybody knew they were caught with thier pants down in the oval office.

I read less than a month later that nVidia was doing exactly the same thing. But luckily I'm not one of you framerate freaks that constantly jack off to benchmarks.

Funny...My video card's performance has almost doubled and the image quality has improved noticeably since June 2001 when I built my system. I mean, not bad for a card architecture that's two years old now--they're still squeezing performance out of it.

Funny, my framerate dropped 10 and my gamma went haywire when I installed the last round of detonators.

There are people (MrNatural, DJ, Macci, Neeyik, Gibbo) there know more about video cards than you know about your own asshole, and I guarantee they will say the same thing as me.

And there are an AWFUL LOT of satisfied NVIDIA users there, so when you wanna start a flame war just remember that.

There's an awful lot of satisified AOL users too so I have no idea what point you could possibly be trying to make. =)

As much as you hate NVIDIA, you KNOW that they need to be around, or STMicroelectronics graphics division (Now part of VIA), or Matrox need to get off their collective ass and make cards that actually can compete with the high end cards to keep prices down.

The Kyro III is an awesome card. The problem is ST went damn near bankrupt thanks to the humongous mudslinging campaign nVidia started against them (they attacked Hercules too for supporting them).

So nVidia has been falsely reporting their own value and lying about their competitors? Sounds familiar.

And don't give me bullshit about obsolescence, as my GeForce 2 GTS (an architecture that is now 2 years old) is considered quite obsolete but still performs well enough in games today. Hell, the GF3 will last you at least another year and a half, maybe even two.

How many games make 100% full use of it? Or the GF3? Or the GF4? I'm not worried about obsolecence.

And Goddamn nVidia for turning off the self-optimization and taking some screenshots in a game and spreading them all over the internet, claiming that the Kyro2 is a piece of shit and the GeForce 2 MX is better all around. Why, because it costs the same price but only performs half as well?

When the hell did this happen?

Not that long ago. Ask some of your nVidia jockeys.

To be blunt, the last thing I give is one 1/1000th of a fuck how orgasmic your GeForce 6 ProUltra 99999999 makes you feel because it has always performed flawlessly for you. Most of the people I know IRL have had a horror story with an nVidia card and so have I.

I would rather have a perfectly functional card then some card that makes shitty games run smooth as glass.

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Why don't you READ my [edited due to uneccessary and immature obscenity] post again?

But then again, most of the MX users are people who have OEM systems, and when DELL, COMPAQ, and GATEWAY go to build computers they're going with NVIDIA

Perhaps you should have put "these types of" between 'build' and 'computers' to make it a little more clear. As it is, it sounds like you mean all the computers they build.

But even speaking about all built computer systems in general, NVidia is indeed what nearly all companies go with (although as I mentioned, Compaq appear to have switched to ATI for some reason). As well as the ones you mention, I know for a fact that Tiny and simply both use NVidia cards as well (although their lower end system use utterly utterly crap Intel motherboard built-in 3D graphics).

I think I read somewhere that while on an individual basis, nVidia cards are more expensive than their GeForce equivalents, nVidia cards are actually cheaper to buy in bulk.

Did I mention dual monitor support was nowhere to be found, as it was also not working?

Seriously, how many people could even afford two monitors? ;)

It's different than having it only perform at 50% of it's intended speed on release.

It's your turn to read a post again :) I was talking about the maximum possible speed, not the intended speeded. Surely the fastest a card can run is more important than how fast it is intended to run.

ANY card regardless of manufacturer will increase in perofmrnace over time with driver optimizations, it's not unique to NVIDIA.

Well obviously, but a 50% increase in speed? I've never heard of the difference being that large in any other card. For the drivers to be able to be optimised so much clearly means that they were poorly optimised upon release.

