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The AMD vs HD vs Nvidia War in modern games

jenji120

jenji120

Admiral
Admiral
Ok I feel the need to vent.... I have an AMD/Radeon card that works fantastic for some games (FO4) and the newest Wolfenstein series among then. My HD card runs the Witcher III (the Wild Hunt fantastically - AMD runs it well too although I do think it prefers the HD) I haven't run Nvidia in a loooong time (there's a reason for that but it's neither here nor there. FWIW they used to be my fave card and I despised AMD/Radeon for a long damned time). HD will also run Assassin's Creed Syndicate as will Nvidia. So it's a total crap shoot.

With moddable games I wouldn't mind this so much since a fix would come out soon. BUT this sux!

Maybe I'm paranoid but I get the feeling there's a graphic's card was with AAA games.
PS anyone experienced this? What games?

/rant
 
The war isn't what it used to be /gazes off longingly into the distance

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SPCTRE said:
The war isn't what it used to be /gazes off longingly into the distance

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:lol:

I had to get a refund on AC Syndicate even though AC Rogue works fine. Tried it on 2 different cards too. I still miss nVidia when it was good - used to pair it with an AMD rig. Good times. Now games are optimized to cards and sometimes don't work with the other. :mad::brickwall:
 
This seriously sounds like the early days of sound cards, where games would work with either Sound Blaster or Turtle Beach or ______, but not usually all of them.
 
B.J. said:
This seriously sounds like the early days of sound cards, where games would work with either Sound Blaster or Turtle Beach or ______, but not usually all of them.
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^^I remember those days but never got in to the sound card mess - it seemed way too complex for me at the time and even though I had outrageous mobos (at the time) that could handle sound cards, I went with onboard sound. FWIW, I still don't know what a SPDIF connection is because I just never focused on sound - CPUs, MoBos, Cards etc. were more my thing.

I somehow blame consoles for this even though it probably has more to do with the war between AMD and Intel with nVidia caught in between. That said, I raised an eyebrow when AMD bought Radeon because I Radeon sucked (never had a good card from them back in the day - All in Wonder my ass) but I have to admit AMD has done a good job with them. Their APUs are pretty cool.

But yeah the optimization war has got to end. I get that devs are trying to please everyone but damn maybe they should freaking offer more beta testing and not the kind you have to pay for like with early access releases on steam (I think that should be reserved for indies trying to raise funds to complete the project but what do I know).
 
One other thing.... whatever happened to the demo? Only a handful of games have them and they're mostly really old (90s and early 00s old).
 
jenji120 said:
One other thing.... whatever happened to the demo? Only a handful of games have them and they're mostly really old (90s and early 00s old).
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they're called "betas" now and you don't test anything in them, but, you often get to pay to enter

it's a brave new world
 
Ah.. the old days.. I started out with a S3 Virge graphics decelerator.. I've had a Intel 740 powered Diamond card, S3 Savage cards, of course had the VooDoo II and III one machine had a VooDoo Rush as well after the VooDoo III I've had a bunch of Nvidia and ATI cards, GF 2 MX and ATI Rage, the latter was a bitch, hardware wise it was great but the early drivers sucked like a black hole.. stuck with Nvidia for a while although I've used some ATI cards as well after the Geforce 8800 GTS 640 I've switched to ATI/AMD HD 5770, 5870 and HD 6970, they all have been great at the moment I use a GTX 780 because I could obtain it for an insanely low price.

As for nowadays, Nvidia plays a dirty game, trying to buy game developers to use their propriatory Nvidia only shit so other cards manufacturers like AMD are at an disadvantage.
 
It worked fine when you used games like Terminal Velocity and so on which were S3D enhanced for everything else even the CPU bound software renderer was faster than the 3D capabilities of the card.. :lol:
The early 3D era was rough indeed.. S3 made more stinkers, especially driver wise they were a mess... S3';s Savage line potentially were fine chips but T&L support never happened. :shifty:
 
Yeah, I remember that not very fondly :D I remember using an early 3D screensaver when I had that card, and It made me wonder what the heck was wrong, and if this was supposedly the future, why it was so slow. Oh S3, you dashed the dreams of many.

