rec.autos.simulators

Strange, everything works fine on my end with multiple versions of their
drivers, official and Beta.
--
Skotty Flynn
http://www.nascar-racing-sims.com

Really? And why is that? I go to all the *** groups and nothing in
this group leads me to believe what you say above. If any group has
superior knowledge it is the flight-sim group.

nVidia's reputation for being driver wizards is completely unfounded.
That rep started with the TnT, due to the fact that Quake 2 had come out
less than a year prior to the release of the TnT, and the TnT was the
only card that had sufficient OpenGL ICD support to be able to run Q2 in
OpenGL mode (3DFX had to run a special compatibility driver).  People
quickly forgot how bad the Riva 128 was.  The next year when review
sites were comparing multiple versions of multiple nVidia chipsets to
the V2/V3's and Rage 128's many of them commented on how nice it was to
be able to use one nVidia driver set for so many different chipsets
without reinstalling the drivers.  That was when nVidia started getting
compliments about their supposed driver wizardry.  It's all based on the
fact that they were first to support OpenGL and the first to use a
unified driver architecture.  It never had anything to do with
reliability.

All it takes is a scan of just about any game related newsgroup to show
that nVidia's drivers are still just as screwed up as they have always
been.  Every game that employs new graphics code (as opposed to
something like Deus Ex which uses an existing engine) requires new
drivers from nVidia before it will run well.  And every new driver set
from nVidia breaks an existing game.  That's how it was with the cards I
had, that's how it has been for my friends, and I see no sign that it
has changed.  nVidia owners are just in denial.  If you have owned both,
you know the difference.

The problems with the Radeon are no worse than they have been with
nVidia cards.  Most of the problems people have had are due to incorrect
driver installation, incorrect BIOS settings, or incorrect
uninstallation of previous drivers.  This is admittedly complicated by
the fact that ATI's recommended method of uninstalling old drivers and
installing the new ones is different than many people expect.  Most
people assumed they knew how to do it, and screwed up.  If they had RTFM
they likely wouldn't have had problems.  There are many satisfied Radeon
owners out there.  ATI just does not deserve the reputation they have;
they are still being beat up for the Rage 128.

I'll admit that nVidia has the performance lead, but people seem to be
forgetting something else.  Performance is primarily a function of your
CPU.  This is still true even with T&L.  Benchmarking shows this
clearly.  The purpose of buying a good video card is and has always been
to increase graphics quality without giving up performance.  And in
graphics quality the Radeon is still superior.  So I'll stick with a
Radeon and a fast CPU, and the rest of you can have your GF3's.

Regarding F1 2001, don't forget that a game typically goes gold about a
month before you see it in stores.  And before that it requires final
testing, packaging, and the creation and testing of the installer (AFAIK
usually done by the publisher, not the developer).  In all likelihood
the last time ISI touched the code prior to its release was August.
Don't know what nVidia drivers were available at that time, but it
wouldn't surprise me if F1 2001 worked just fine with the official
release drivers that were then available, and has only been screwed up
by the newer drivers that were released to support the new nVidia
chipsets.  That would be typical.

Sorry if I've pissed off any nVidia owners.  I'm not trying to knock
GF's specifically, I'm just tired of hearing nVidia being treated like
they can do no wrong and ATI being treated like they are incapable of
doing anything right.  It's just not true.

It's the difference between looking at glossy print and web based
reviews, often softened by the view of a journalist with a large
base to write to, vs the views and experiences of real people who
are working with the platform trying to get best performance out
of their software.  How often do you read a review in a mag or on
a web site which says "the game is great once you tweak settings
x, y and z and configure your OS this way and your BIOS that way".?

In terms of technical knowledge - too many people in the past 5
years have asked questions about their Crapard Hell computers
in this group for the "average computering knowledge" to be all
*that* high.  Averages are like that :)

iksteh

Notta once here. And I have tried multiple driver versions.
Question: What games etc did you have problems with?
I have a whole slew of games that I have played since purchasing my
nVidia card, including many, many demos with not as much as a glitch.

Before my GF2 Ultra, I used a Voodoo3, also with no problems. Can't say I
am in denial, I just haven't come across the problems that are plaguing
you guys. Yet that is <g>

Yeah improper procedures of changing drivers can complicate things, but
if one is unsure how to do it, then they shouldn't IMHO.

