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Below is the random thought titled "Sick Of Crap Video Card Drivers". Be aware that these thoughts may be based on opinion, and my opinion might not agree with yours. Also, the thought below may be based on mood, time of day, or any number of other factors. Please keep this in mind.
I'm starting to become very sick and frustrated with the crap that passes for video card drivers these days.
Before Christmas, I installed an nVidia TNT2 card in my "main" machine. I'm not a gamer, but someone else in the family is and they just needed some basic 3D. So it was time to retire the perfectly stable Matrox Millennium. I had the nVidia card hanging around, so I installed it and loaded the latest nVidia driver. Then the problems start.
First, it killed my ATI TV Wonder capture card. Tried loading the new drivers for the ATI card, but the new ATI Multimedia Center would not load under XP or Win98SE. The errors ranged from lockups, to bizzare setup errors, to the software complaining that I didn't have a Radeon card (uh, duh). Multiple emails to ATI's tech support, and the issue is still unresolved...
Back to the nVidia card. The main problem was that the screen would randomly go blank and not come back. Tried multiple versions of the driver, and yet the problem remained. Other problems encountered while trying the various versions of the driver ranged from not installing, to not booting (locked up at the Windows splash screen), to not recognizing the card. After wasting many hours, I finally just decided to live with it and wait for the next driver release...This came in March, which I promptly upgraded to. Great, now Windows doesn't even boot...So after booting into safe mode and once again downgrading the driver, I have the system back, although still with the random blinky issue...
About this time, at work, we needed a video capture/TV display system on 6 brand new IBM P4/WinXP machines. So I picked up 6 ATI All In Wonder Radeon cards. Sigh, once again, driver hell. Problems ranged from the driver not loading (setup locking up half way), to bizzare errors (setup error in script...etc.), to only half the hardware being recognized. Multiple trips out to the customer's site finally cleared up all the issues, with a significant amount of tweaking. At the moment, all the ATI cards seem to be working.
Fast forward to last night, where I finally decided to tackle my nVidia problem again. Brand spanking new GeForce card, right out of the box...Guess what? Driver just GPF'ed halfway through the install. Once I finally got it going, the system was rendered non-bootable. Removing the driver and loading the nVidia reference driver got it going, but 30 seconds after boot the screen went blank and the system was dead. So back to the TNT2 card and the original driver I downloaded. System seems much better now, knock on wood.
Now before anyone thinks otherwise, this system has always been perfectly stable. No unexpected lockups, newest drivers for the motherboard and all other hardware. All the basics were covered during the troubleshooting process.
Am I the only one that believes this is past ridiculous? Am I the only one who remembers when you could actually buy a video card, install the driver, and it would WORK? I can't imagine what a "normal" person would go through in this case.
| Make sure you uninstall old drivers first if they give you so many problems. I haven't had any problems with drivers since I switched to ATI, I don't even have to uninstall first, I don't even have to restart. But when I was using Nvidia I had lots of problems, I ended up just uninstalling my old drivers first then installed the new ones. Not to mention I never got my origional performance back on my 7800gs. When I got the card it worked great, then nvidia put up the newest driver. I installed it then all my performance went strait down the drain. I went from avg of 190fps in hl2 to avg 50, wth. I reverted back to the old drivers until I started blue-screening with newer games then I had no choice but to update them. When I sold the 7800gs the newer drivers got it back up to around 120, but I never saw its original performance again. I bought a ATI as my next card and I have never looked back. | ||
| I cant play Call of Duty 4 because of stupid driver! | ||
| The person above that said buy a mac did give you a viable option to escaping driver hell. The beach ball death thing is no different from blue screen, lack of games is true but the newer intel based macs are closing the gap, more expensive hardware is also true but at what are you willing to pay for a "cleaner and friendlier" operating system?, the quality problems are no differnt from pcs im sure (my macs dvd drive is dead but ive had the thing for over 7 years and ive burned several hundred dvds) cult-like owners? haha maybe we just have a unjustified and undeserved sence of arrogance about us lol. macs never need drivers, everything always works, blablabla, im sure youve been preached to, so i wont force any more banter out. ps i found your site while trying to find the proper divers for my boss's laptop so we can hook it up to a projector. all i get is tons of "buy this program and it will give you all your drivers!!!!" but arent drivers supposed to be free? the fact that pc users are targets for constant crappy programs is really anoying to me. | ||
