My opinion of ATI cards

[hallsofvallhalla]

OMG I am so sick of ATI. Such garbage. This weekend we had a big lan party and guess which of all the computers there gave us the most trouble. Yep the one with the ATI video card. I cannot believe ATI doesn't even support Windows 7 completely. They do not have drivers for my card and its not that old! I couldn't even play Rise of Nations. Gimmie a damn break. Any game that would play was terribly slow.

Garbage!

[Jackolantern]

I think that ATI is losing serious ground to nVidia. I am not really a fanboy for either one, as I have always been open to buying either brand provided it offers the most power for the money. But these days I am thinking I will probably stick to nVidia. They have been aggressively pursuing game developers with their "Meant to be played on nvidia" program (or whatever it is called) that has games being developed specifically for nVidia cards.

[Falken]

I have all respect for you halls, but if you want to keep those forums serious you should stop posting flame bait posts like this. It really drags the quality of the forums down and thats sad.

If you gonna whine like this, please atleast say why so there can be in a some way civilized discussion.

Just saying it is garbage wont really help.

They do not have drivers for my card and its not that old!

Ok, please say which card, if you look at ati.amd.com you can see they have windows 7 drivers for all cards since 2002 (Radeon 9500 series), so if you got an older card than that I would say it is rather old crap card and you can get a better one for $10

And for some real facts ATI was about ½year earlier than Nvidia with releasing official Win7 drivers...
Also ATI is the only one with DX11 cards on the market...Nvidia still using DX10, not even 10.1...that's what I call not fully supporting Win7 and all it's features.

So please in the future, start acting like an admin of a respected admin of a forum and don't post flame bait posts.

Don't take this the wrong way, I think you are doing a great work with this site and all, but I would hate it all being ruined by whining and flame wars like all other forums on the internet.

[hallsofvallhalla]

The great thing about these forums is that we can make posts like this and act civilized. Anywhere else I would have posted it people would have flamed me because of personal feelings and preference. Here everyone can laugh at it and have a nice argument. My points are valid and like I have said a thousand times before. I spend 8-12 hours a day in a professional job not able to say what needs to be said. This is my get away. There is nothing fun in a forums where you have to "act professional" all the time. This is in the off topic section and not in the reviews section.

THIS IS ONLY MY OPINION! I am not a hardware expert.

I do thank you for making a counter argument.

[rockinliam]

My XFX ATI HD 4850 was terrible, for like 6 months i could barly play any games, my dev tools wud crash like the unreal editor, even RC would crash. The crashes were really weird too loads of random clours all over the screen. XFX tech support wasnt any good either, with no answers and going over the things i had already done. But i fixed it my self, i removed all drivers for video and sound i cud find on ma machine, n i did a clean install of realtek for sound and only the xfx display driver, none of the CCC rubbish. Then finalley got some software meant for overclocking my GPU and underclocked it as low as it would go. i fired up a game and the problem vanished, albeit the game had a poor frame rate, finnaly i push my cards' clocks up until they went at maximum speeds without crashing, and now i have a card that can still handle the latest games but works perfectly.

So after my experience with ATI based cards, the drivers are poor, the support is poor, they annoy the hell out of you wen they fail, but the cards (wen they work) are awesome. also to anybody experiencing frequent crashing on their cards, try what i did it cudnt hurt lol

[Last Known Hero]

I personally love nVidia, thats what 2 out of the 3 computers I have had have used. Those nVidia cards ran like champions compaired to my old ATI... although in all fairness the ATI was old, but still, its the principal that stands.

[Jackolantern]

I think it is kind of hard to get a real feel for ATI vs. nVidia, since the cards are created by third-party manufacturers leasing the technology from those two companies. I don't know how true it is, but I have heard several times that ATI has somehow ended up with a string of bad manufacturers. If it is true, then who knows? The technology could be sound, or even superior to nVidia, but the manufacturers may just be screwing it up.

[SpiritWebb]

I have an ATI, and I love it...its been so much better then the graphics card I had before. I guess with this conversation, its really just the eye of beholder and their specific tastes. I have had integrated graphics, nVidia graphics and now ATI...and now I prefer the ATI over nVidia...

[hallsofvallhalla]

that all makes sense. Could be jack