I have nothing against them, because I have never used an ATI product.
The only cards I have ever used are from Intergraph, 3dfx, S3, and
nVidia. Never once have I had a problem with a game with any of them,
besides the technology/speed falling behind the times.

I surely am not defending nVidia, I'm just baffled that you guys have had
problems with their products and/or drivers. I am very happy with my card
and might be just as happy with an ATI product.
--
Skotty Flynn
http://www.nascar-racing-sims.com

Ken

Why should they?  What's in it for them?  :-/

Because there is *no* choice.  If you want to run proper simulations (racing
cars, flight sims etc.) then you have to have a beefy Windows box.

Normal people can and should stick with a console for games and a Macintosh
for general PC-type tasks.  But do they?  No.  They all follow the crowd,
and assume all the typical Windows problems are 'normal'.  Morons!  :-/

--
Richard.

"I look at you all... see the love there that's sleeping."

For a start, as you've said in the past yourself, there are probably 5x as
many nvidia owners on the group than 3dfx owners, so you would naturally
expect there to be 5x as many problems.  Plus the only people who post about
card compatibility are the people who actually have problems.  You don't see
posts from the silent majority saying 'my cards still working fine' so it
gives the impression that almost everyone has problems when they don't.

I've owned two GeForce 2 cards, both from Creative Labs, a GF2 GTS and a GF2
Pro and they've both worked flawlessly since the day I got them.  On the
other hand I actually had to sell my V5 5500 AGP because of driver bugs
which made it impossible to program D3D with.   And from what I read
regularly on 3d programming forums, I believe those driver bugs are still
there even today (it's possible to test this if you fancy).

As for drivers, I've used the official 6.50 drivers without a single
problem.  I've used the official 10.80 drivers without a problem.  And I've
used the official 12.41 drivers without a problem.  I've also briefly tried
a few of the beta drivers over the last year, and never found a problem with
them.  Plus I play a lot of different games, and btw F1 2001 worked
flawlessly straight out of the box on my PC.

I'm not saying the people who post with problem haven't really got problems
of course, but I have to wonder whether some of them don't know anything
about PCs.  They're probably all using cheap Via chipset motherboards
without the 4-in-1 drivers installed.

Simon.

and
< snip>

You might want to wonder on over to Creative.Products.Sound_Blaster.audigy

There you will find hundreds of posts from high-tech gamers and sound
hobbyists (even more high-tech than us) who can't install, or ortherwise
make work.....their new SB Audigy card (any of them in the series).   Most
of whom have just uninstalled their SB Live (series) sound cards.  By the
way, that's the new sound card from Creative Labs, released a few weeks
back, that replaces the SB Live series of sound cards.  Now, with a
marketshare of something like 70% and 3 years plus to engineer and refine
the hardware and software of the famous SB Live "replacement" or upgrade
product, don't you think that if  writing drivers for hardware were such a
straightforward and simple issue as you describe....that surely something
not nearly as complicated as a sound card....would have no problems with
drivers on product launch?  Certainly, maybe a "few" problems huh?

Why not take a 15 minute gander over on
Creative.Products.Sound_Blaster.audigy and come back here and give us your
opinion of how "simple" or how "few" problems are going on right now.......
and how easy of a time everyone (well, almost everyone) is having installing
this simple piece of hardware into their XP boxes, or maybe there Win2000
boxes, or maybe...well surely no problems with Win98SE boxes...heck that's
an operating system that's mature and been out for years...nearly bug free
now (they say)?

If you own an Audigy sound card and also just about any AMD platform
computer....either don't plan on having any sound on your computer any time
soon.  Or, don't plan on being able to use your computer for anything,
anytime soon.....depends on whether you leave the sound car installed, or of
course, decide to uninstall it, Fdisk and reinstall WindowsXX so your
computer can work again.

Dave, and you thought Nvidia was bad?

Tom

With that in mind here is a rough list of problems I can recall with the
TnT and GF2 (leaving out the Riva 128 because it just seems irrelevant
at this point).