| totally agree, I have elderly card Raedon 9550/1050, new driver have completely buggered up the whole set up. . | ||
| ATI said my radeon x1300 agp 256 mb ddr2 would work on vista...truth is it never worked. Result was Blue screen of death every 5 minutes. Every new release of ati catalyst said that the problem had been resolevd and truth fact was it had not been. they kept recompiling the same crap drivers over and over. Now shortly after the warranty expired it has completely stopped working now. note to everyone: NEVER EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM ATI EVER AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! | ||
| i have a radeon x550 and it doesnt load the drivers after it boots up. once it boots up i can reinstall the drivers and it works. but when i reboot, i lose them again. | ||
| sounds like someone needs a new computer .....built 5 computers and never once had driver problems with 1650 pro | ||
| Buy a Mac. (Editor's notes: Spinning beach ball of death, lack of games, more expensive hardware, constant quality problems, cult-like owners, etc.) |
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| HI guys i have a 7600gs. I think it is responsible for me having to reinstall windows xp pro 3 times, the thing that is different this time is that in the bios screen the colour puple is now striped down the screen. The worst thing is that the nvdia drivers while installing the computer crashes at the end and an error message apears after reboot from Microsoft. | ||
| http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=239268 "roffle" is a spelling of pronounced acronym "rofl" and the remainder of the statement says that tnt in 2004 is (laughably) ancient, "jeeeezzzz (= gz)" what's a shiny donkey? something for people who are tired of babes wrestling in baby oil? :-0 ok, i got to this page by googling ... cuz i wonder about writing a driver, or just inf, or icm files? i ask cuz rage iic is fine in win9x (i'm not a gamer), but ati has no rage iic drivers for winxp. i get cr@ppi refresh and bit depth. (roffle rage iic in 2007, gz) :-) | ||
| RANT ON
I have a brand new, out of the box Radeon 1650. I have a pretty solid machine too.
1+ TGB harddisk space
2 GB RAM
Intel D - Dual Core 3.2
3 Cooling Fans just to be safe.
I have tried XP PRO, XP MCE, VISTA and VISTA 64. The all get loaded and then everything falls hell the second I install the ATI driver. It then prompts me to reboot, and when I do, it doesn't get past the Windows loading splash page before it reboots. I can only get around it by going back to sage more and uninstalling the driver.
THIS is the only thing stopping me from a vista machine, and the 1650 is SUPPOSED to be VISTA READY!!!
i get 5.2 on every other aspect in the VISTA rating too... sorry...
RANT OFF (Editor's notes: Have you tried trhe ATI reference driver? Or gone back a few versions?) |
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| This is more of a question than a comment, but maybe you can help me? Why would a pc not recognize an ATI radeon video card upon boot up. You can delete the hardware in device manager and then reinstall it in Add New Hardware and it works fine. But if you reboot, the card is not recognized again. Any insights into this? | ||
| roffle tnt2 in 2004, gz. (Editor's notes: A shiny new donkey to whoever can translate that into actual English.) |
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| Yup... i just installed new drivers about a 1/2 year ago and i got major artifacts, went back to 84.21 FORCEWARE drivers, computer still crashes and monitor goes blank like video card is failing but atleast i can see what is going on i just installed new drivers it was like driver #98.... or somethin like that, TODAY (1/1/07) and counterstrike:source started artifacting and the game crashed which only happens when something is overclocked! i run a Geforce 6200 Verto by PNY 128MB DDR clock speeds 350/500 stock, and added copper hsf and copper hs on ram chips and added stability in major gaming situations, after going back to the old drivers i think it will run better, somehow Direct X got uninstalled in the past so hopefully installing the old drivers will fix the problem, computer runs perfectly after i installed a new Pentium 4 3.4E from a 2.8GHz celeron (BIG DIFFERENCE) and why the hell does this happen to only a small group of people? is it because the ones with the bad drivers are the ones that never go and do gaming