Sapphire HD 4870 1GB Question

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Personally I tend to avoid all ATI cards in favor of nVidia ones on the grounds that I've always found the drivers from nVidia to be of a much higher standard.

True dat....I've found ATI drivers to be a horror show mostly too, compared to nVidia.
 
I switched to ATI for my current build for the first time, and I'd say I'm pretty happy with it.

I have always been hesitant due to the drivers issue, but thus far I have yet to experience any setbacks due to drivers not functioning properly or not being available for the game I want to play.

I've even been playing the AION beta, which uses an updated version of Crytek, and superb performance, 120-200 frames even in densely populated areas with the 4870 1gb. Granted, the engine was tweaked to be easier on the gpu, I was curious to see if DRIVER problems would arise with an unreleased game.

I also heard people complaining about the new game Trine, which uses a lot of physics, and saying if you don't have an nvidia card then the game is super choppy etc, but I have had no problems with the game. You can download the nvidia ageia physx software and use it with your ati card for certain games.

I guess it really comes down to your build and budget. Don't be afraid of ATI, I sort of was but now I am quite happy with it.
 
I have the 4870, its a breze, I haven't tried to OC it yet, but other people who use it say that its easy and safe to OC... unless your really pushing the OC'ing
 
But I think the HD 4800's have really given nVIdia a run for their money (literally), they've forced them to price stuff more competively in order to stay in the game. They were planning on charging $300 and something for a GTX 260 originally until the HD 4870 came out and $500 for a GTX 280 and finally $200 for a 9800GTX.

Oh yeah, I don't doubt that. They're a decent bunch of cards to be sure, it's just I've found they sometimes require a lot of fiddling around before it starts working the way it was built to.
I mean, as an honest question, which company would you say was ahead in driver development? ATI or nVidia?
 
^dude, you've got to be kidding! Have you owned a nVidia card recently? Judging by your sig you haven't. Google around a little, I think you'll find most driver problem posts are with the CCC drivers, or nVidia beta drivers but I think that's why they're labeled 'beta'.

However, assuming you indeed have something like a 9800GTX tucked away somewhere, on what ground would you say AMD beats nVidia's drivers?
 
As opposed to installing my nVidia fanboy friend's rigs (mostly 9800's and GTX series) and other friends who were willing to try AMD, I've had less problems with current Gen AMD's as opposed to the original one's which I must say were remotely bad. You are right though, I haven't owned an nVidia card, and I don't plan to either, I think my HD 3850 512MB is quite sufficient and all my rants about wanting more GPU power is just for GTA IV.

My worst luck with nVidia's drivers was their SLI support and dealing with nVidia chipset drivers. However, this is just my experiences, but 7/8 problems is still pretty bad; but I am an unlucky person.

With AMD's side, I did have a bit of trouble with the HD 2900's (way worse than nVidia's luck), but the drivers did improve with time though. No problems with the HD 3850 of mine, but I did have a fair share of bad luck with my friend's HD 3870 and HD 3850 CFX mode... I think he ended up selling those and just got an HD 4800, which he has had no bad luck with, as have with my other friends. Zmatt hasn't had any bad luck at all with his dual HD 4850's but I think Drizzt5 has been having some crap luck with dual HD 4850's.

I'm not saying nVidia are bad in drivers, just currently, AMD's winning both the war and the driver support. In the past I would have said nVidia won hands down.

(But I am comparing GTX's and HD 4000's when I mean currently though)
 
hmm, it's kindve hard to compare drivers from ATI and Nvidia. i mean there are no benchmarks or anything to look at so all we have to go on is peoples opnion. not entirely fair.

i would however say that back in the days of the x1950xtx days their drivers were terrible me and my dad had alot of problems with that card and the drivers. but i did play around with a 4670 for a few days and i can say the drivers were alot better than what they used to be.

this is just my personal opinion, but i would say that nvidia currently has the best driver support. they tend to release new drivers, that i have seen improvements in games, every 3-4 weeks. then there is the betas in between.
 
ATI drivers these days are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were even a year ago, competitively vs nvidia. There were times when games simply wouldn't even support ATI cards.

Now, however, I think you'll be hard pressed to find a new game that doesn't have ATI support, or one that suffers considerably because of your drivers being ATI over NVidia. A lot of issues I've seen also stem from user error and people seeing the CCC and going ape wild on overclocking etc, or using drivers from their gpu installation disc, etc.

I'm no ATI fanboy, I've always used NVidia until now, but as I said in my earlier post, my fears about ATI were unnecessary. So far no problems at all. Well, unless you can count the fact that CCC won't let me force anti aliasing on some 10 year old games ;P.

But I digress. The OP wanted to know if he should avoid the 4870, and I say NO! Buy it!
 
When I was playing Far Cry 2 with my 8800gs the display driver would stop responding every 30 minutes or so however when I played it on another system running an ATI card I never had a problem. Based off that I would say ATI's drivers can beat nvidia's in some situations.
 
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