I have experienced a bigger speed increase than this in a game though ;) Go play the original release version of Ultima IX and then install the latest patch for it. The difference is amazing, something like 300%. Now THAT is what I can the original release being unoptimised :)

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I'm suprised no-one has mentioned 3Dfx yet, so I'll do it first :) My previous graphics card was a Voodoo 3 2000, and the drivers for that, while far from being perfect, never caused me any problems whatsoever

One bug I have found with the (latest) drivers for the Radeon is that they like to mess up the gamma levels every so often (e.g. sometimes when I minimize Thief 2). I'm perfectly happy with the Radeon for now, although I do plan on getting a GeForce 3 when they become available. I'll probably get more RAM for the motherboard first though (only 256 megs right now).

I've got a Athlon XP 1500 as my processor, and Serious Sam 2 just flies along, even at 1280x1024 with EVERY SINGLE GRAPHIC OPTION TURNED TO FULL <evil grin>.

In fact, I use at least 1024x768 in every game that supports resolutions that high, and the only time I've had slow down of any kind is in the two winter forest levels of Medal of Honour: Allied Assault (and I bet anyone else who's played those levels knows what I'm talking about).

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I think my next mobo is gonna be an SIS chipset cause I've had too many problems even with just a VIA southbridge on my mobo.


I'm running the K7S5A with the SiS735 chipset, and I'm pleasantly pleased with it so far.

DC

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quote:
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There are people (MrNatural, DJ, Macci, Neeyik, Gibbo) there know more about video cards than you know about your own asshole, and I guarantee they will say the same thing as me.

And there are an AWFUL LOT of satisfied NVIDIA users there, so when you wanna start a flame war just remember that.

>There's an awful lot of satisified AOL users too so I have no idea >what point you could possibly be trying to make. =)
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Well MrNatural is a computer engineer, Neeyik is an electrical engineer, DJ (Digital Jesus), Macci, and Gibbo are master tweakers who knows more about video cards than you do about your own asshole.

I think the fact that they have college degrees says something. Doesn't mean they're geniuses, but they'll sure know more than you do.

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The Kyro III is an awesome card. The problem is ST went damn near bankrupt thanks to the humongous mudslinging campaign nVidia started against them (they attacked Hercules too for supporting them).
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The Kyro III is still vaporware. Do you have one? Does even an engineering sample exist? I've got one, it's sitting in my lap, and it's made of nitrogen and oxygen.

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So nVidia has been falsely reporting their own value and lying about their competitors? Sounds familiar.
-----------------

What does this have to do with the fact that ATI is really the only major competitor to NVIDIA?

We can have a flamewar about their illegal and immoral practices in another thread =) this one is just about hardware.

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How many games make 100% full use of it? Or the GF3? Or the GF4? I'm not worried about obsolecence.
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Actually many games make full use of it: bumpmapping, T&L, etc.

It's the GF3, GF4 and Radeon8500 which have features that only (AFAIK) four games currently available for sale support.

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Not that long ago. Ask some of your nVidia jockeys.
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I must have missed, can you give me a link? I'd like to read about it.

quote:
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To be blunt, the last thing I give is one 1/1000th of a fuck how orgasmic your GeForce 6 ProUltra 99999999 makes you feel because it has always performed flawlessly for you. Most of the people I know IRL have had a horror story with an nVidia card and so have I.
---------------

I'm sorry that you have had so much trouble with their hardware. But, just because you had problems and the vast majority of NVIDIA users have not had any problems is not grounds to simply dismiss the company and its products as being the utter crap you claim them to be.

I would rather have a perfectly functional card then some card that makes shitty games run smooth as glass.

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I read less than a month later that nVidia was doing exactly the same thing. But luckily I'm not one of you framerate freaks that constantly jack off to benchmarks.
----------------

NVIDIA lowered the detail in ALL of the games, OpenGL and Direct 3d, what's wrong with that? They never said that they wouldn't.

Remember, NVIDIA makes NO GUARANTEES on its drivers. No guarantee on performance, image quality, stability, etc. Now it's good P

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Remember, NVIDIA makes NO GUARANTEES on its drivers. No guarantee on performance, image quality, stability, etc.