anymore because when i ask people on counterstrike no one has any freken idea to what i am talking about! seriously i am getting tired of reading "made in china" on every single graphics card i buy, i want to buy quality not quantity, i already emailed evega and nvida about this issue and posted on forums but they just deleted the whole freken thread i posted on, whatever is going on i hate it, i hate it so freken bad, i should have a right to have my posts seen on websights, i though there was a freedom of press.... (Editor's notes: Freedom of press has absolutely nothing to do with your right to post on a privately owned forum. And neither does free speech. ATI's drivers have been decent lately, so if you can't get the nVidia card running there may be another option.) |
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| i wasted my money on two Nvidea 7800's with SLi it runs fokkin sweet!!! | ||
| I completely agree. I'm very reluctant to get rid of my Voodoo3 because of the rock solid drivers. Unfortunately, someday I'll have to upgrade and deal with all the crap I see everyone posting about myself. My sister has a TNT2 Vanta and she has to deal with all kinds of crap I've never seen on my system. | ||
| got the same problem with 440BX. Mine is a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra. I found a solder joint which seemed to miss some solder on an XTAL. I will just have to switch from my Rage Pro Turbo to TNT2 again to see if it still happens. Have all people with this problem had an ATI product before the TNT2? Maybe re-installing Windows will work? | ||
| hi arron,i am fully sick of crap pc stuff on the market now fullstop,not only do i have probs with drivers but anything that i buy for my pc,allways end up taking crap back to the shop untill i find something that does work,it really pays now to deal with a shop that knows what is crap and also make sure thet have a good return policy,I could give you some examples of the probs i have had with crappy pc goods but you dont have enough room on your webpage lol. | ||
| My video card will go blank when it overheats - you might want to make sure yours is not running too hot.
(Editor's note: Nope. It will happen hot or cold. The newer NVidia drivers seem to have helped the problem, but it still happens at least once a day.) |
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| I can sympathize with you Aaron, I just laid down about $70 for a new geforce4 MX, and ever since I installed it, the latest drivers have eben a nightmare. My computer randomly crashes when I swich to fullscreen, DirectX7 and lower games don't even render all their polygons, and all this ever since I "upgraded" from a TNT2... it's not upgrading, it's DOWNGRADING! AAGHHHH!! | ||
| Assholes To Infinity | ||
| ATI sucks, I might get flammed for that. Well anyway they put half assed cards together has gotten somewhat better. Canadian comapany. yay. Biggest problem was they didn't make drivers in a timely fashion if ever to address problems. Nvidia on the other has drivers out all the time and they have always worked great and better. Ati makes new ones and still problems besides compatability problems I have witnessed with some mainboards. They have nice picture but not worth it besides now they are over charging for their poop in a box. I am sticking with nvidia unless one of the other video card makers comes out with another good card but not ati. | ||
| on the issue of the TV wonder VE, I have one on my XP system and had the same problem with Multimedia Center not starting. The solution? I just installed the nVidia drovers and used 3rd party software. Right now i use a freeware prog called DScaler but eventually I'm going to find a different one that'll let me record. hope this helps P.S. my vid card is a geforce 2 and haven't had any problems with it and the TV wonder | ||
| See http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/157.shtml | ||
| I know what you meen I bought a creative lab Video Blaster a long while ago it blew up my monitor's flyback the I bought a savage4 it kept on crashing the computer after 20 min of usage, I then decided to by a so known ATI radeon wich was hell to get working (drivers) then i had to use different drivers for differnent games and or video software I then bought a geforce2 card WOW no problems exept trying to get the tv-out to show the same as the monitor when using overlay. But I know that with my frien switching from a tnt2 to a geforce2 was hell flushing the old drivers had to use a ati mach64 as a bypass card( to be able to remove the tnt2 drivers) customers should complain and return crappy product | ||
| sounds like lack of effort on the company's side. You shoud complain to the manufacturer. If they get enugh crap from teh costomers, they might even fix it. Luckily, I havent ever had problems with my VooDoo 3 card. | ||
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