TnT:
Extremely poor performance in Unreal
Extremely poor performance in Tribes
Heroes of Might and Magic required several driver revisions to fix a
crashing problem
Image quality and performance problems in Shogo
Menu corruption in Half-Life (never fixed)
Artifacts in Quake 3 (required new drivers)
2D speed poor in OpenGL map editors (never fixed)

GF2 MX:
Horrible image quality in Q3 with compressed textures (known to be a
hardware problem)
Menu corruption in Half-Life (never fixed)
Artifacts in Q3 with several official released drivers
2D speed poor in OpenGL map editors

That may not seem like much but you have to realize that each of those
represents several months of trying different drivers, game patches,
BIOS settings, etc. and several months of frustration because I could
not play the game in the way that I expected to.  And I'm sure there
were more that I have forgotten.  Although looking at this list I can
see that there were relatively few real crashes.  Mostly I had problems
with artifacts, thrashing, or performance (I know I said performance was
not the bottom line, but in each of those cases the card was performing
poorly relative to its own benchmarks, poorly relative to its
competition, and leading to an unusable product on hardware that more
than met the recommended requirements for the game).

For example, at a time when the TnT card was getting kudos for its
excellent OpenGL support in Quake engined games, it was also falling
down badly for games that were ported from Glide.  Unreal and Tribes on
the TnT were actually slower in hardware mode than in software mode for
many people.  A lot of mud slinging went on between nVidia and the
developers, and it was never really clear who was at fault.  The
underlying problem seemed to be inadequate texture management, which led
to excessive bus usage, which led to texture thrashing.  This has
largely been rendered moot by the hardware improvements we have had
since then, so people have forgotten I guess.

The two that I think most turned me off to nVidia though are the 2D
performance problems and the Q3 texture compression problem.

I used to do a lot of map editing for FPS games.  Never was any good at
it, and never published much of it, but it was something I enjoyed.
nVidia drivers had and I believe still have a big problem with 2D line
drawing code.  It was never properly optimized, and as a result trying
to manipulate line based objects in 2D was excruciatingly slow.  The
Radeon does not have this problem.  In fact a Virge would be faster at
2D line drawing than an nVidia card.

The Q3 texture compression problem has been pretty well documented.  It
only affects one particular mode, but it happened to be a mode that is
used in Q3.  Quite a few developers are convinced that the texture
compression code in the GF2 is broken at a hardware level and therefore
you simply have to work around it.  Id, who is known to refuse to employ
workarounds for a driver's inadequacies, eventually gave up and turned
off texture compression by default, a sure sign that there is no fix.

Bottom line is that after several years of putting up with nVidia's
quirks, I became convinced that despite my initial good impressions of
them that they were only interested in making cards that have fast
benchmark scores and that reliability (from a software standpoint),
image quality, and so forth is not a priority for them.

ATI OTOH still seems to be interested in making an all-around good card.
Not that they are without weaknesses.  There are a few games which are
known to have issues with Radeons.  And even though their line drawing
code is far superior to nVidia's, their overall 2D performance is a tad
lower.

Nobody's perfect, I just feel like I have had fewer problems with the
Radeon than I did with any of my nVidia cards.  It is entirely possible
that my next card will end up being an nVidia again, or something
entirely different.  I didn't mean to imply that I either hate nVidia or
love ATI, I was just trying to say that the reputation that both
companies have is not in accordance with my experience.  And I know I am
not the only one who feels that way.

Regards,
Hal

A lot of people in the board-design business will tell you that.

Just one simple screwup out of thousands, which has resulted in
man-centuries of frustration, is Microsoft's violation of the PCI
standard.  PCI slot number and physical slot are not required to be the
same.  But, Microsoft code assumes that slot a is both logically AND
physically slot a.  That's why some Windows problems, even with recent
releases, can be fixed by just rearranging your cards.

One of the major points behind PCI was to eliminate just that kind of
physical dependence.  

The list goes on and on.  While I don't like the way a lot of card
producers operate these days, it is a situation (bad software) that
Microsoft legimitized first.  

Writing software, especially real-time game software and bleeding edge
graphics code, for Windows is an absolute nightmare.  It's a testament
to the incredible efforts of (some) game designers that anything runs
reliably at all, the foundation is so poor.  Debugging is especially
difficult, because with each bug you find, you first have to make sure
it's actually your code that is the problem.

Hopefully, one of these days, they'll either die or finally start
producing quality instead of grunting out steaming mounds of new
features.

--

/Jens

<Snip!>