Pardon those of us used to a free market system from assuming that a company competing for market share would try to make the best possible products. Oh wait:

Microsoft
Firestone
Ford
Intel
K-Mart

Yeah, never mind.

DC

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quote:
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There's an awful lot of satisified AOL users too so I have no idea what point you could possibly be trying to make. =)
---------------------------
Well MrNatural is a computer engineer, Neeyik is an electrical engineer, DJ (Digital Jesus), Macci, and Gibbo are master tweakers who know more about video cards than you do about yourself.

Doesn't mean that they're the final word on anything, but they are sure as hell knowledgeable about what they do.

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The Kyro III is an awesome card. The problem is ST went damn near bankrupt thanks to the humongous mudslinging campaign nVidia started against them (they attacked Hercules too for supporting them).
--------------------------

I've been looking at hardware specs and I'm impressed at it, if I had something other than a GTS at the moment it would be my next upgrade. Its whole rendering algorithim is a smart one, and makes the brute force approach by NVIDIA look really stupid. I don't hate the Kyro or STM at all. I wish NVIDIA could learn something from them and come up with a more efficient architecture so their cards don't cost so much.

Nonetheless, the Kyro III is still vaporware. Do you have one? Does even an engineering sample exist? I've got one, it's sitting in my lap, and it's made of nitrogen and oxygen.

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So nVidia has been falsely reporting their own value and lying about their competitors? Sounds familiar.
-----------------

What does this have to do with the fact that ATI is really the only major competitor to NVIDIA?

We can have a flamewar about their illegal and immoral practices in another thread =) this one is just about hardware.

But then again, when one company makes a "factual" statement about their arch enemy, would you believe it?

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How many games make 100% full use of it? Or the GF3? Or the GF4? I'm not worried about obsolecence.
---------------------------------

Actually many games make full use of it: bumpmapping, T&L, etc.

It's the GF3, GF4 and Radeon8500 which have features that only (AFAIK) four games currently available for sale support.

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Not that long ago. Ask some of your nVidia jockeys.
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I must have missed, can you give me a link? I'd like to read about it.

And I'm not an NVIDIA fanboy or "jockey" by any means. Between myself, my brother, and my parents we own: three NVIDIA cards, two ATI cards, one S3 card, and a mobo with integrated ATI graphics.

The most recent additions being the two ATI cards.

You can continue to accuse me of being an NVIDIA "jockey" if you would like.

I realize to NVIDIA, I don't exist. They dont' even know me as the customer who owns the GeForce 2 chip with serial number: N3928DJK28.

Some companies are a bit more in touch with their customers, but even AMD, and ATI still see u as customer # 2984822.

I'm not defending them at all, I'm just arguing against you.

quote:
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To be blunt, the last thing I give is one 1/1000th of a fuck how orgasmic your GeForce 6 ProUltra 99999999 makes you feel because it has always performed flawlessly for you. Most of the people I know IRL have had a horror story with an nVidia card and so have I.
---------------

I'm sorry that you have had so much trouble with their hardware. But, just because you and a small group of people you know had problems and the vast majority of NVIDIA users have not had any problems is not grounds to simply dismiss the company and its products as being the utter crap you claim them to be.

Hell, I had dozens of problems with game stability before I really knew what I was doing when configuring my video card. Now I don't have any because I know what to do and what not to do when configuring my card, and system as a whole.

Did the problems I had make me hate NVIDIA? No.
Dit it make me hold a grudge against the company? No.

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I read less than a month later that nVidia was doing exactly the same thing. But luckily I'm not one of you framerate freaks that constantly jack off to benchmarks.
----------------

NVIDIA lowered the detail in ALL of the games, OpenGL and Direct 3d, what's wrong with that? They never said that they wouldn't.

Remember, NVIDIA makes NO GUARANTEES on its drivers. No guarantee on performance, image quality, stability, etc. Now it's good PR to make drivers which improve these attributes without sacrificing others, but legally they do not have to.

Back to the issue:

Many people picked apart the code for the ATI drivers and it contained the word "Quake."

