Drivers: NV, M, ATi

[Heiney]

Ok, I'm thinking about a new graphics card here, sometime in the fairly near future.

I'd like to hear from the people here who have experience with Nvidia, ATi, and Matrox with regards to driver quality.

My experience has shown NVidia kicks ass for OpenGL, but their D3D is kinda weak. Matrox OGL generally sucks, while their D3D is above average. ATi, I dunno, I always hear how bad their drivers are, especially Win2K.

Any future driver prospect opinions, especially since WinXP (a Win2K variant) is coming, would be great too.

With my recent problems with Serious Sam on my G400 and Matrox' inability to produce a card with some relative speed improvements in over 2 years has me leaning away from them.

But, I'm not planning on a purchase in the near near future, just want something that will play some of those spiffy new titles shown at E3 this year



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ABIT BF6, Pentium III 1GHz, Alpha P3125 Cooler, 256MB Crucial 7E, Quantum Fireball Plus LM, IBM 75GXP, Matrox G400 DH@160/200, Enlight 7237, 300watt TurboCool PS, and some fun with a Dremel!

[isochar]

I've had a Creative Annihilator 2 GTS in my gaming machine for the past year. In that time I have never encountered a problem that was not solved by an already available leaked driver.

With nVidia cards in the majority of desktops, and soon in laptops, you can't go wrong with one for a gaming rig. Developers will be designing games with interest in supporting the most customers with the least amount of hassle, so expect nvidia cards to have the least amount of trouble.

GF3 Ultras will be out in 3 months, so expect the GF3 to be reasonably price soon enough. (If $300 isn't quite there yet)

[This message has been edited by isochar (edited 30 May 2001).]

[GT98]

The Kyro2 drivers for Win2K show almost no difference then the ones writen for Win98 performance-wise. I would say that the biggest problem for the Kyro2 card is that it doesn't have a on board TL unit, but the drivers dump that duty off to the CPU (couldn't tell you how much of hit performance-wise you would take).

Scott


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Abit BH6 rev 1.0 Celeron 2-566@877mhz,256mb RAM,ATI Radeon AIW,SB Live! with Klipsch Promedia v2-400, Optiquest V95 19in montor, Asus 40x CD-ROM, Aopen 5x DVD-ROM,HP9110i 8x4x32 CD-RW,SupraMax 56k modem,WinME on Western Digital 30GB drive

[Gurm]

Since there are no games currently written that use T&L (you know what I mean, I'm not here to argue semantics), the difference is negligible.

- Gurm, proud Kyro2 owner.

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Nuno]

Yep. KyroII win2k drivers are excelent, compared with others. Only video card that doesn´t loose performance in win2k. WinXP having a NT kernel, drivers for XP should be fine too.

[isochar]

I would not recommend buying a Kyro 2 card if you plan on holding on to it longer than 6 months...

Nearly every E3 game shown had T&L as well as other D7 optimizations.

[Nuno]

As long as they support DX7 T&L as good as Quake 3, MDK2 or Nvidia own Dagooth Moor Zoological Gardens, let´em come

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 30 May 2001).]

[DuRaNgO]

And your eyes will thank you

[Heiney]

Thanks guys.

I'm really pumped for some competition in the market to bring that GF3 down to $200

I'm sure when ATI and NVidia release their fall stuff, we'll have some amazing deals...