Then I eventually moved to an ATI card which was only marginally better due to their drivers.
 
^^ Yeah tell me about that.. I've used a really nice ATI Rage Pro which in itself wasn't a bad card, at first it would NOT play The Need For Speed 3, after a driver update it would play it but with a black sky and render errors, the next driver fixed all that, took only a year or so to make the bloody card behave nicely.
 
A year?? Wow, if that happened today, you can bet people wouldn't be so patient and take it to twitter.

I think for the most part, we're a lot better off these days, Even some of the cheaper cards aren't all that bad. Although I did have an issue with the card I currently have when I originally got it as the driver kept crashing. Thankfully with drivers restarting themselves now, it's not as much of an issue it could have been in the past, and the issue eventually did get fixed.
 
Ha! back in 1998 we didn't have twitter or any other social media, also, no broadband... getting drivers involved hauling yer arse to the computer shop where you got the card with a floppy or two and nag for newer drivers, in a rare case you might get the whole driver CD.
I worked at a computer shop in those days, for OEM machines you got a large box with 20-40 cards with every card having a CD, together with motherboard driver CD's and manuals you'd bundle it with the machine and ship the whole thing to the client, every expansion card came that way with a manual a CD or floppy and a warranty card, in some cases when a card would be dead on arrival we'd ship only the card back and got a new card including CD manual etc back again from ATI or S3 etc so you'd gather a few spare CD's that way.

You could actually download software from ATI etc but even then they didn't update as fast as nowadays.

Nowadays its really easy, for discrete cards there kinda are only the two big companies left, either AMD or Nvidia, and indeed they simply can't afford bad drivers anymore although it still happens that they'll make a stinker, of course it will only take days instead of months to get a patch. :)
 
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And believe it or not, those kinds of shops still exist. I actually prefer them to getting service via Big Box stores like Best Buy. We have one in town that we've been going to since the early 90's. He originally started working out of his home, moved to a storefront where he was for several decades before he to not renew his rent, and moved it back home as the business wasn't as sustainable as it once was. Nowadays, he makes most of his money via virus and malware cleanup, and he charges by the hour. He tends to get a lot of business as people know he has a lot of knowledge. The kind that gets cultivated by experience that a box store wouldn't have.
 
If it were not for MS we would all be trying to laod
Santaman said:
Ha! back in 1998 we didn't have twitter or any other social media, also, no broadband... getting drivers involved hauling yer arse to the computer shop where you got the card with a floppy or two and nag for newer drivers, in a rare case you might get the whole driver CD.
I worked at a computer shop in those days, for OEM machines you got a large box with 20-40 cards with every card having a CD, together with motherboard driver CD's and manuals you'd bundle it with the machine and ship the whole thing to the client, every expansion card came that way with a manual a CD or floppy and a warranty card, in some cases when a card would be dead on arrival we'd ship only the card back and got a new card including CD manual etc back again from ATI or S3 etc so you'd gather a few spare CD's that way.

You could actually download software from ATI etc but even then they didn't update as fast as nowadays.

Nowadays its really easy, for discrete cards there kinda are only the two big companies left, either AMD or Nvidia, and indeed they simply can't afford bad drivers anymore although it still happens that they'll make a stinker, of course it will only take days instead of months to get a patch. :)
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We never had anything like that here in Glasgow, the only way to get anything new driver wise were from gaming mags at the time with the floppy disk stuck on the front, sound like the stone age now when i say it out loud, although the local weekend market stall did have a public domain bit were you could buy floppies with drivers and stuff on them.

Of course drivers were never really that important back then, well for me anyway, more of a pain than anything else when you were trying to get a dos game to run and you had another driver to try and fit into high mem or the game would not run. lol

Crazy days. ha
 
Tihihih... Oh yeah... Autoexec.bat and Config.sys :lol: ye gods I remember that.. I still have 8088/86 /286/386/486 and Pentium machines around.. I am so damn rusty with that stuff.. it's that I lack the space and time to tinker with them, the really old ones would need a checkup, I don't think that its wise to run them without checking if the capacitors haven't gone south...

Hmm..
http://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm <-- how to setup yer Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, quite handy.
 
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