When that word was changed to "Quack" the framerates in Q3 dropped, and image quality went up.

My point is that ATI did it specifically for Quake 3, because it is probably the most widely used benchmark for video cards.

They tried to play it off as a driver bug, but most people thought otherwise.

http://www.tech-report.com/etc/2001q4/radeon-q3/index.x?pg=1

Re Benchmarks:

I'm not obsessed about benchmarks, but some people are. I always check many sources when looking at benchmarks because most always they are skewed one way or another

And as far as my own system goes, if I did jack off to framerates I would have a Ti4600 and a P4 running ~3.0GHz. I can afford to buy 5 or so top of the line XP2000+/Ti4600 systems with a gig of ram each, out of my own pocket, so why haven't I?

Why do I have a 1.4 athlon with a GTS in it? Because at the moment I don't need anything more. I'm not out to be a benchmark whore, I just like to play my games at reasonable framerates without spending too much money on excessive speed and unused features.

Is this a legitimate enough reason?

If I wanted the world's highest benchmark scores believe me I'd have a Ti4600 and an industrial sized refrigeration plant outside of my apartment to keep my mega-fast-GeForce 90 Ti126000 series card cool.

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Funny, my framerate dropped 10 and my gamma went haywire when I installed the last round of detonators.
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(the most likely cause is because VSync was enabled, and yes they do change the gamma settings between drivers as they see fit. The problem was most likely your monitor being set at too high of a gamma. And you can change the gamma options in the drivers anyway, so it's not like they permanently fucked you over just because you are you.)

Again, I am sorry you have had this problem. I have had problems with other hardware <cough>VIA</cough> but I hate them. I realize that many other VIA users have not had problems, and I do NOT use that as grounds to attack the company and say that they're horrible and their products are of sub par quality.

Are problems frustrating? Hell yes.
Should I start a war because of it? Nope, not worth my time.

Will I buy another one of their chipsets, and will you buy another NVIDIA card?

Probably not in either case, but I don't hold a grudge against VIA, Toshiba, and IBM because their products have failed me in the past.
I don't need to attack them--I just don't buy their products anymore.

When I have a problem with a product, instead of getting hysterical and calling a witch hunt to see who put a curse on my computer I try to troubleshoot it to the best of my ability. I refer to other users experiencing the problem and see if they have successfully remedied it, and I contact the company for possible causes.

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Originally posted by Doom-Child

Pardon those of us used to a free market system from assuming that a company competing for market share would try to make the best possible products.


As I said before it's Excellent PR for a company to offer good support for their products. In this case it's video card driver updates.

Now most times the new drivers have improved performance, image quality and performance, but they are not guaranteed to. And NVIDIA has earned a good reputation for their drivers, you cannot deny that.

As a paying customer, you have every moral right to expect them to continue improving their drivers. This is not unreasonable at all, in fact I feel the same way.

But, legally they don't have to do anything. Not releasing new drivers would be very bad for PR, and be an unwise business move, but their legal disclaimers cannot be refuted: they do not offer ANY support with their new drivers.

If they guaranteed that new driver releases would be bullet proof, stable, fast and user friendly; and in the end the new drivers didn't live up to those guarantees, then you are allowed to complain.

Nobody forces you to upgrade--it is your own choice. If you have a negative, or displeasing experience because you upgraded to a new driver version then it was your decision, and you live with the consequences.

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Well MrNatural is a computer engineer, Neeyik is an electrical engineer, DJ (Digital Jesus), Macci, and Gibbo are master tweakers who knows more about video cards than you do about your own asshole.

You'd be surprised how much I know about my own asshole. I can derive a whole lot of pleasure from it.

I also derive pleasure from playing video games, not breaking out the torch and hacksaw and getting the games to run 3% better. I really have no fucking use for a new video card because the piece of shit I have basically plays games at 640 by 480 at a decent framerate and that's enough.

