AMD Challenges NVIDIA To Graphics Throw-Down 240
MojoKid writes "Over the last couple of weeks, the two most powerful graphics cards released for the PC to date made their respective debuts, the dual-Cayman GPU powered AMD Radeon HD 6990 and the dual-GF110 GPU powered NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. With such powerful products in their line-ups, both AMD and NVIDIA have claimed they offer 'the world's fastest graphics card.' AMD says it's theirs. Dave Erskine, the Senior Public Relations Manager for Graphics Desktop at AMD, challenged NVIDIA directly. 'So now I issue a challenge to our competitor: prove it, don't just say it. Show us the substantiation.'"
Driver quality (Score:5, Interesting)
How about a driver stability shootout? Include the major platforms (Windows, OS X, and Linux) and compare:
* Stability in desktop environments (Windows Aero/OS X/KDE/Gnome)
* Stability in the major productivity apps (Office suites, Photoshop/Gimp/etc., Lightroom/Aperture/etc, Final Cut/Premiere, AutoCAD)
* Stability in games
* Ease of installation
THAT is a shootout I would like to see. Even entry-level cards are "good enough" for casual gaming, and mid-range cards are great for even newer games at high resolution.
Slashdot is a PIECE OF SHIT!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Hello, What the fuck /. ! Post My comment already You Fucks !
AMD and Nvidia, Take a FOSS challange (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing I would like to see is a free software/free driver challenge between the two. Everything else does not matter. I never tried how any of them are doing in the Windows world, but my impression from what I have read is that it comes down to drivers there too and Nvidia seems to be doing better than AMD in the windows world.
Hardware really doesn't matter if there's not software to utilize it.
Re:Hope their drivers have improved (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but how many systems have you and the parent had? If you're talking a handful then your personal anecdotes are meaningless.
I did tech support for local government/schools for 7 years and we had over 5000 PCs to look after at any one time, and of course over that period we went through a number of hardware refreshes so I saw closed to 15,000 machines of various configurations.
I can tell you now that the number of times we had widespread issues with nVidia cards was one due to one bad driver release, but rolling back to old drivers was rediculously easy with nVidia.
In contrast ATI cards were a constant persistent headache, and sure there were some ATI based systems that never really caused a problem, but there were literally hundreds that did. The issues ranged from instability due to shit drivers, through to perhaps one of the most annoying issues- the fact that you could download the right drivers for a card from the ATI site and sometimes they just would not work with the only way to get graphics working properly to find the original CD that came with the system/card and install the version from that because later versions of drivers for a specific card didn't always work right with those older cards. Even when you found the old driver CD if those original drivers were shit- i.e. poor performing, or unstable then you were left with a choice between an unstable/poor performing system or, well, no drivers at all.
ATI cards don't have a poor reputation because the odd gamer has had a dodgy system, they have a poor reputation for drivers because people like me who have dealt with large sample sizes of systems have seen that ATI cards over the years have consistently had these problems whereas nVidia's screwups have been relatively few and far beween in contrast.
I can similarly tell you from my experience of such a large sample size that whilst HP printers are generally some of the best hardware, they have equally had some terrible driver releases through the years. I can tell you that Maxtor drives have a drastically higher failure rate than that of other manufacturers.
It's not fanboyism if a particular product or manufacturer has a bad reputation for some reason, no it's generally based on the fact there's a lot of truth in that reputation. If it was as you say individuals building questionable systems then why don't nVidia equally have a bad rep, or are you suggesting nVidia users are more competent at selecting good components and configurations than ATI/AMD users? Obviously that seems unlikely.