I already have quite a few games for X-Box and Gamecube that already do Doom 3 style realtime shadows. And they don't need a patch every week. And they don't require me to constantly fuck with the system to keep them stable. And they're fun.

I really couldn't care less about 99% of the games in the PC world, because they are absolute pure shit.

If I GAVE A FUCK about spending 4-5 hours hunkered down hacking my computer to get my nVidia product to perform like it should out of the box I would. But I don't, and I don't see why I should have to either.

I think the fact that they have college degrees says something. Doesn't mean they're geniuses, but they'll sure know more than you do.

I find this statement amusing on quite a few levels.

The Kyro III is still vaporware. Do you have one? Does even an engineering sample exist? I've got one, it's sitting in my lap, and it's made of nitrogen and oxygen.

Maybe you would have one. Maybe you would have a $150 card that outperforms the $500 GF3. Maybe you would if nVidia didn't illegally destroy ST.

What does this have to do with the fact that ATI is really the only major competitor to NVIDIA?

Because I am a consumer, and when I purchase something I am putting my support behind the product. What it is, what it does, and who made it. I refuse to support nVidia ever again until they publicly apologize for what they did. Until they do, fuck them, they can do without me.

If more people cared as much about what they buy as I do capitalism would be a much larger success story.

We can have a flamewar about their illegal and immoral practices in another thread =) this one is just about hardware.

Yes, hardware. Hardware that is OPTIONAL. Hardware that I have a choice of. ATI's cards work. When they release new drivers my entire Windows setup won't get corrupted. Therefore, ATI deserves my gaming dollar a fuckton more than nVidia.

OH NO, if I go with nVidia I might recieve 5 frames more a second in everything. WHOOPTIFUCKINGSHIT. 20 frames a second? WHOOPTIFUCKINGSHIT. So long as it works I'm happy.

It's the GF3, GF4 and Radeon8500 which have features that only (AFAIK) four games currently available for sale support.

All the more reason to buy one RIGHT NOW.

I must have missed, can you give me a link? I'd like to read about it.

I saw it on TomsHardware.com like five or six months ago. I didn't bother keeping the Acrobat file.

I'm sorry that you have had so much trouble with their hardware. But, just because you had problems and the vast majority of NVIDIA users have not had any problems is not grounds to simply dismiss the company and its products as being the utter crap you claim them to be.

But, just because I had problems and the vast majority of my friends had problems and the company ITSELF is utter crap is a reason for me to dismiss them for as long as I fucking see fit.

NVIDIA lowered the detail in ALL of the games, OpenGL and Direct 3d, what's wrong with that? They never said that they wouldn't.

That tech ScreenSavers show like 2 months ago said that nVidia was also caught undisclosing things they did to their drivers, hacking them just for better performance in Q3A at the expense of everything else.

But it's not like I care. The ScreenSavers are fucking bought off idiots anyway.

Remember, NVIDIA makes NO GUARANTEES on its drivers. No guarantee on performance, image quality, stability, etc. Now it's good P

I could make a lot of money too selling everyone cars and making no guarantees of whether or not there'll be an engine under the hood. Unless people are smart enough to look before they buy.





Round 2:




But then again, when one company makes a "factual" statement about their arch enemy, would you believe it?

That's not the issue, the issue is direct lies.

Hell, I had dozens of problems with game stability before I really knew what I was doing when configuring my video card. Now I don't have any because I know what to do and what not to do when configuring my card, and system as a whole.

Are you saying it's acceptable for a company to release drivers that will flat-out corrupt your OS installation? Drivers that literally require registry hacking to get to function? Are you fucking serious?

And as far as my own system goes, if I did jack off to framerates I would have a Ti4600 and a P4 running ~3.0GHz. I can afford to buy 5 or so top of the line XP2000+/Ti4600 systems with a gig of ram each, out of my own pocket, so why haven't I?

Because they'd be useless?

Why do I have a 1.4 athlon with a GTS in it? Because at the moment I don't need anything more. I'm not out to be a benchmark whore, I just like to play my games at reasonable framerates without spending too much money on excessive speed and unused features.

Same here. I'd just really like, for ONCE, for nVidia to release a set of Detonators that don't, LITERALLY, require registry hacking to function or completely corrupt a part of Windows. And I mean corrupt.

I mean I had my buddy over who's been studying this kind of shit in college for three years over and after rooting around in my registry for 20 minutes and examining my SYSTEM32 folder, from a CONSOLE boot mind you, the only thing he could really suggest was to reinstall.

(the most likely cause is because VSync was enabled, and yes they do change the gamma settings between drivers as they see fit. The problem was most likely your monitor being set at too high of a gamma. And you can change the gamma options in the drivers anyway, so it's not like they permanently fucked you over just because you are you.)

1. The Goddamn VSYNC is always disabled. 2. I have NEVER been able to change the Goddamn gamma output with a set of Detonators since I've moved to XP. The option just isn't fucking there. And yes, I've tried about four of the most highly recommended nVidia chipset hacking utilities.

Are problems frustrating? Hell yes.
Should I start a war because of it? Nope, not worth my time.

I'm not starting a fucking war, I just refuse to do anything with nVidia again until:
1. They learn to write a FUNCTIONAL set of drivers.
2. They apologize for illegally destroying a superior video card company.

Will I buy another one of their chipsets, and will you buy another NVIDIA card?

Absolutely not in either case. Most likely because nVidia will go out of business soon enough. Just like 3DFX and ST. Why? Because these companies are fucking disposable. In no time flat the latest breakthrough company will trot out and it won't even be a fucking concern anymore.

I don't need to attack them--I just don't buy their products anymore.

That's funny, on AIM Liam just said that's the SECOND time that nVidia drivers hosed his 98. He took a screenshot of safemode for me, it's kinda cute. I lost count on my end, actually.

When I have a problem with a product, instead of getting hysterical and calling a witch hunt to see who put a curse on my computer I try to troubleshoot it to the best of my ability. I refer to other users experiencing the problem and see if they have successfully remedied it, and I contact the company for possible causes.

Sometimes that's difficult when you're computer refuses to boot or both of your web browsers crash upon opening.




Fine, nVidia makes decent video cards. Fine, nVidia makes compatible drivers.

I have nothing more postive to say about them.

AFAIConcerned this conversation is over and through, but just once I'd like to hear you say:

"It'd be nice if I could get the latest Detonators and not:
A. Remove the current detonators with an anti-virus like program because there's no uninstall.
B. Get them to work without hacking my system.
C. Install them without them making my system unusably unstable."

Will you EVEN ADMIT that drivers with those 3 qualities are fucking BAD, no matter how compatible they are?

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In my mind, a driver upgrade should be a message from the company to the consumer: Yes, our product is good, but we've found some ways to make it better. I have this whole "execellence" thing going. I'm something of a perfectionist when it comes to my code, so I have a hard time believing that someone who's actually making money with it wouldn't be.

DC

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quote:
---------------
Perhaps you should have put "these types of" between 'build' and 'computers' to make it a little more clear. As it is, it sounds like you mean all the computers they build.
---------------

Sorry, I should have clarified that.



quote:
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I think I read somewhere that while on an individual basis, nVidia cards are more expensive than their GeForce equivalents, nVidia cards are actually cheaper to buy in bulk.
---------

Nvidia designs the chips, which are manufactured by a partner company. The chip manufacturer then pays royalties to NVIDIA, and sells their chips to third party companies which make cards based on the GeForce series graphics processors.

NVIDIA makes the GeForce series, I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

quote:
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Seriously, how many people could even afford two monitors? ;)
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Actually in the enthusiast market it's becoming quite common for people to use dual monitors. And it's even more common in business workstations which use high end 3d cards for rendering 3d models and CAD models.

You design on one monitor, and render the object on the other.

For home users you get two desktops and you can use each monitor for independent uses. You can play a game on one, and browse the web on the other, or type a document on one while watching a movie on the other.

Dual monitor support (read some current video card reviews: GF3, GF4, Radeon8500 if you don't believe me) is becoming almost a necessary feature in the eyes of many people, not just a rarely used addon.

quote:
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It's your turn to read a post again :) I was talking about the maximum possible speed, not the intended speeded. Surely the fastest a card can run is more important than how fast it is intended to run.
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Just like how the Radeon8500 was supposed to be 2x faster than the GF3, but instead matches it equally.

The GF4 Ti4600 undeniably whips the crap out of anything currently available in the high end,

quote:
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Well obviously, but a 50% increase in speed? I've never heard of the difference being that large in any other card. For the drivers to be able to be optimised so much clearly means that they were poorly optimised upon release.
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I built my system in June '01.

As I said before the performance in games and benchmarks in windows2000 at that time was SUB PAR to what people with windows98 systems were seeing.

The driver were immature and poorly optimized because they were brand new.

Windows 98 had been around since late 1997, so there was a four year period for optimizations, bug fixes, and general tweaks.

Being that the first set of windows 2000 drivers for nvidia cards were immature and buggy (read: downright sucked) I'd expect that they should eventually perform closer to the windows 98 drivers.

quote:
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I have experienced a bigger speed increase than this in a game though ;) Go play the original release version of Ultima IX and then install the latest patch for it. The difference is amazing, something like 300%. Now THAT is what I can the original release being unoptimised :) [/B][/quote]---------

Optimizing video card drivers for better performance is completely different than optimizing the game code so it runs better on your CPU.

Shoot, there's a 3D engine that rivals the Q3 engine, and It'll run on a 486 processor.

How's THAT for optimization mr. 300%???

And I wouldn't doubt that the game was poorly coded to begin with.

Who's fault is that? That of the software company.

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Originally posted by Doom-Child
In my mind, a driver upgrade should be a message from the company to the consumer: Yes, our product is good, but we've found some ways to make it better. I have this whole "execellence" thing going. I'm something of a perfectionist when it comes to my code, so I have a hard time believing that someone who's actually making money with it wouldn't be.

DC

It should, but it's more like "hey, you just bought a flawed product and we're willing to fix it". Maybe it comes down to the same, but what I think is being judged is companies' honesty.

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Get an 8MB ATi RAGE PRO.

Much better than all this modern rubbish :)

I'm getting my 256MB 2.4Ghz 6.4GB nVidia GeForce6 Monday.

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Yes, I've always loved having my graphics card stop me in the middle of a game and ask me to open Calculator so it can figure some stuff out.

Nuno: That's a pretty interesting article. It's interesting to note that in my benchmarkings, my GeForce3 actually did multitextured filling better than single textured. Weird.

DC

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Originally posted by Doom-Child

Nuno: That's a pretty interesting article. It's interesting to note that in my benchmarkings, my GeForce3 actually did multitextured filling better than single textured. Weird.

DC



Not weird.

The GF3 has multiple pipelines that are able to apply multiple textures in a single pass, I think the total is 8 layers or something.

So if it can do 8 layers, and you're only sending it one layer, it will only process that one layer.

If you send it two layers, and it is capable of 8 layers then it will process the two layers (still well under it's maximum) resulting in a higher score.

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No, I mean in frames per second. The multitexture is actually smoother than the single. I would expect that the single would be inefficient in terms of pipeline usage, but still smooth.

DC

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Nvidia designs the chips, which are manufactured by a partner company. The chip manufacturer then pays royalties to NVIDIA, and sells their chips to third party companies which make cards based on the GeForce series graphics processors.

NVIDIA makes the GeForce series, I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

I'm saying that its cheaper for companies like Dell, Compaq, whoever, to buy Nvidia chip cards in bulk than ATI chip cards, even though on an individual basis, NVidia cards are more expensive.

And I wouldn't doubt that the game was poorly coded to begin with.

Who's fault is that? That of the software company.

That was just a little anecdote about how crap drivers can be, how could you possibly take at as inferring that it's anyone other than the people who coded the game's fault?

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